future tense

ingredients for peasant cuisines found inexpensively at your nearby co-op: spices, fruits and nuts, beans, lentils and rice. plus a little bit of maple sugar

Two thousand eleven was the year that the cat clawed herself out of the bag! Finally everyone seems to know they need to be eating clean-raised local food, and they seem to know where they can find it, too.

Thank god for Roots, say those of us who are disgusted by the idea of a burger made of the ground up flesh of ten, a hundred, maybe even traces of a thousand cows who were fed antibiotics and hormones like gruel in their last days, and then were all ground together into a vast vat. Roots, the Restaurant, on Wales Street opened last winter and has made it their point of pride to serve food sourced from our local farmers – all across the menu.  They've bought almost $70,000 worth of local food from our farmers in the first 11 months they've been open! They have succeeded. Wildly!

We also recognize 3 Tomatoes, which has long made a valiant effort to serve a lot of  food grown in Vermont, which is to say pretty organically, and they do so beautifully. Dennis at Red Clover in Mendon is a pretty faithful Farmers’ Market customer. Downtown Grocery in Ludlow serves spectacular home-grown food – for spectacular prices, it must be said.  Splurge there, though, when you can. And both Cafe' Provence in Brandon and The Victorian Inn at Wallingford source local food, though Chef Stanti at the Victorian Inn balks at local meats.

But other restaurants are slow to catch on. When we all stopped by Sabby’s the other day I was told that local food was way out of their ball park. People didn’t care. We stayed anyway, but I’ll tell you that eating a pile of anonymous animal protein is not a very appetizing thing anymore.

Even the New York Times’ Mark Bittman, whose food politics have been somewhat middle-of-the-road until the last year or so, understands that studies finding that eating meat is an unhealthy habit are not studying locally grown grass-fed beef, pork and fowl. In other words, they’re not studying the effects of meat-eating on human health, they are studying the effects of the antibiotics and hormones the meat is fed on the health of the eater. So Bittman, realizing that most people do not have access to grass-fed meats, suggests abstaining from meat on certain days of the week and simply eating less. And he's not alone in this fall-back stance among food experts who are talking to a large number of people. And it is not an unappetizing idea.

Peasant and ethnic cuisines that rely on a preponderance of vegetables and spices with very little meat to produce great flavor are a fantastic place to start. We can teach ourselves their ways by picking up a book or looking online.

If you are as ignorant as I am you might start by picking up a copy of Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook – It’s chock full of inexpensive and for the most part simple recipes and techniques. After all these years since it was published, this is the first time I’ve really examined it. I made a little ‘garlic dip’ she wrote about and it was not bad. It was not good, either – it involved boiling some potatoes until very tender and then fo-proing them with lots of garlic and some mayonnaise into a slithery mass that tasted like very garlicky potatoes. Of course it did.

If you really want to fix something good to eat, quick, and cheap, try this, one of my favorite meals: It’s basically red lentils and rice, with perhaps a sausage. The lentils are rinsed, put into a pot, covered with cold water, and cooked over medium heat until tender but still (if possible) retain their shape. This takes only about 15 minutes. Add a little salt to the water towards the end of cooking. For the rice, bring two cups of water to a boil, add a teaspoon of salt, pour in 1 cup of white rice, stir, bring back to the boil, cover, and turn the heat very low. Cook for 20 minutes. When these two foods are done, they’re piled into a plate, dolloped with plain yogurt, sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds, and drizzled with a little garlicky olive oil. Salt and pepper. Maybe some hot peppers. You could sprinkle with Asian seasonings such as 5-spice powder. Add any crunchy vegetables you might have lying around. It takes about 25 minutes to make and costs about 3¢ per serving. It’s good, plain, proletarian, peasant food that can be gussied up.

This one from last summer included sausages and lots of fresh veggies. Yum.

Of course, for home cooking there are few places more liable to supply good makings for our kitchen than the Farmers’ Markets and Co-ops. Here in the Rutland area we are blessed with the best year-around Farmers’ Market in the state, probably in the northeast, possibly in the country. It’s impossible to walk through without engaging in many conversations with people ecstatically commenting about the good feeling there, the wonderful food, the festive atmosphere, how lucky we are, yadda yadda. Shopping at the Farmers’ Market is just a very uplifting experience. Here are some vendors and foods that are new favorites. 

I LOVE having Peter McGann – who used to give away samples of his food free at the Co-op – offering his Mexican fare – all the way from tamales and enchiladas to the lovely cascobel pepper salsa, guacamole, and tomato salsa, as well as his Tortilla Espagnol – a thick potato omelet. His orange scented rice pudding studded with big plump raisins? Well...

Too, I enjoyed Maya Zelkin’s steamed tamales there one Saturday, and she will be back with more the last Saturday in January. I keep nattering at her to supply us with freshly made tortillas, but they are labor intensive and she does not see her way to doing that just now.

Pine Woods Farm is also new this year, with their excellent beef and pork. I bought pig fat there that I rendered down into the best lard I have ever made – creamy white and solid. It’s a once-a -year process I go through, and so worth it! You can also get organic suet – for cooking or for the birds. After all, why would you feed birds suet with antibiotics and excess hormones in it?  Love their sausages and roasts, too.

Meadow Squire is there with her Breezy Meadows booth from which she is still selling baby greens, most especially fresh cilantro, as well as the bibelots she puts together, like the tiny jars of maple sugar last Saturday. I wrote about their rice crop here.

Meadow is just one example of the biggest boon the Rutland region has going for it right now – a preponderance of young and very determined farmers.

A few years ago Greg Cox told me, “We’re getting tired. We’re getting old. We need nothing less than an influx of young people going into farming.” Guess what? Suddenly we have them, and they are committed to the land (even when it slides out from under them as Evening Song’s did during Irene). And Greg, who has hosted many beginning farmers on his land at Boardman Hill, is very responsible for this resurgence. He has long worked with RAFFL to offer an incubator space for new farmers and POW, we look back and what do we find? He has, perhaps unwittingly, provided it on his own land!

I hope that 2012 proves to be the year that the Rutland Co-op assumes its diversified and indispensable roles for Rutland, for instance as a teaching venue for people who want to learn to shop the Co-op and the Farmers’ Market and learn to cook the food. There is a very nice kitchen that was built a few years ago expressly for that purpose. Now there’s a “Private” sign on its door most market Saturdays.

I’m not grousing about 2011.  I still have not needed to get up from my supper table, pack up a few things, and walk down Rt. 7 to get away from the enemy. Wars always take place upon other people’s soil, isn’t that true? All I really wish for in 2012 is peace and a contentment with what is without losing the edge that makes us do better. A less tense future. And I wish that for you, too. That’s not much to ask, is it?

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.

Emus: big brown prehistoric birds

and oh, yes, incidentally, we eat them.
(Photos by Lowell Klock of Klockworks.com)

Ann Breen with Baby Emu

I have this kind of block about different and unusual kinds of food animals. Emus, for instance, were not on my radar.  But a couple of weeks ago when I dropped by Roots the Restaurant to sample their new menu of foods and wines, I met Ann Breen, who mentioned that their Emus were “hatching”.  Along the way that evening we had some excellent emu sausage.

In the next few days that verb finally sank in and I remembered that emus were fowl of some sort. Some kind of flightless birds? Like big brown chickens, I guessed, having forgotten whatever I ever knew about them. But when I mentioned to my friend Lowell that the emus were hatching – Lowell loves all these esoteric animals like ostrich and emu, and has been trying unsuccessfully for years to get me to eat ostrich – I could barely keep her on her er, ah, leash. Plus, a trip to Brandon would no doubt include lunch at one of Chef Robert’s Provençal establishments there, something she never forgoes.

I notice I’m talking here about living animals and food as the same thing. That strikes me as wrong, doesn’t it you? But that’s the way we are. Unless it’s dogs and cats and sometimes more esoteric things that we keep as ‘pets’, we expect that if we keep an animal it will do things for us – such as give us milk or eggs or... yes, flesh. It’s a deal we make with them, although they have no decision in it. No doubt they would agree with us that in order to survive for a certain amount of time they would have to agree to die on our schedule. It’s kind of the same deal we’ve made with our own gods and goddesses, I imagine. If we could remember. Perhaps it IS the same. 

Those living beings that don’t benefit us in some way that we recognize we swat or pull out by their roots, or poison, or trap, or simply make it our habit to kill in any way we can, especially if they’re pests. They buzz too loudly, or they bite, or they slither scarily, or they grunt ferociously, or their juice makes us itch, and we find a way to banish them from our environment.

But I do love my little Jersey cows, and big grunting pigs, and sometimes even chickens, and suddenly I was seized with a desire to see baby emus. So, after I’d suitably bribed Lowell, we drove up to the Breens’ Neshobe Farms in Brandon a few days later. Ann Breen came up from the barns holding a baby emu who had gotten tangled in some fishing line, and we were immediately involved in trying to untangle him.

Ann held him and I tried to untangle the line from his three long toes.  Remember, this is my first glimpse of an emu, and the baby is as big as a small turkey, with beautiful striped markings on his fuzzy baby feathers. The adults, who can weigh up to 120 pounds and can look you in the eye, have gorgeous lacy feathers covering their rumps, and sometimes a strikingly curly headdress. Their little faces are triangular with funny round eyes. They get right up to you, but then shy away. The Breens’ emus are dun colored, silvery and black and grays. It really is a prehistoric bird, Australian, very odd and beautiful. Big Bird is the most famous emu, except for his extravagant coloring.

So when this baby emu startled, and his powerful little legs kicked out, I was one startled untangler, I can tell you. But it was good to get up close and personal so quickly, and soon he was untangled and put back into his pen, where he almost got stomped to death by his slightly older siblings when we startled them by stepping into their pen.

There was a lot of startlement going on that day.

Ann showed us their beautiful farm, their emu corrals, the raised garden beds, and the rest of her fowl, among the most beautiful of which was a Muscovy duck and a giant red leghorn rooster rooting and hooting on a pile of compost.

Ann’s husband, Peter, came along and got us some emu steaks and summer sausage from the freezer, and we went back up to the house where Ann fetched us some emu oil. Emus have a nice layer of fat between their skin and their musculature which is touted to be excellent for dry skin and all kinds of eczema, and since it is easily and deeply absorbed it can do some good for arthritis and other aches and pains. It’s even said to lower cholesterol. Huh? It might seem odd to be rubbing chicken grease all over yourself, but come to think of it, Grandma used to rub my chest with goose grease and then wrap it in a flannel cloth when I had a cold. Using fowl grease for healing is nothing new under the sun.  More about emus here.

The meat of the emu is red. It is leaner than most other meats. The steaks should be marinated, Ann told us, and then flash grilled so that the outside is nicely marked and the inside a very dusky pink.

Roots’ Chef Don Billings offers several emu dishes. There is, for instance, an appetizer consisting of a white bean dip, emu sausage, and Blue Ledge Farm Chèvre. The combination is lovely, and the emu sausage very tasty. He also offers an “EELT”, a BLT served with Emu sausage and a fried egg as well as lettuce and tomato. But one of his most popular preparations is ground emu in a patty.

I have to leave soon – I’m writing this yesterday – to pick up my daughter from Albany Airport – Yippee! – and I think tonight I’ll fire up the grill and try that emu steak.

Along with it I think I’ll try a grilled salad. I have a head of romaine from Alchemy Gardens at the Rutland Farmers’ Market. I’ll split that in half and lightly grill it and serve it with a Caesar dressing. I believe Chef Don has the best Caesar dressing I’ve ever had outside my own kitchen, that he serves over his new Grilled Caesar.

The salads on Roots’ new summer menu are outstanding. I believe I talked about the ‘massaged’ kale salad that I had there during Restaurant Week. It’s now a regular on the new menu. I loved the Quinoa Salad, too, consisting of toasted quinoa tossed with grilled mozzarella cheese and tomatoes, with a basil vinaigrette. There’s cumin in that there dressing that kinda sneaks up on you. Delicious. Lots of local ingredients here, including the warmed spinach with mushrooms, bacon and blue cheese that seared scallops are served over in yet another great salad.

Another thing that I might put on the grill is a head of that escarole from Radical Roots that just fell apart like feathers when I cut off the end. Delicious, tender, sweet, with just a slightly bitter edge. It will  need a stand-up dressing – lots of garlic, maybe some plumped raisins, balsamic and olive oil. Oh, and blue cheese. Another green that I’m in love with is some very cute little arugula from Breezy Meadows (a little play on co-owner Meadow Squire’s name?) that I like to scatter all under and over plates of food these days.

At that tasting I spoke about at Roots, we also tasted wines. What absolute fun. I tasted and swirled with the best of them and, if I didn’t spit, I did at least pour quite a bit of wine into a spare glass just so’s I could keep on tasting.

Among my favorites (and keep in mind that I am no expert) was a very grapefruity, citrusy New Zealand New Harbor Sauvignon Blanc, as well as my more customary red – a Norman Classic Zinfandel. I loved that and wrote various forms of BAM and POW over my menu.

If Roots does any more wine and food tastings I would be sure to sign up for them.
Well, I'm off for Albany now::: Remember::: Eat Local!

What? Who said that? Who is that woman. Smile. She's taking your photograph!

between now and green

a little dill'll do ya

Last year at this time we’d had spring for over two weeks – not terribly bright, perhaps, but in the 50s and low 60s sometimes – and green things were becoming apparent. All the green this year is at the Farmers’ Market.

Miller’s Farmstand has been offering dill and cilantro directly from growing flats for our delectation, other herbs already banded together, tiny bunches of romaine, and half a bushel of baby spinach if you get there early. Foggy Meadow has had micro-greens all winter – those baby sprouting greens that make such a difference to a plate all through these snowy days – and now has baby spinach, too, but, as with Millers, you need to get there early for a taste. They are in demand.  Jim Horton, Paul’s son, who has been manning the stand this winter, told me he hopes to have (shhhhhhh...) a bit of chard this coming market.

There’s no doubt that we’re missing Kilpatrick’s Farm this winter, they with their well-tended and well-planned plethora of winter vegetables as well as surprises all along the way.  In an email, Michael Kilpatrick told me, “...now at the (Saratoga) market we have lettuce mix, mesclun mix, baby spinach, regular spinach, Christmas spinach, boc choi mix, and  Swiss chard, for greens, (and) the kale will be back in a few weeks. Couple new roots this year, too –  Jerusalem artichokes, parsley root, purple and green kohlrabis, (and) a new yellow carrot.”

So, as I say, we miss them, but some of our larger farmers are seeing that they need to take up the slack – Paul at Foggy Meadow and Greg at Boardman Hill come to mind. How to do that sustainably is really the gnarly heart of the problem. Winter greens grown without petroleum? That would be the next breakthrough!

In my last column I said that you could find local mesclun – that mix of small-leafed greens – at the Co-op in Rutland. Mea culpa, you can not – they’re getting their mesclun from California! I’ve been buying it all winter, assuming it was from Benson’s Vermont Herb & Salad Company, because that IS available, and as we all know our Co-op is mandated to support our local farmers and provide us local produce when possible. So I emailed co-owner Heather McDermott to ask her where VH&S’s mesclun could be found. Not closer, she said, than Burlington! She is trying to get her herbs and salad mixes into Hannaford’s, however, so it wouldn’t hurt to put in a plug if you shop there.

Ironically, when Leo brought home a package of California mesclun from Price Chopper the other day I was like, Umm, I am NOT eating this stuff. What were you thinking?

(Over the holidays my daughter picked up two vacuum-packed packages of romaine lettuces. I popped one open to use in Caesar salad. The other got shoved to the back of the fridge and when I dug it out over a month later it was – guess what? – just as “fresh” and crisp as the first one had been. Now that is scary. “Don’t eat anything that won’t rot, or ferment” is a really good axiom.)

 “But it’s organic,” Leo said of this recent incident, “and I was at PC anyway.” Organic schmanic, I said, I’m not eating greens that were picked in California by who knows who, who knows how long ago!

 Sheesh. Who knew that’s what I’d been feeding us all winter. Lesson learned – I should never assume.

This demand for local food has just skyrocketed, hasn’t it? And nowhere can it be seen more clearly than in the success of Roots: The Restaurant down on Wales Street. Their business has been going lickity split ever since they opened – is it something like ten weeks ago already? I mean, reservations for lunch, please, as well as dinner (open every day except Monday at 747-7414). And the farmers whose product Chef Don Billings has contracted for are also doing well, able to plan the year ahead; having some idea of how many head of beef, how many rows of squash, and how much bacon to have smoked.

And the customer? The eater is in her glory – finally she can get a locally grass-fed beef hamburger! With hand-cut fries from local potatoes.  She can also get a shrimp cocktail with Bomoseen shrimp and Don’s own sweet salsa. Oh, you didn’t know Bomoseen had shrimp? Learn something new every day, don’t you?

Let’s face it – not everything can be local, and what would a menu be without a shrimp dish – these are delectable little Ecuadorian things, supposedly sustainably caught, very nicely presented in a champagne glass so tall that you kind of have to put in your lap to be able to eat out of, with said salsa and guacamole and some tortilla chips. Kudos to Roots for making a few exceptions to Local!

Because at this time of year our  tastebuds crave something out of the ordinary. And we’re finding it also in a burrito from Izapa Burrito Bar on Evelyn Street. The little purple structure is home to fiery – or not so – Mexican tastes a la the very gutsy Jillian Burkett, who has been open ALL WINTER (in that flimsy little structure) for lunch Monday through Friday. My burrito’s heat and content was perfect, I told her, and she murmured that she has a knack, the ability to judge, just by looking at them or listening to them on the phone (774-1001) a customer’s scoville unit preference.

And at home? What are we doing to enliven our winter-weary buds on that front?

Dukkah is the answer. I’m sprinkling this little nut and seed preparation on everything, from the yogurt and red lentils I have for brunch to the striped bass (Earth and Sea in Manchester)  I wrapped in parchment with drizzles of olive oil, panko, and the dukkah grind I made last fall, and salt and pepper, of course. I put that parcel into a 400° oven with the slices of sweet potatoes that had  lived there for 15 minutes already, and set the timer for 20 minutes.
In the meantime I remembered the brocc raab I’d bought a week ago at least. I parboiled it while I warmed some garlic and hot pepper flakes in olive oil in the old black skillet. What the raab would experience when it had drained and turned cool, was a warm spicy bath of olive oil that imperceptibly heated to flavor the raab in a process similar to that in which lobsters are said to be cooked starting in cold water – without alarm.

Dukkah

There are many mixtures of this but this pleasing one I found online
 from a woman by the name of Melissa Fernandez.
Feel free to double this to make it worth your time.

• 2 tablespoons pistachios, toasted
• 2 tablespoons hazelnuts, toasted
• 1 tablespoon sesame seeds, toasted
• 2 tablespoons coriander seeds, toasted
• 1 tablespoon fennel seeds, toasted
• ¼ teaspoon sea salt.

To toast the nuts and seeds put each kind separately into a small skillet over medium heat and watch them carefully, giving them an intermittent swirl, and when you begin to smell their toastiness they are done. Let them cool in a sauce dish and start on the next one. When they’re all toasted and cooled put them into a mortar and pestle and pound to a coarse consistency, or pulse in a food processor (I use a coffee grinder). Sprinkle them on everything.

Make some dukkah for yourself. It’ll pass the time between now and green!

published as Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald 15 MAR, 2011