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.

Cabbage Minus Zero

If your dog has an ancient brain, vestigial memory, he will bury a bone and go back one day and dig it up and lie down over it and hold it in his paws and nurse it until it’s gone, licking and sucking and sometimes chawing until it is lace and finally disappears. He buries the bone not so it ferments, not so the earth will make its elements work on each other until they are more available to his digestive system, which is what happens, but because something, a hunch, tells him to. My dog’s ancient brain has been pretty much bred out of him. Nevertheless, he has little or no interest in a fresh bone. If I give him one on June 1^st, he will disdain it, nose it a few times over the next month as it lies in the grass under a hot sun, and finally find real interest in it about the 4^th of July. A winter bone can lie there till hell freezes over and then thaws, at which point he might find it fascinating.

Makes you glad to be a civilized human, doesn’t it? But wait a sec: you pick a cabbage out of the fall garden. It might be sleeting, you might have to lift the protecting blanket and shake the snow off it before you break off the cabbage. Now what? Eat it at ground zero? Probably not. And no, you can’t leave it on your counter or even in your fridge to eat next month, for even if rot doesn’t set in, the quality – the flavor and nutrition of it – will degrade. No, you have to do something with it – immediately, if not sooner. What do you do? Grandma used to cut out the core and shred the cabbage, salt it until it wept, wring it out, and apply a dressing of light cream, vinegar, a little sugar. That’s pretty much ground zero.

Next step is to heat it. I like to put some good amount of butter in the pan (natch!), melt it over low heat, then add the thin wedges of cabbage, salt and pepper, cover it up and leave it over very low heat on a back burner for a long time – an hour, maybe. Turn it once in awhile as the cabbage melts and golds. The long low heat doesn’t excite cabbage’s bitter buds but calms them into sweetness. A touch of vinegar when you eat it.

That’s the way with cabbage. You heat it, it’s a plus, an addition.

Let’s go the other way – don’t heat it, slice it up in slivers and put it to work, encourage it to make the most of its innate self. You’ve heard of sauerkraut? You know how it’s made? Think about it – it’s buried in a crock with salt sprinkled over it, pounded down, weighted, covered, and let work!

The process is called lacto-fermentation, and the key to it is salt, which allows “Lactic microbial organisms – similar to those that curdle milk – to develop spontaneously and convert the natural sugars of the vegetable into lactic acid. This environment rapidly acidifies, to the point that it becomes impossible for bacteria responsible for food spoilage to multiply.” This is from a little book called Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning, put together by The Gardeners & Farmers of Terre Vivante, in France, and published by Chelsea Green in White River. It’s a treasure trove of old techniques of preservation that get left out of modern cookbooks but that were – until quite recently, the middle of the 19^th century when heat sterilization (canning)came into wide use – the prevalent forms of food preservation. They include drying; preserving with salt, oil, sugar, alcohol or vinegar; cold storage, and fermentation.

“Oh, how esoteric,” you might say. But lots of foods we eat everyday take advantage of fermentation. Chocolate, for instance. In an October 29^th New Yorker article called “Extreme Chocolate”, Bill Buford says “Fermentation has been around forever. It is older than cooking. It was probably the first method of food preparation. Fermentation transforms grapes into wine, grains into beer, wheat into leavened bread. It transforms a raw ingredient, often valued for its nutrition, into one valued for its taste. It yields vinegar, yogurt, sauerkraut, cheese, prosciutto, vanilla, and pickles.” Of course, cacao pods are also fermented, a process Buford describes robustly, to yield, finally, the silky bitter thing we call chocolate.

Without undue thought about the matter, I made a couple of small batches of sauerkraut this fall. I was surprised by the sweetness and velvety texture of it, and how well it accompanied roasted or grilled meats. A taste of it alone in the middle of the afternoon proved satisfying, too.

Suddenly, as though my ears had been unstoppered by the doing of it, people were TALKING, in the most ravishing tones, about sauerkraut and the more varied Asian counterpart of it, kimchi, a fermented vegetable mix, usually based on cabbage but with the addition of other vegetables such as carrots and onions. Its spiciness can be scorching or mild with hot peppers, its Asian origin told in notes of ginger or fennel or seeds of cumin, coriander or cardamom. It’s as individual as the maker.

Potter, Maya Zelkin, served kimchi as part of a little spread she put out for her pottery studio opening in Shrewsbury in October. As I nibbled it appreciatively she told me she’d made it from her own garden produce and in a fermenting crock like the one I was at that moment looking at and wondering what that unusual object was. She had taken a fermentation class given by the Flack Family Farm of Enosburg Falls a few years ago at a NOFA (Northeast Organic Farming Association) conference, and based her execution of the crock on one she’d seen there.

The crock holds 2.5 gallons of vegetables, considerably more than I had been making at home, and the covering weight is a halved disk that fits, half by half, through the narrow top to cover the vegetables to weigh them down. “You don’t need a lot of weight,” Maya told me.

A bowl-like top fits upside-down into the lip, or gutter, of the crock, the lip is then filled with water, which creates a seal that allows the fermenting gases to escape but keeps air and dust out and prevents the formation of kahm yeast, that slimy stuff that isn’t harmful but is a little distasteful.

The crock is both beautiful and utilitarian, and suddenly I was a little more excited about making kimchi.

Maya said that I might visit her one day for a kimchi-making session if I would provide the cabbage. We would need 12 pounds, and I arrived in her kitchen a few days later toting just two heads of cabbage, because one of them weighed a humongous 10 pounds! A pot of soup bubbled slowly on the back of the wood range and Maya was prepping ginger, carrots, garlic, onions, and daikon radish to grate, a bowl of sea salt and a package of dried hot pepper stood by, as she handed me a sharp knife and a teensy cutting board and bid me get busy on that cabbage!

As we chopped and grated and chatted, she told me she’d made several batches of kimchi already and stored it in canning jars in a cool spot in the basement.

“Really,” I said, surprised at this, thinking of it as a condiment, “and why do you make so much?”

“As a preserving method, this is just so superior to canned. I realize it’s not good for modern commerce, doesn’t have a long shelf life, but it means I don’t need to buy California greens in February.”

“So we need to be careful,” I said, “or the USDA will decide that lacto-fermented vegetables are dangerous to our health and outlaw them!” We both had a rueful chuckle at that!

As a matter of fact, there is a caution in the Terre Vivante book, saying that “The USDA and the FDA recommend that all fermented foods should also be canned in a hot water bath to protect against botulism,” but they add, “There is good reason to think these recipes are safe without canning.”

We plunged along in our dangerous task.

Much of the big cabbage was revealing itself to be made up of numerous baby cabbages that grew from the same stem and nestled in its structure like babies in a womb. I munched on one and offered one to Maya, which she declined. “I’m not much for raw vegetables,” she explained. “I think traditional cultures didn’t eat a lot of vegetables, except for fermented ones.” She went on to explain, “I think the emphasis on raw salads is really not good for you – after all, we’re not cows!” I looked around and tossed the little half-eaten baby cabbage in the compost.

I’d sliced about a quarter of the cabbage, Maya had a nice pile of grated additions, so we put them into the crock, sprinkled 2 tablespoons of gray sea salt – Maya was using slightly less salt with this batch, 6 tablespoons altogether, for the 15 pounds of vegetables – and a half teaspoon of hot pepper powder on them, and I took the big pounder that had been carved out of a stick of firewood and began to pound.

It wasn’t long before the last layer of vegetables was pounded down. Maya fit each half of the weight on top and pressed them down onto the solid vegetables – the kimchee was juicing up nicely – and fitted an incongruously vivid bowl over the top onto the lip. The original top cracked in the firing, but she found this bowl fit perfectly. Carefully she poured water into the lip. “This was the first fermenting crock I made, and the lip is a little shallow, so I refined it in the following ones. But this is good enough for me.” Too, this crock was the smaller of the two sizes she makes, holding 1.5 gallons of vegetables, a size she finds most useful for her needs.

The task completed, we cleaned up and I gathered my things to go. “Come back in three days,” she bade me. “It should be done by then.”

My mouth was agape. Three days! “Oh, yes,” she crowed. “Bring some canning jars.”

Sure enough, three days later I returned home with my jars of delectable, juicy, sweet and spicy kimchi.

The following Saturday I bought daikon, carrots, cabbage, onions and a bulb of fennel at the Winter Farmers’ Market at the Rutland Area Food Co-op, and made a small batch of kimchi for myself. Of course I didn’t have Maya’s fermenting crock, but I could get along with a small crock I did have, my little coffee-cup plate to cover it, liter jar full of water to weight it, and a cheesecloth covering. It’s been two weeks now, and my small batch of kimchi is beginning to taste pretty good. It’s a little dry, I think because of evaporation, but quite tasty. But I’m thinking that when Maya gets back to making pots again next spring I might have to splurge on my own Zelkin fermenting crock!

Preserving fall vegetables might seem a little off-season for a December column, but the mind-blowing success of the indoor Winter Farmers’ Market puts the lie to that thought! When the prospect of a winter market began to take hold last summer, farmers began to plan for fall and winter crops. So far their planning has been fruitful, and the market is bursting with produce. Talking to Sally Beckwith of Foggy Meadow Farm last Saturday, I learned that the cabbages are still in the ground, picked at opportune moments during the week, and have probably benefited appreciably, as the parsnips have done, by the nip of raw weather making them sweeter. The spinach, though not actively growing, has roots still securely in the ground waiting, with no loss of freshness, to be picked and sold at the market.

Fresh or fermented, even cooked – never have our food choices been so broad, so festively presented. Why, I feel as instinctively happy as a dog with a fresh juicy bone in its jaws, just beginning to dig a hole to bury it in!

Potter/artist, Maya Zelkin Pottery, wood fired stoneware and porcelain, Coldham Road, Shrewsbury, VT 05738, 802/492-2045 or mayazelkin@gmail.com

published in Rutland (Vt) herald December 4, 2007