Interns and Garlic

photo by Bailey Schreiber

One of the more exciting things we look forward to with the beginning of the summer are the farming interns who will earn their stripes over the season. They  bend their backs and minds to learn from some of our most experienced and successful farmers, and we get to know them at the Farmers’ Market. Their enthusiasm and hard work is often so enticing that we become fast friends.

Bailey Schreiber is interning with Paul Horton and Sally Beckwith at their Foggy Meadow Farm in Benson. She, with her cohorts,  follows Caroline Kimball and Conor Falcon from last year, and our own Lindsay Arbuckle and Scott Courcelle from the year before.

Bailey hails from Jackson, Wyoming, and has been writing about her interning experiences on her blog called Turnips and Tators. She is an uncommonly good writer. I took my licks and lessons from MFK Fisher, Laurie Colwin, and Elizabeth David, to name a few mentors. When I read Bailey’s post about garlic and the process of coming to love the earth I knew that I had to be the first to introduce her to my readers.

She titles her piece,

Garlic as Legacy

by
Bailey Schreiber

About nine months ago, last year’s interns – who are to me just names, not faces – helped Paul and his son, Jimmy, plant about 2,500 row-feet of garlic. On a cold fall day, they threw a bunch of seed garlic in the back of the truck and headed up to the south meadow. The bed was tilled and marked, and they poked a little clove into the soil at eight inch increments. After this was done, they likely looked over their work briefly, then threw their tools and themselves back into the red truck.

If they were anything like me, as they made their way back to the barn they thought about how this was one of the few crops they will sow but not harvest, how it will be one of the first plants to reach up and greet next year’s interns, and how it will be tended, harvested and planted again by yet other hands.

These other hands are, of course, my hands. And Katelyn’s hands, Nate’s hands, Grace’s hands, Sandy’s hands, and Kayce’s hands. The garlic was there in the spring to greet us and, as we slowly and sometimes painfully learned what it means to farm, it grew for us too. Early in the summer, I’d walk the rows looking for a double shoot – a spot where two cloves had been planted instead of one. To ensure a full head of garlic, one stalk had to be removed. And eaten.

Scapes provide a welcome taste of garlic before the young garlic
is ready to be pulled. They can be eaten raw or sauteed or made

into a vibrant pesto. (photo by spnimtz)

In late June, I watched and waited impatiently for the stalks to send up scapes. When they finally started to appear, we’d walk up and down the rows, baskets in hand, snapping off the early garlic blossoms. These whimsical, green garlic curls, when removed, encourage root growth. They also provide a taste of what is to come, a little sneak preview.

After weeks of scape-snapping and -snacking, I watched as the first few leaves of the garlic stalks began to brown – an indicator that the bulb is shaping up. Paul would pull up a plant now and then to check progress. “Getting there,” he’d say as we watched in anticipation as he pulled back the outer layers of the bulb to reveal the developing cloves. We waited until one day, after he examined a head, he said, “Well, I guess we’ll be bringing some garlic to market this week.”

We were a little train of garlic harvesters: one person loosened the soil and roots with a broadfork, two people pulled the plants from the dirt, and a third cut the roots and stalk from the bulb.

We were a well oiled machine, pulling and cutting over two hundred heads in an hour.
A couple hundred heads the first week and a few hundred more the next, we piled fresh garlic on the bed of the truck and on the table at market. As I told many a curious customer, fresh garlic is milder than the garlic you find in the store. As garlic cures, its flavor intensifies. Fresh garlic, though, can be sliced thinly with a pocket knife and eaten in the barn between tasks. It is important, however, that all workers are fond of and partake in this practice.

Garlic cultivation, as I’ve discovered first hand, is very labor intensive for about two weeks of the season. This is the primary reason farmers don’t grow more of it. It is important not to leave the garlic in the ground for too long as the heads will start to rot rather than cure. As a result, lots of hands are needed for a week-long window. It took four or five of us about twenty hours to get fifteen hundred or so heads out of the ground, trimmed and set up to dry. We did it in two- or three-hour increments stretched over a week and a half, but even so, it felt good to have it all under a roof and out of the field. One day before the garlic was harvested, Paul asked if I was going to market with Sally the following day. I replied, “No, I’m staying here to make sure we get all the goddamn garlic out of the ground.”

Once harvested, we set up the stalks in a small old garage on simple yet effective drying racks. We put fans up to promote air circulation and closed the doors in the evening to keep out the dew. After a few weeks, the outer layers of the bulbs took on a papery feel, flaking off in your hands as they were cut and cleaned for market. Again, we cut a few hundred at a time as was needed for market, until yesterday, when Paul decided they were as cured as they were going to get. I clipped over two hundred pounds of garlic, setting the largest bulbs aside. We’ll sell the regular heads at market for the next few months, but the biggest heads have a different destiny as breeding stock.

Come October, we’ll separate out the cloves, sitting on buckets in the barn. I’ll probably be wearing long underwear beneath my Carhartts and my fingers will be cold. We’ll load the truck up, drive to the prepped bed and we’ll poke one hundred pounds worth of garlic cloves into the ground at eight inch increments. After this task is completed, I’ll look out over the field, hands warming in my pockets. I’ll think about next year’s interns who will watch the garlic poke up through the soil when the snow melts and the ground thaws; who will excitedly snap the scapes; who will pull, trim, dry and eventually replant the thousands of new heads these little cloves will grow to be.

I’ll feel a sense of relief knowing I will not be responsible for these tasks, but I’ll also feel melancholy. This farm now feels a lot like home. As I’ve worked in the fields, I’ve come to know and love this land. I feel a small sense of ownership and liability for its care. But, while it will be sad to leave one day, I am thrilled to know someone will be taking my place in the spring. And I’ll know, on that chilly fall day, that the garlic will be there to meet, excite, challenge and feed them.

***

I think you'll agree that we'll be seeing much more of Bailey's writing in the nation's food future.

For garlic lovers, scape pesto is made by chopping scapes with pine nuts or walnuts very finely, then folding in
grated parmesan cheese and enough olive oil to make the mixture creamy. Season with salt . (photo by spnimta)

an accretion of karma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

photo by Janet Kennedy Farmer

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

Mid-summer Salad of Kohlrabi & Apple  

serves 4
SALAD:

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

VINAIGRETTE:

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

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

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

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

satiate the soul

Every year that day before Mother's Day in early May is SUCH a treat – walking into Depot Park in Rutland on that first Summer Market Saturday, greeting old friends and discovering new – friends, farmers, and, at this time of year, foliage. This year, however, there had never been more miserable weather than we had that day – rain and wind and mud and cold! Nevertheless my eternal axiom had to hold true – the Farmers are going to be there and, thus, so am I!

We had radishes this year! It's always been a joke that the mayor will throw out the first radish at the first Farmers' Market, and someone has to go over to the supermarket to buy one! This year we had a splendiferous display of radishes – most notably at Foggy Meadow's stand – and the Herald got a great photo of young Ben Horton and those radishes to display on the front page.

As difficult as it is to be transported when you are hunching against the rain, racing through mud, icy rivulets streaming down your neck and up your sleeves, we shoppers managed it, and were able to greet some great new vendors as well as all the old beloved ones.

Here are a few of the former and one of the latter.

***

Lindsay Arbuckle and Scott Courcelle are new vendors this year, and their Alchemy Garden stand is a work of art, so beautiful that you might not gather how much sweat of the brow it demanded and got. From their smiles and easy-going manner it seems that it effortlessly, as its name suggests, sprang into being.

Not so, though, as the Arbuckle/Courcelle duo are busy people who are also the managers of the new co-op at Pierce's Store in Shrewsbury. No doubt they were able to polish their farming talents when they acted as Paul Horton's interns last summer at Foggy Meadow Farm in Benson, and they're putting those skills into practice now that they farm/garden on a piece of land at Greg Cox's Boardman Hill Farm in West Rutland. Lindsay also coordinated this year's Locally Grown Guide (just out – look for it) for RAFFL.

Note the lovingly-created seed packets and signs by Lindsay. Whew, that lady is a busy bee!

***

Another new vendor is Larson Farm from Wells, selling, most notably, pasture-raised veal. Some of you readers have asked about humanely raised veal, and here it is. It is rosy colored, very tasty. I made cutlets out of it last week, pounded thin, lightly breaded, sauteed in butter and olive oil.

Erin Seward woman's the enterprise, and brings along, so far, her own wildcrafted ramps, fiddleheads and, these few weeks green garlic.

Probably many people don't realize that garlic can be eaten at any stage of the game. Right now it is simply bulbous, like a scallion, so tender it can be eaten all the way up the stem. Soon you will find cloves being formed, the outer skin toughens, and the skin surrounding the individual cloves easily splits to uncover the tender cloves inside.

Erin also offers a pesto, made out of green garlic, and homemade hummus. Soon she will add her own garden-grown produce.

One of the things that is most heartening about these new vendors is the pure joy they take in what they're doing.

***

This splendid new vendor is Radical Roots Farm. We have watched Dennis Duhaime and Carol Tashie all this long spring sweating it out on their land out on Creek Road. That sweat has paid off with, among other things, broccoli raab at the very first market on May 8.

Now there's a story behind that raab that dates back to when Dennis was the Co-op's produce manager and I urged him to get some in, offering to do a tasting of it if he would. It's one of my favorite vegetables but most people had never heard of it. Dennis fell in love with it and now, finally, we have it available at Market.

Here's the way I wrote about its preparation last year:

….. toss the raab into boiling salted water and bring it just back to boiling, hold it there maybe a second more, then drain it. In the meantime you’ve warmed about a quarter of a cup of olive oil in a sauté pan with a finely chopped clove of garlic. When the raab is drained, and the garlic has had time to flavor the olive oil without turning a bit brown, turn the heat to high under the pan, and when the oil is hot (don’t let that garlic turn) throw in the raab and shake, rattle and roll until the raab is hot, has cooked a couple minutes more and is, my goodness, coated with the oil. Sprinkle with salt to taste, then a teaspoon or so of hot pepper flakes, and there we go! Serve it warm or even cold, or put it in a sandwich of crusty whole-grained bread.

Don't you love that sign? It's the work of Carol's brother.

Carol and Dennis also had the earliest regular broccoli ever on May 22. Here's Carol with it in her hands.

***

Not a new vendor but one of my favorite old ones is Rebecca Worthing of Poultney who offers her incredible made-from-scratch-and-lots-of-butter pastries almost every week, winter AND summer at her Rebecca's Kitchen stand at the Market. They're fresh each day! You know what this means? She's up most of the night before Market.
The reason I haven't written about her before or even, I think, mentioned her, is that I was saving her for a feature article. Well, I just don't seem to get around to features anymore, so it's high time to tell you how wonderful she is while I'm writing about other wonderful people.

My favorite is that bearclaw. I've never eaten better – flaky and rich and perfectly balanced between shaley savory crust and nutty, sweet filling. Perhaps an interesting sidelight here: a year or so ago I asked Rebecca how she made her pie crusts. She uses sweet butter in everything else, but she said that was too expensive for pie crusts so she used a no-trans-fat shortening. I was probably visibly disappointed, because, as you all know, I advocate for natural fats – preferably half butter and half lard in my crusts – and she was also visibly distressed, as any artist is at even a hint of criticism.
Recently, though, she confessed to me that she had taken my advice, and now all her pastries, including pies, are butter rich. Right on, Rebecca.
She picks all of her berries and apples fresh and in season. She has a young family, too. I don't think she sleeps, ever.

***

What else is new at the Farmers' Market?

These lovely little salad turnips (from Foggy Meadow) are exquisite out of hand – halfway between a radish and an apple; sweet and juicy – or simmered slowly in butter, with a bit of tarragon, along with their greens. What an unctuous, sweet, meltingly fresh, lovely vegetable this is, either alone or curled around a perfectly grilled porkchop.

And these beauteous young beets:

Really, there's nothing better in spring than young beets and greens. Last night I cut the stems about 2 inches long and simmered the beets until they were almost tender – for as little as 10 minutes, really – then added the greens to the pot and simmered for perhaps 10 minutes more. I drained them, slipped the skins from the beets (but saved the stems), and added the quartered beets, stems, and greens to a saute pan in which I had steeped over a low flame some fresh green garlic in a plethora of olive oil, turned the heat up a bit and tossed just until the beets had absorbed that lovely, garlicky oil.

At that point I may have sprinkled them with a few drops of vinegar, showered them with grated hard-boiled egg, salted and peppered them, or strewn them with hot pepper flakes, but whatever I did (and I've done all for different suppers this month), they all satiate the soul!

***

Okay. What's missing here? Oh, of course, Greg Cox, the Grand old Man of the Farmers' Market, the Philosopher-Farmer. Where's Greg?
Well, Greg's recuperating from long-delayed and well-deserved knee surgery!
About time you took care of those knees, Old Man! You're going to need them for many years to come, and maybe now that you're pain-free and agile as a gazelle you'll quit grumbling like an old bear and accomplish even more for Rutland and its food and farmers!

***

Satiate the soul. Hie yourself to the Farmers' Market wherever you be!

That last summer sweetness

It's Fall, folks, Autumn, but without our big freeze yet, this is the time to take full advantage of all the fresh tastes you can.

Some of the summer etables still available pending the big freeze. Eat 'em up!!

I had the most perfect tomato the other day. It was an enormous Brandywine, perfectly ripe, grown by the Tomato Lady at the Farmers’ Market. I made a BLT for Leo with Bear Mountain honey/oatmeal bread, bacon from the pork people in Clarendon – J&S Davis – and iceberg lettuce grown by Paul Horton at Foggy Meadow Farm in Benson.

For me I made a BLT salad, because I’m not eating bread right now, nor potatoes, rice, nor pasta. No starchy things, in other words, nothing that can easily turn to sugar, and NO sugar. It was so good, that luscious tomato all juicy and sweet, and the crunchy, icy, substantial lettuce, and the salty crisp baconness, all dolloped and dotted with mayo. I ate and ate and ate.

“Iceberg lettuce!” you exclaim. “But how outré!”

Well. Maybe. But possibly trend-setting, I’d like to suggest!

I was re-minded of my predilection for the crisp-tender sweetness of that round balled lettuce – with leaves so substantial you can wrap a slice of ham with a slather of mayo in them and forego the bread while you munch – last late-spring when I sat on the deck leafing through the May issue of Saveur Magazine. Yes, there was a photo of Her Majesty The Ice Queen, as they called it, looking luscious with blue cheese, radishes and scallions.

Iceberg was the only lettuce to be had when I was growing up. Those big pale green balls would come home from the grocery store every week, the stem would be thumped on the counter to remove it, and it would be stored in a – get this – Tupperware container made especially for it! We ate it every night, usually with bottled red stuff called French Dressing. It was sweet. We liked it. Candied lettuce! Often, though, budding little gourmet that I was, I would top a crisp cold leaf of it with half a canned peach and a dollop of Hellman’s – not mayo, but – was it called “Salad Dressing”? It looked like mayo but it was sweeter. I think it’s still around. If company was coming, a plump red maraschino cherry would sit atop the whole elegant thing... “Just like downtown,” my mom would say.

Suddenly, sitting there in the backyard in that long beginning twilight that is early summer, I yearned for iceberg lettuce, but I would have to go to the grocery store to get some, and it would have been grown in California or even China, and I didn’t want it that bad. The Farmers’ Market overflows with gorgeous, splendiferous greens, and that’s what I buy.

But. That next Saturday I couldn’t help but ask Paul whether or not he’d ever thought of growing iceberg lettuce. He’s very open to growing new things, even asks for suggestions, and I never hesitate to oblige. “Hmm,” he said with interest, “I haven’t. But it’s not a bad idea. I’ll order some seed.”

We’ve had lots to think about over the summer, but the other Saturday I revisited the subject: “I did grow some,” Paul told me, “But the heads didn’t form up very well – maybe it was that last heat we had, or maybe all the rain early on – but it tastes good and it’s been going into the salad mix.” So I bought some of the salad mix and enjoyed it that way.

The next week, though, “Oh, I’ve got something for you,” Paul said, and handed me a ... real... head of iceberg!

Tomato Lady's Brandywine Tomato and Paul Horton's Iceberg Lettuce

Now I can’t tell you how much pleasure that head of lettuce has given me. I know that sounds pathetic, but I live a simple life, with simple tastes and ... well, nevermind! But, it was perhaps at least partly responsible for my eating low-carb for a few weeks here, as I could see how I could do without some of those starchy enclosures, how a leaf of this crisp stuff could cup a tuna or egg salad or support that BLT salad I began with, tastily, crisply, and absolutely healthily. I feel better already.

As I spoke to some other farmers, including Greg Cox of Boardman Hill, and read up about the history of the lettuce, I found few facts but much conjecture. Greg told me that iceberg was the original desert lettuce, bred to survive the trip across the country from Sonoma County where it was grown, which is probably why it didn’t thrive in our cold, rainy summer. I read that it traveled heaped with ice chips, from whence comes its name, and that it was the picking of this lettuce that led, in the 70s, to Caesar Chavez calling for a boycott to protest the working conditions of California lettuce pickers.

The main point to me, though, and what makes me feel less than proud of my hunger for iceberg, is that it was bred for long-distance travel, and I have simply given up on long-distance foods. I said to Paul, I don’t know why I’m writing about iceberg lettuce when I have just finished the only head of it that anyone’s likely to see...” He had a thoughtful look in his eye. “Maybe I’ll try it again, make it the first seed planted, maybe in March next spring.”

So that’s okay – as a long-time local-eater (before localvore was coined) I know that I can’t have everything I want exactly when I want it. I can wait. In the meantime there are other crisphead lettuces. A silky butterleaf is as encompassing if not as crisp, and we’ll have lovely spinach all through the winter, most likely.

And, truth to tell, this diminuendo of eating mainstream carbs has paid its benefits – I no longer have an insatiable urge to eat more and more; to, in the midst of a meal, be planning the NEXT meal! Because that’s what sugar does to you, you know, it makes you want MOWAH, as Oliver so plaintively pled in the midst of his pallid porridge.

So now it’s time to allow in starchier veggies, such as beans and lentils. They’ll taste sweet enough, because when you cut out the blatant sugars in your food the subtle sweetnesses that remain step up to the plate. How to get your sugar fix? Go without carbs for awhile and a bowl of split pea soup will taste like ambrosia. A very thin slice of Bear Mountain Honey Oatmeal sourdough bread will be orgasmic! Slathered, I don’t have to tell you, with butter.

So forget about iceberg lettuce for now, wait for spring and see what Paul’s efforts bring, and truly enjoy those wonderful tomatoes that are still vine-fresh as I write. Eggplants. Peppers. Go hog wild on those things while they last.

**

Corn on the cob is getting scarce, but when you can find it it’s starchy and sweet, maybe a little tough for some of you dainty cob-gnawers out there, but it’s great scraped off the cob (maybe with a round cookie-cutter?), perhaps scored with a knife, first, so as to get its milkiness in with the kernels, then baked with lots of butter in a hot oven for half an hour, 45 minutes. Caramelized, you’ll think you’ve died and gone to corn heaven.

My latest favorite rendition of this is from Michael Ruhlman’s blog – his wife is a photographer and the photo made me want to fly down to Manchester to get myself a corn scraper just like Michael’s. If you have one you don’t have to use a cookie cutter or a knife:

Baked Buttered Corn
adapted from Michael Ruhlman
These are the ingredients for four servings:

- 8 ears of corn
- 4 tablespoons butter, cut in 4 pieces
- salt and pepper to taste

Scrape 6 ears of corn using a corn cutter, [but we’ve talked about this, right?] so the kernels are opened and all their sweet starchy juices fall into a bowl (you can also slice the kernels with a knife and scrape the ears that way or you could probably use a box grate. Cut the corn from the remaining two ears into the same bowl. Season well with salt and pepper. Pour the corn into a baking dish (choose a dish or individual ramekins that will give you a depth of a couple inches). Push the butter into the corn and bake uncovered at 425 for 30-40 minutes.

The more common scene: Sarah Seward's Farm Stand, East Wallingford. Gorgeous Fall.

for all Pratico purposes

In a few weeks, we’ll have apples and winter squash littering our kitchens in bountiful and pleasant ways. But if the latter two descriptives are true, then the word ‘littering’ is not quite correct. Change that to ‘gracing’. But whatever. Today, what litters and at once graces our porches and kitchens is tomatoes. And really, it’s only the lucky ones of us – the ones whose gardens didn’t go into an extended sulk at the unprecedented amount of rain they were required to soak up – who have a litter of tomatoes to at once glory in and feel responsible to do something with.

...The Pratico tomato...

There are, as usual, exceptions to that rule, and I am one. My garden DID sulk, but I was the grateful recipient of a basket of Pratico tomatoes, which I talked about last year in an article called “Sex in the Garden” which dealt with, among other things, the Menduni and Pratico tomatoes.

If you’ll remember, the Pratico came from seeds given to Stephen Chamberlain of Dutchess Farm in Castleton by an elderly person at the Farmers’ Market one summer day, in the hopes that Steve would propagate an old family favorite. S/he said he’d developed them, part beefsteak, part paste tomato. Luckily, Steve did propagate them, thereby saving an incredibly ugly but luscious tomato. It’s a fat, long tomato tapering to a pointed blossom end. It has very little core, the shoulders are as tender and meaty as the rest of it, it has few seeds and jel, and lots of flavorful flesh.

...patsy...

After that article was published Ray Pratico, Jr. called me and offered this conjecture.

He thinks it was his great-uncle, Pasquale (Patsy) Pratico who developed – hybridized – the Pratico tomato. Patsy was the brother of Ray’s grandfather, Anthony Pratico, who started Pratico’s Barber Shop on Strongs Avenue next to Gill’s Delicatessen.

The brothers came from Reggio in Calabria, Italy, Patsy in 1918 and Tony in 1920.

Back in 1918, Pasquale escaped a horrendous depression in Italy and worked hard so that he could send back $35 for his brother’s passage. The depression taught him well. Ray remembers fishing with his Uncle Patsy on Lake Champlain, and when they caught an eel Patsy would bring it home to eat. “Fish that you and I would never consider eating, he would consider a delicacy.” He was a champion skeet shooter – learning when he was in Italy by being charged with taking a shotgun and shooting robins for the family’s dinner, “and he wasn’t to waste a shell by shooting only one robin, he had to shoot six at a time.” We imagined that they’d taste pretty good with a little tomato sauce.

Ray says that Uncle Patsy had a beautiful garden in his back yard at the south corner of Union and Forest in Rutland where he grew, not so much broccoli or cucumbers, but peppers “as big as my head,” and tomatoes – presumably developing, along the way, our precious Pratico – onions, garlic and eggplants, all the ingredients for a great sauce and parmesans. “And you did not want to be caught playing out in that back yard.” I did some exploring, and if what I found was Pasquale’s backyard and it is the same size it was then, I have to say it is truly tiny. But apparently Patsy planted every nook and cranny of it.

Anthony Pratico died in 1999, close to a hundred years old. Pasquale died in 1990.

Do they still have seeds for the Pratico tomato? Still grow it? Ray is uncertain, but he says, “Everyone buys Ragu, it’s cheap and it’s easy.”

I think I know where you could get some seeds, Ray, and continue carrying on a tradition.

...and grandmother menduni...

The Menduni had been saved from extinction by Claire Clarino, whose grandmother Menduni had brought seeds from her town in Italy called Chella, and had grown them until she died, when Claire took them over. “Claire saves seeds each year and grows them in her mother’s garden in Rutland, her ex-husband grows them in Key West where they climb to six feet or more, and a market gardener in Grand Isle grows large crops of them for sale,” I wrote then. They are a large, meaty plum shaped tomato, with excellent taste. Apparently they take a little longer to ripen, for I have not yet got my first taste of them this year.

...spreading the seed...

I saved seeds from the Menduni and the Pratico, and gave some to Paul Horton at Foggy Meadow Farm in Benson – he who was the giver, this year, of the basket of Praticos – and my friend Dana Squire in Virginia – she with a climate which allows her to plant the seeds directly into her – prolific – garden! – and Marilyn Burnham, gardener and cook extraordinaire, in South Wallingford.

Marilyn had no luck with them. They were fine until she put them into her rainy garden, and then they just stood right up and died. Dana, on the other hand, emailed me photos of her “thrilling” crop, saying, “I processed some last night – I don't usually grow plums – and what bliss to not have squirts going off in every direction. Delicious flavor. They will be featured all next month. They are huge – like 6" long!”

Paul Horton had good luck with germination, and planted about 20 plants, from which he and his partner, Sally Beckwith have “probably put up 40 pounds, and maybe we’ll get another 30 pounds.” They will not be widely available at the Foggy Mountain Farm stand at the Farmers’ Market this year, but he hopes for a larger crop next year.

In a couple of serendipitous asides, a friend gave Paul some tomato plants this spring that hailed from Providence, Rhode Island. By the time he got them they were rather sickly looking plants that he’s nursed along until they are producing some fruit that is now almost ready to taste. They are, he thinks, both a red and yellow Sergi Sicilian tomato, the red called Doro Rossi Lunghi, and the yellow P. Lunghi Gialli, and they are in appearance remarkably like the Pratico. Googling does nothing on this subject, but we wonder if they could possibly be from the same town in Italy, Reggio, each brought by different émigrés, a supposition that might hold a little more water if we did not already think that Pasquale Pratico ‘developed’ his tomato from beefsteak and plum tomatoes.

At the same time, a neighbor brought Paul some Jimmy Nardello pepper seeds, a multi-dimensionally sweet and intensely flavored banana-shaped pepper. They came originally from Seeds of Change, a company that was founded to save heirloom seeds that were in danger of dying out.

“This to me is really fascinating,” Paul told me, “because I think it’s really important that we have crops that we can save and share the seeds of, to reproduce these older varieties, because they’re reliable, and delicious, and because we need our own source of seeds without relying on seed companies.” Seeds of ordinary plants, like green beans, for instance, are getting much more expensive and even hard to get, other farmers have told me. Paul elaborated on that thought by saying, “More and more seed companies are being bought by big companies and the seed being hybridized and sold back to farmers.” It’s not good, we agree, when the seeds for our foods are all owned by industry!

That was the thought of Tom Stearns, the founder of High Mowing Seeds in Hardwick. In an article in the 9/03 Seven Days entitled Hungry Hardwick, Suzanne Podhaizer writes, “In 1995, [Stearns] began saving the seeds from his garden. ‘I was interested in having as self-sufficient a home garden as I possibly could,’ he recalls. After moving to Vermont, he realized he had more seeds than he could use, so he put together a miniature catalogue. In 2000, Stearns quit his day job to focus on his seeds full-time, and in 2005, decided to take the business national; with the economy in a slump and more people aiming to grow their own food, the move is paying off. ‘There’s a lot of people gardening who weren’t before,’ Stearns suggests.”

A little aside here – if you don’t follow Suzanne in either the online http://www.7dvt.com/ or the free hard copy of Seven Days, you should! She’s an indefatigable food sleuth, and what she doesn’t write about food from Middlebury to Montreal probably doesn’t merit writing about.

...saving tomato seeds...

Saving seeds, though, is a laborious process, especially if you want to save enough to take the product to market. So far, Sally and Paul are keeping most of the Praticos (the Mendunis aren’t quite ready yet) for their own use. Steve and Julia Chamberlain, too, keep most of their Praticos, though a few show up at the market. “Aren’t they the best tomatoes!” exclaims Julia, adding that it’s lucky for her that the tomatoes aren’t the gorgeous things that buyers expect. Steve adds that they’re poor yielding, too, and he can’t afford the time to train people to buy them for the taste. He mentions, though, that a Pratico relative from the Midwest, after reading the Sex in the Garden article, emailed Steve for some seeds.

Saving tomato seeds is a process of fermentation. Since Pratico tomatoes have very few seeds and little gel, lots of meat, you’ll have to do some digging. Slice the tomato in half lengthwise, maybe even into quarters. With a spoon, scrape the jel and seeds into a small bowl. Add a couple of tablespoons of water to the seeds. Cover the bowl with a piece of plastic wrap and then poke a small hole in it to allow for transpiration. Place it in a warm spot for two or three days, removing the plastic wrap each day to stir the mixture, then replace the plastic. There will be a layer of scum on top of the liquid when the fermentation process has separated the jel from the seeds, and destroyed many of the possible tomato diseases that might be harbored there. When this happens, pour the seeds into a fine kitchen sieve and rinse with water several times. Drain well and place on a piece of parchment or waxed paper and spread them into a single layer. Let them dry for maybe a week, stirring often. When they’re dry they do not stick to each other. To store them, wrap them envelope-style in parchment paper and label them with the name and the date.

...mfk symposium...

Lots of readers here seem to like MFK Fisher’s writing, and since this year she would have been 100 years old, the New School in NYC is hosting an MFK symposium on Sept. 22. It’s free for all students, only $8 for others, as I read it. Thought some of you MFK diehards would grab the chance. More details: A panel of distinguished guests celebrate the life of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, master food writer, and discusses her relationships with other American food celebrities, including Julia Child, James Beard, and Alice Waters. Panelists include Amanda Hesser, food writer for the New York Time; Judith Jones, editor and author; Joan Reardon, author; and Kennedy Golden, Fisher’s daughter. Andrew F. Smith, editor of the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, moderates. This event is offered in conjunction with a short course, MFK Fisher: Poet of the Appetites, beginning September 15; please visit www.newschool.edu/food studies for more information. Tickets: 212 229-5488 or boxoffice@newschool.edu

...didn’t i already mention marilyn...

My friend and neighbor Marilyn Burnham will be the next guest chef on What’s Cookin’ Rutland at Peg TV on Monday, 9/15. Marilyn is the superintendent of the Vermont State Fair’s culinary competitions, among other things, and she will introduce this year’s apple pie winner, Barbara Taraska, of Wallingford and points south, chat with host, Whitney Lamy, about the pleasures and tribulations of baking for, organizing, and judging the fair’s food contests, and show us how she makes her own apple pie. Studio guests will taste apple pies from Marilyn, Barbara, and Whitney.

What’s Cookin’ Rutland is taped from 6:00 – 6:30 PM, doors open at 5:30, and members of the audience must be seated by 5:45. You may bring your own beverages, if you like, a $10 donation is suggested, and for reservations call the Chaffee Art Center at 775-0356.

...hungry bikers wanted...

Got this note from Shelby Hammond of Rural Vermont about the TOUR DE FARMS event that Rural Vermont is hosting with the Addison County localvores and VT Bike-Ped Coalition. Choose a 10, 25, or 30 mile bike tour with stops through Shoreham at various farms and orchards to sample farm fresh goods. It's on Sunday the 21^st at 10:30 a.m. meeting in Shoreham. It’s $15 per adult and $8 for 15-and-unders, and you pre-register by calling (802)223-7222 or email Shelby@ruralvermont.org.

I’ve just done some investigation into Shoreham’s vital farm scene, and hmmm, wonder if my old bike still works...

The article “sex in the garden” can be found at http://thriceshy.blogspot.com/2008/03/sex-in-garden.html

This post was published As Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland Herald here.

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