Simmer Time

Stick season –compelling time of year! Leaves stripped off boughs to cover the ground in drifts of pale and rusty yellow, bereft limbs and bark shading from mauve to chocolate against a lavender sky, flowerheads mellowed to dull copper and steel, while grass remains brilliant in its green, like a ninety-year-old running the marathon. Brrrrr!! You know what comes next.

But if you’re honest with yourself there was that time in the second week of August that you looked at all the marauding green growth and longed ever so briefly for an early freeze. What you did not wish for was less light, shortened days with no evenings, and dawns that come long after the eye of the clock nudges you from sleep. Winters would be wonderful if their chill whiteness were to be lit by long days to urge us outdoors to do outdoor work.

Well dream on, my little chickadees! Because it is our cross to bear, and how do we bear it? We gather inside and begin again to enjoy quiet and long-lasting processes, performing warm and comfy and indoor tasks, like cooking, at least once in a blue moon.

...the long and the slow of it...

Instead of tossing halved tomatoes and peaches on the grill towards the end of chicken roasting or steak grilling – while the sun still blazes but the clock shows nearly half past seven – and going about our gardening business in-between, now it’s barely mid-afternoon when we put the lamb shanks in the big cast-iron pot to brown in olive or coconut oil, or lard, and while they’re doing that the kitchen gets those little attentions it’s needed since May when you abandoned it for the great outdoors, and the house begins to fill with the deep and appetizing smells of lamb.

When the shanks have browned they’re taken from the pot and a leek is shredded, garlic chopped, both added to the juices in the pan and briefly wilted; a frozen packet of sauce, made from last summer’s Pratico tomatoes, is added, and then a glug or two of red wine before the shanks are put back in, the pot covered tightly and put into a slow oven for two or three hours. What the heck, you’ve got the time!

I did this recently, and nestled the shanks on top of baby turnip greens from Boardman Hill Farm, that I curled on top of the leeks and garlic, then scattered the teensy turnips themselves on top of the shanks. I find my low oven – 200 degrees for four to six hours or 300 for two to three hours, who’s counting? – approximates all day in a slow-cooker. The shanks themselves were from South Freeport Maine’s Wolfe's Neck Farm.

I served them with a side of butternut squash a friend had given me, that I steamed and then mashed with lots of butter, a mere touch of maple syrup, and a bit of curry powder. I was angling towards a middle-eastern touch, however subtle, because that’s what lamb reminds me of. A friend had given me a bag of Trader Joe’s blend of Israeli style couscous, orzo, baby garbanzo beans, and red quinoa, and I soaked a cup of that in water for a couple hours before adding more water and simmering it for half an hour. On the plate, these three items were accompanied by home-made raw-milk yogurt, and Man, was that a splendid meal!

I know how precious that sounds, how spoiled I seem! Absolutely! Who has the time for this kind of food intensity? I must be nuts, right?

Well, this is the kind of meal that comes together over time, a little bit here and a little bit there, and then it all goes rather quickly. The browning of the lamb shanks and getting them into the oven or crockpot took about half an hour. If I remembered to soak the grains at the same time, that would take another three seconds. Finishing the whole thing up later in the day – cooking and mashing the squash, and simmering the grains – took another half an hour. The yogurt had been made for days. My point being – and because you’re reading this you probably already act on this conclusion – that if you keep a running food commentary in the back of your mind, making connections with this ingredient and that, you’ll be ready to construct a final product when the time is right.

The leftovers were fabulous. Next night I took the remaining lamb off the bone, chopped it up, put all the sauce and well-cooked veggies in the blender, buzzed it, thinned it out with more liquid – chicken broth, water, and more red wine – added a handful of small pasta, some leftover cannellini beans, the chopped meat, simmered, and had a great supper soup. Leftovers of that provided Leo a couple of lunches.

There are certain meats that benefit from that long and slow cooking. It’s tempting to think that they all do, but ‘t’aint so! I used to roast most meats, except for pot roasts and other tough, flavorful, gelatinous cuts, at a high heat – 425 degrees, at least – but lately, for the last several years, I’ve been roasting them slowly, not above 325 degrees. Congruently, I’ve bemoaned the lack of flavor in the pork roast or the chicken. Hmmm, as my grandmother said, “Too soon old, too late smart!”

I took a rather small Boardman Hill chicken – three and a half pounds, I think – and roasted it at 450 for about 15 minutes, then 425 for the better part of an hour – no seasonings except some butter smeared over it to hold the sprinkling of salt – and it was exceptional! I served it with brown rice that I had soaked for several hours before cooking slowly for about an hour, and cannellini beans that had also been soaked before cooking. I served this with an apricot/tomato chutney that I’d made for a Friends of the Library Eastern Indian dinner.

Next day I refried the beans in coconut oil and lard and made burritos with shredded chicken, the warmed up brown rice and refried beans, with added arugula from the garden, Salsa-From-the-Gut and cheese. Then I made a stock out of the chicken bones and – full circle – used it to stretch out the lamb soup I talked about.

...old wives’ tales...

Soaking grains for hours and days? Where does that come from? Well, this is a real change for me – I used to advocate NEVER soaking beans, unless they were so old they wouldn’t soften anyway. After all, they cooked just fine in an hour or two with lots of water, a bay leaf, and no salt until the last half hour, without soaking. It was an old wives’ tale, I said.

Well, yes, and what is wrong, anyway, with old wives’ tales? Are we assuming those old wives didn’t know what they were talking about? As it turns out, beans and grains, and for that matter seeds and nuts, are rendered much more digestible by soaking. Soaking triggers the sprouting process and deactivates the enzyme inhibitors, softens the action of phytic acid and breaks down tannins, complex sugars, gluten and other digestive stumbling blocks. As an added bonus the brown rice I’d soaked cooked up very nicely – none of the messy broken kernels I associate with the stuff.

I began to soak oatmeal overnight for breakfast and, “Yum, that oatmeal hit the spot,” said Leo the next morning. I told him it was simple, just soak a cup of organic oatmeal in a cup of water overnight, then add another cup of water and a pinch of salt and simmer it for about seven minutes the next morning.

“Or of course there’s instant,” he mused.

I looked at him sharply. He was grinning...

...passing it on...

The question this posits is: How do we – you and I – disseminate this hard-earned food-intuition to those who most need it, those harried and hard-working young people with families who need to be fed good food who simply don’t have the time? How to impart the importance of being jealous of their sources and guarding them against the encroachment of big business and intrusive government?

...above all, be sure it’s safe...

Couple weeks ago I picked up a gallon of apple cider and happened to read the label – “UV LIGHT TREATED” – it said. “Will,” I said to William Apple of Apple Orchards (names have been changed here TPTI), “What’s this all about?”

Will ran with that. It is, apparently, the long-ago fault of Clinton and Gore who, Will tells me, received money galore from big juice companies and then had to heed their demands. Then he handed me a homemade CD recording of a This American Life segment called “Ladies and Germs” and dated 10-02-98. I guess I’m not quite up to date.

Apparently in all the history of cider making there have been 4 instances of E Coli 0157:H7 found in cider. In 1996 a little girl died of Odwalla juice into which had been dumped a truckload or so of rotten juice composed of drops – apples that had dropped off the trees, apparently on to cow patties.

Buying industrial fruit juice (juice made by an enormous company, of juices from hundreds if not thousands of farmers that you do not know) is a far cry from buying apple cider from a local maker. Small cider makers use only ripe apples that have not dropped from the tree. The apples are washed before using, and the machinery used for crushing and catching the juice is also washed after using. And if you doubt it you can go to the orchard and see for yourself. Too, apple cider that has not been treated with heat (pasteurization) or UV light retains more vitamins, minerals, and enzymes.

Frank Browning, apple grower, cider maker, and author of Apples, was the narrator of the piece. He talked to a spokesman for the National Food Processors Association, which represents many of the world’s largest multi-national food conglomerates, who said, “Juice companies want to know ABOVE ALL that their product is safe. If there’s something effective that you know you can do, that would render the industry completely free of the charge of not being safe, that that would not be an issue anymore; if there is an existing technology there that can be applied and is widely being applied, we don’t really see a reason why you wouldn’t go ahead and acquire it.”

Will Apple could think of a reason, as could most small producers: his UV light apparatus cost him $18,000. Last year it was four years old and needed repairs that cost $1,000. On top of that there’s $500 a year for maintenance. But he got off comparatively cheaply, as pasteurization units cost $25,000 to $30,000.

And I could think of another reason, and that is that processed cider is another food that is being skeletonized – all its vitamins, minerals, trace-minerals degraded in the name of safety by big business, with no thought as to what is being destroyed. Our bodies, just like our brains, learn from experience; and if they don’t experience a myriad of bacteria they don’t learn how to deal with them. When a potentially harmful bacteria gets into a knowledgeable body the body knows what to do with it; when it gets into an innocent body it can wreak havoc.

This is a big impetus to eat local, to buy food from your neighbor farmer, and to support her when she’s faced with costly and unnecessary and only so-called improvements. When big business and intrusive government reaches down and throttles the last small farmer with a campaign of fear, what will we do? Where will we go to acquire our food? This becomes a personal freedom issue.

...this just in...

Like so many others’, my heart just swelled right up and tears came to my eyes on Saturday when I walked through the Co-op on Wales Street, through their new hallway (sheetrocked, taped, and mudded) into the old theatre where some thirty to 40 vendors displayed their bounteous and beautiful wares to a steady stream of patrons who arrived even before the opening ten o’clock hour and lingered, reluctant to leave, through the two o’clock closing.

It was the inaugural session of Rutland’s Winter Farmers’ Market, and it was only then that I realized what a miracle Greg Cox, of Boardman Hill Farm and RAFFL, whose dream it was, and who organized the whole thing, and the volunteers who cleaned and painted and pounded and swept, had accomplished! That cavernous old place, filled with music and chatter and food and good smells, was positively warm and intimate.

Some old faces from the outdoor summer Market were missing, but several new ones from points west – just over the New York line – and north from Orwell gave new meaning to the word “local”. There is rabbit, now, to round out our fresh meat needs (the Co-op is selling it now, too), and more free-range chicken, beef, and lamb. Two boys (twenty years old!) from Kilpatrick Family Farm in Middle Granville showed an incredible array of vegetables highlighted by a mountainous display of Brussels sprouts on the stem. “How do you stick all of those little cabbages on that log?” asked one customer with a grin. Nugget of information: Michael Kilpatrick told us he uses a small pruning chain saw to harvest the sprout stems.

When everyone had left, Greg splayed back against his stand and couldn’t quit smiling. “I’m going to sleep well tonight,” he sighed.

Ah, it was a happy day!

this column was originally published in the Rutland (Vt) Herald on November 6, 2007

Before the Night Hits...

Since I begin to dread the Winter Night as soon as the summer days begin to shorten at the end of June, and my dread builds as the evenings grow cool and then downright cold, it’s always with a burst of relief and appreciation that I realize we have these two months of energetic brilliance to enjoy before the Night really hits us. Brisk and loaded with color, with baskets and pans and boxes and bowls full of glorious foods, rescued from the garden on frost-fearful nights or just because this is peak season, these days bring contradiction and imperative, both to get out and enjoy the last of this vitamin D sunshine and to stay inside chopping and simmering chutneys, jams, butters and sauces as the piles of fruits and vegetables first grow then dwindle down into preserves.

I know you all feel the same – in late July my friend Lowell emailed me “We've had the most wonderful spinach and broccoli from Foggy Meadow of Benson, and good corn and blueberries from Woods. How shall I exist when all this good stuff is over? I say this every year and survive – but...”

Yes, we shall survive, and we shall eat lots of local foods this winter – especially with the Winter Market and the Co-op keeping them available to us – and then May will, presumably, appear again.

...in a foggy meadow...

I remember walking into Depot Park on the first Market day – the Saturday before Mother’s Day last May – my heart swelling up the way it always does at the sight of these people I’ve known for so many years, and their wonderful early-season produce, working my way down the truck line, saying joyful hellos and catching up, when I was stopped in my tracks.

Speaking of hellos, HELLO, what was this? A new vendor, Foggy Meadow Farm, had set up across from the truck line; a large set-up, of bounteous greens and purples and reds, leafy mostly – from the micro-greens that I would use all summer in salads, and scattered here and there to complement, say, a cheese or salsa, both in beauty and taste, to the mature, most perfectly frilled green and red lettuces, laid out and mounded in beautiful pattern.

“My Goodness!” I said, rather abruptly. “Who are You?” I had not seen Foggy Meadow in their growing stages, not heard of them before, and here they were full-blown as though puffed from a hookah. I rubbed my eyes like Alice.

Paul Horton, it seems, is not a man who goes through growing stages. He and Sally Beckwith have owned their Benson hill farm for four years, lived there three, and farmed organic vegetables for two, selling at several farmers’ markets, including Middlebury, Dorset and Rutland.

I say hill farm advisedly, as I learned when I visited them later in the summer – the old farm house set on the north side of the road, behind and above it the scratching chickens and grunting pigs, and across the road below, and slanting down, an old barn and a patchwork of fields and, um, patches, outlined with irrigation ditch and pipe and scattered, it seemed artfully, with farm implements and machines, some ancient. It’s quite a sight anytime, particularly when created by a man who until a few years ago managed production systems for a publisher and a woman who designed databases. But perhaps that’s the source of their joy and success in what they do now, bringing those organizational and pattern-making talents into an area in which it is possible to love and feel at home – the farm-garden.

An avid organic gardener by avocation before he decided to make it a vocation, Paul appears to see farming as a cheerful challenge, a puzzle to be solved with a little creative diligence: when the town of Benson didn’t seem too keen on digging a trench across the road in which to lay his irrigation pipe, he contacted utilities companies and had them pound a conduit under the road like a horizontal well – that’s the way they lay their own lines, he reasoned – and then snaked the irrigation line through it.

In another instance, as we were walking through a field of leeks he reached down and measured the size of one. “Almost ready,” he said. “I want a buck fifty for these, so they have to be big.” Later I realized that two of his leeks were as big as the three that other farmers were banding together for $3 a bunch, and he pointed out that by growing them large he had decreased his handling costs, time, and aggravation.

Problem solving! It’s a real kick for some people. I’ll bet even now he’s noodling over how to get in the truck line next year.

It’s good to have people like Paul and Sally as part of our food community. Welcome them, won’t you?

...they pasteurize almonds, don’t they... The ubiquitous “They” – The US Department of Agriculture – has determined that all California almonds must be pasteurized (100% of our almonds come from California). However, in this case it seems that it was not the USDA that decided to kill the mosquito with a piledriver, but the Almond Board of California, who worked quickly after a 2004 outbreak of salmonella attributed to almonds to protect their industry from even the faintest mainstream taint, and made it a law that almonds must be pasteurized. Almonds are pasteurized either by steam or by propylene oxide (PPO), a chemical that has been banned by hot rod and motorcycle racing associations where it had been used as fuel. It’s also used for weed control. PPO is a known carcinogen. Pasteurized almonds apparently don’t taste or look differently from their raw counterparts, and are not required to be labeled “pasteurized”; are, as a matter of fact, continued to be labeled “raw”.

According to the Center for Disease Control, food borne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. In the almond outbreak, a total of 33 people were hospitalized, lots of people had tummyaches, no one died. Wouldn’t it be an intelligent reaction to check out how almonds are being warehoused and packaged, marketed and delivered, rather than to stomp the entire industry with pasteurization? Our food system should be helped by the USDA and a knowledgeable public to recognize that it should celebrate the diversity and originality of our products and knowledge and totally abhor the idea of uniformity and lack of choice.

...which brings us to milk...

It made sense to react to the inane news of mandatory pasteurization of our almonds by revisiting the issue of raw milk by speaking to Amy Shollenberger at Rural Vermont, the organization that was instrumental in making it legal for small chicken growers to sell their chickens to restaurants and neighbors earlier this year. I had heard rumors that Rural Vermont was working to make unpasteurized milk more easily available to consumers. She said that Rural Vermont is still “in the homework stage, working with legislators” to allow farmers to sell unlimited quantities of raw milk from their farms (they’re limited to six gallons per day now), and to advertise (which they’re not allowed to do) and to deliver milk to the consumer after it is paid for in an arrangement something like the produce farmers’ CSA – Consumer Supported Agriculture – wherein customers subscribe to a farmer’s harvest at the beginning of the season and receive a box of vegetables and fruit, sometimes other foods too, once a week, of whatever is in season. “It’s important to have a relationship with the farmer,” Amy told me, “and pre-purchasing the milk makes it so you would have to at least seek out the farmer.”

...pasteurized livestock?...

Amy was also very hyped about the appearance of Mary Zanoni, legal expert, farmer, and anti-NAIS activist, today, at The Abbey, way up north, in Sheldon at 1:00 pm and at Ilsley Library, Middlebury at 6:30 pm. She’ll keep to the subject of animal registration tomorrow, Wednesday, at the United Church of South Royalton at 7 pm.

NAIS is the National Animal Identification System, which the USDA is pushing, and which small farmers are resisting, saying that the costs of knuckling under to the system are prohibitive, and that the aim of the whole thing is to aid industrial animal farmers and to, indeed, put small farmers out of business. See and hear Zanoni to learn more.

It’s amazing that you can still buy a raw egg.

... what we’re eating now...

Fresh, yet fall, beets. I forego the balsamic vinegar and also the teaspoon of sugar, and use, along with a little olive oil and salt and pepper, raw cider vinegar, with misgivings, yet when I taste them later they are perfect, the beets sweetening their coating, yet sharp, yet sweet.

Katherine Clark of Montpelier is cooking crookneck squash or, rather, her husband is. She writes: “I am convinced that crookneck is by far the best variety of yellow squash. It has a nutty complex flavor that is much better than the standard yellow squash... You never find them because they are ugly and bumpy and people think they are gourds. Bill cooks the squash in our house. He cuts up crookneck in non-uniform small chunks (so that the faces won't stick to each other while cooking), and cooks them in a non-stick skillet with a small amount of butter for a long slow time so that the liquid evaporates and the flavor intensifies.”

I ran with Bill’s technique, sautéing crooknecks or any other summer squash for as long as two hours. The good ones keep their shape, lose their water, and get all caramelly and absolutely wonderful.

Katherine’s on a quest to get people to like ugly vegetables, or vegetables they don’t think they like – like rapini, turnips, fava beans – so that farmers don’t quit growing them. “I adore rutabagas and don't understand why they aren't hugely popular. I like to roast them in the oven with olive oil...and rosemary.”

I’ve never cooked rutabaga much, but I will this year. That sounds like a wonderful way to expand our winter local foods repertoire.

Something else I just discovered is the very small – Little Ben – pumpkin. “We’ve been having good luck with these,” Paul Horton told me last week. “Just bake them, whole, at 325 degrees for about 45 minutes. They’re really good.” I took two of them and grilled them for about half an hour. When I sliced them open the seeds were easily scooped out, and the pumpkins contained a sweet nutty meat. Great taste and texture!

I make Elizabeth David’s tomato soup. I can remember it almost word for word, yet when I make it without getting out the book and re-reading it there’s something missing. As she said, “For all its simplicity and cheapness, this is a lovely soup, in which you taste butter, cream, and each vegetable, and personally I think it would be a mistake to add anything to it in the way of individual fantasies.” Don’t you love that word, “fantasies,” as though you or I could not and should not entertain them?

So I get out my French Provincial Cooking and the book falls open to Potage Crème de Tomates et de Pommes de Terre. It calls for the white part of 2 leeks (only one of Foggy Meadow’s though), ½ pound of tomatoes, ¾ pound potatoes, 1 ½ ounce butter, a little cream, chervil or parsley. You melt the butter, soften the leeks in the butter, add the roughly chopped tomatoes, cook a little until they begin to give off their juice, add the diced potato, a seasoning of salt and a little sugar, cover with 2 ½ cups water, bring it to a boil and let it simmer “steadily but not too fast” for 25 minutes. Put it through a food mill, she says, but I put it all in a blender and pour it back in the pan, in which I’ve heated about ½ to 1 cup of heavy cream. Just before serving sprinkle with chopped chervil or parsley.

But when I open the book and read the recipe, even then I don’t make it exactly as she says – I do indulge in some of my “fantasies” and it tastes better than if I hadn’t read it but made it closer to her instructions. What do you make of that? I make of it that life is more mysterious than we can comprehend.

This column was first published in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald on September 25, 2007