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

emptying the larder

I took out last year’s calendar just to look at the blank spot that ran through the last week of February into the first week of March of two thousand and ten. So clean and unmarked it was except for the straight line I’d drawn through it with the words “to SJU”. That is travel agentese for San Juan. Every last week of a Vermont February should have a similar line drawn through it, indicating that we are off having adventures, exotic or not. A certain energy is released when one goes journeying, certain plugs are exploded, a freshness in one invites new energy back. Lives change when adventures are spun.

My calendar this year does not sport that line through a couple of weeks, though it doesn’t have much else, either. So I have been enjoying my own home and village and walks as though I were a visitor, hoping for new eyes and appreciation. It almost works, and it has some enjoyable side effects.

The weather has cooperated. This is one of the more exciting winters that I can remember, with temperatures into the negative numbers and not single digit ones, either. There is a certain sense of accomplishment when your car thermometer shows -23° and you  have made it out for early breakfast with the governor. Or when you get to the Paramount in spite of heavy, wet, crunchy snow all day, to hear The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, whose music is simply magnificent.

We were in our own private world there with those eight people on stage working as hard and perfectly as hummingbirds, with their wands and violas and violins and cellos to give us music that just smacked us in the face like a lovely Olympian ruffle – so powerful and transporting it was.  After the Shostakovich came intermission, when nature gave us just as powerful a rendition as the thick snowing sky turned to pouring February rain, pelting like liquid icicles on the street, and lightening and thunder, great rolls of it, blasted us back to the Academy for the mesmerizing Mendelssohn in the second half. The whole night was something like ecstasy.

We are some of the lucky ones: Everything works – though there have been some major complications – and our house is warm and the larder stocked.

That larder is being slowly depleted, which is as it should be: The growing season is coming again – we’ll soon be prying ramps out of the rocky ground and steaming fiddleheads – and it’s time to spend the luxurious currency we put up last summer.  The roasted corn we froze last August  is so incredibly sweet and tasty now! It’s as though our tongues had been blanded down over these white months to be shocked awake at what we took for granted in August. All those times that I threw twice as much corn as we could eat on the grill, all those times that Leo shaved the rest of it off the cobs and I froze it? Little chunks of time with a great payoff now!  I simply mixed it with faro one night, to side some grilled chicken breasts. Now there’s a nice combination – so nutty and so sweet.

I roasted broiler pans full of tomatoes last summer, and ladled them into freezer bags. When I thawed some the other day, took an immersion blender to them in the pan just to break up skins and seeds, and tasted, I was petrified with delight!! So vibrant, so sweet, that I simply ladled them into little bowls, put a spoonful of garlic olive oil on top, and imagined we were sitting on the August porch.

Then – it just keeps getting better – one very snowy Saturday we saw the signs for the Maine shrimp truck and scored 5 pounds of them. After beheading them and shelling them, 5 pounds of Maine shrimp is not an impressive amount. Nevertheless, they are delicious little things, and combined with the roasted corn and the roasted tomatoes, cilantro and chopped avocado, on a few leaves of mesclun, some lime juice squeezed over – they made a totally decadent and delectable salad.

Playful salads are our counterintuitive choice these days for supper –  a bed of mesclun, locally grown and available at the co-op, along with the micro-greens from the Farmers’ market, some leftover shredded chicken or pork, sometimes beef (also from the Farmers’ Market), perhaps some homemade fried croutons for crunch, a scattering of walnuts or pecans or pumpkin or sesame seeds that have been roasted or at least warmed in some butter, and some dried cranberries or diced dried apricots, or slices of fresh mango, come to that. A little vinaigrette of sherry or balsamic vinegar and garlic olive oil. Salt and pepper, sometimes some shavings of parmesan or cubes of mozzarella. These just totally hit the spot, full of intriguing tastes and textures.

We’ve started on the second batch of sauerkraut, too, and it’s wonderfully refreshing – tangy and crunchy yet, and full of microbes and live cultures that help our guts populate themselves with healthful things.. I dig out a dish of it in the morning and leave it on the counter to snack on all day. 

The pile of New Yorkers (not people, Silly, the magazine!) that I was too busy to read last fall is slowly diminishing, too, as I take some of these white hours to peruse them, finding some gems as I go along.  One of them was a fascinating article by Burkhard Bilger in the November 22 issue called Nature’s Spoils, which followed Sandor Katz, author of Wild Fermentation, on his rounds of making fermented foods such as my sauerkraut and along the way had some amazing things to say about the idea that “Americans are killing themselves with cleanliness,” as he quotes Katz saying.  Somehow Bilger segues from fermented sauerkraut to raw milk, and his discussion of that timely topic is perhaps the most balanced and unbiased that I’ve ever read. It’s too long and too complicated to summarize here, so I hope you’ll find the article and read it for yourself.

I say ‘timely’ topic because you may or may not have heard that the excellent organization, Rural Vermont, was stopped by our new  (and, we hoped, farmer-centric) Agency of Agriculture from conducting workshops teaching people how to make yogurt, butter, and cheese from raw milk. The Agency cited some confused wording in the raw milk law that prohibited farmers from selling raw milk to people who would use that milk in any but its fluid form. The solution would seem to be a simple one – the Agency should clean up the wording so that it makes some modicum of sense and get themselves out of our pantries – where they most obviously do not belong. Because it is none of their business (or my farmer’s business) if I drink my gallon of raw milk whole or skim the cream to make butter or heat it up to make yogurt.

Making yogurt from raw milk is something that I often (and illegally?) do. And there’s nothing simpler, really.  This is my technique.

***
Yogurt

• 2 quarts raw whole milk
• ½ cup good unflavored, whole milk yogurt (Butterworks Farm is a good one)

Ladle the milk into two quart jars and pour into a pan. Heat the milk slowly and carefully to 160° to 180°and let it cool to 115°. (Some recipes call for just heating the milk to 110° in the first place, but I do not have good results with that technique.)

Meanwhile, take a small hard-sided cooler (that the two quart jars can fit into) and fill it with hot water. Close it and let it warm up while you make the yogurt.

When the milk has heated and cooled to 115°, stir in the yogurt. and pour back into the quart jars. Screw the caps on loosely.

Empty the cooler of water, put the jars of milk/yogurt into it, close it, and place somewhere warm and out of drafts for 8 hours, at which time check the consistency and taste.  If it is still too thin, without any sign of setting, you can leave it for a few more hours or overnight. If it seems to be setting, put it in the fridge, and it will continue to thicken.  If you leave it for too long in the ‘cooler’ the tanginess will cede to sour.

Voila! That’s it.

***

Mark McAfee, C.E.O. and founder of the country’s largest raw-milk dairy, Organic Pastures, is quoted by Bilger in the aforementioned article as saying that dealing with the live cultures in any food, but in this case, raw milk, forces dairies to do what all of agriculture should be doing anyway: downsize, localize, clean up production.

“We need to go back a hundred and fifty years,” McAfee told Bilger. “Going back is what’s going to help us go forward.”

My question to the new head of the Agency of Agriculture, Chuck Ross, on VPR’s Vermont Edition one day was,

“Sustainable dairy –  meaning smaller herds, grass and pasture fed, sustainably milked, minimally and locally processed... How do we make this happen, and how do we quit encouraging farmers to get bigger at all costs, and how do we transition big farms to sustainable farms?
Thanks. I'll take the answer off the air.”

The recent action of the Agency of Ag was not the answer I was looking for.

published as a Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald 01 MAR 2011

not a lot of solid evidence

It’s Sunday morning, so I’m trying to decide what to do instead of writing Tuesday’s column. I think I’ll wipe the kitchen down, even mop the floor.  Make some chicken soup – good for what ails you in February or any other time. And maybe I’ll clean out the fridge.

There is a commonality in opening the fridge and seeing it stuffed full with forgotten leftovers and other mysteries and realizing that it needs a good cleaning.  Nora Ephron has to take care of her own leftovers, probably, clean her own fridge. No one escapes that chore unless they have full-time housekeeping, or a wife, or a partner who does it. There is not a job I like less, except, apparently, writing a column.

Ah! I’d forgotten those Brussels sprouts I made on Wednesday. I was looking for recipes for the Co-op and asked around and Lindsay Arbuckle, of Alchemy Gardens and  Pierce’s Store, suggested Brussels sprouts steamed with dried cranberries, leeks and pecans. I formulated that into a recipe that I trust approximates the preparation she had in mind.

They’re delicious now, cold, salted and peppered. The sweetness of the pecans and the cranberries with the savory greenness of the sprouts is the perfect brunch snack.

Hmm, wonder how the Vermont Peanut Butter got pushed back behind the seldom-used jars of miso? I take a teaspoon full of it – it’s the chunky variety – and add a scraping of butter before taking it to my computer and staring at this screen. It’s an adult lollypop. Well, it’s a peanut butter lollypop, adult or not. And it reminds me of an article about  food allergies in children that I read in the Feb 7 New Yorker. 

The practice of anti-intuitively advising pregnant women and babies to avoid all kinds of foods, from peanuts to shellfish for varying amounts of time up to two years old in order to AVOID food allergies in children, seems to have backfired, and the number of food allergies has exploded!

My favorite quote is by a medical doctor/professor who said, “We in medicine are making a lot of decisions and recommendations based on not a lot of solid evidence.”
Read that again. “... on NOT a lot of solid evidence.” 

So the NEW thought on allergies is that “a child becomes tolerant to a variety of food proteins through exposure in the first six months of life.” You will notice that’s the exact opposite of what they have been advising the poor allergic dears all this time.

Nowhere in this article – The Peanut Puzzle, by Jerome Groopman – does anyone wonder if allergies might be due to the altered chemistry of the food because of the way it is now grown. Is it not reasonable to think  that the reason such an increasing number of people have ‘intolerances’ to so many foods – milk, wheat, soy, nuts –  is that their bodies do not recognize the food as food. It’s been genetically altered. It’s been grown or produced with a variety of chemical helpers that our bodies do not recognize as food. 

But they do note that in developing countries, where allergies are scarce, children “often consume solids, initially chewed by their parents, at two or three months.”  It’s the quickest and most convenient, and even, perhaps, the healthiest way of feeding babies solid food.  “Saliva is a rich source of enzymes that can help break down solid foods and of antibodies that might coat food proteins...” to make them less allergenic.  Don’t you just love it?

You know all those pronouncements about when to feed your baby rice cereal, and phase in this and that food?  It has NO basis in scientific evidence! And that’s according to a specialist in newborn nutrition quoted in the article. NO basis in scientific evidence. Who’da thunk?

This reminds me of a quote by Gary Taubes. In his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories,  he wrote, “The institutionalized vigilance, ‘this unending exchange of critical judgment,’ is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity...”  He adds, “(practitioners) certainly borrow the authority of science to communicate their beliefs to the general public.” In other words, it SOUNDS like science, but it is far from it.

How about that low-fat milk we’re advised to feed our kids? Who says? Well, for one, the new USDA guidelines say to. On what scientific basis are we advised? There is none. And to my mind, when in doubt follow Michael Pollan’s advice – Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize. Why take apart a perfectly good food and recombine it to some know-nothing’s specifications? Eat the whole food. Drink the whole milk. Our cells need saturated animal fats. They don’t oxidize like vegetable oils do, and go rancid and create the dreaded free radicals. Cholesterol is an antioxidant.  It rushes to repair arteries and heal infections. It’s good for our brains, our nerves, and our adrenal glands. Forget the Kool-Aid! Drink the milk!

Oh my goodness, look what I’ve done! It seems I’ve written a column! Whether or not it’s readable remains to be seen. And just to be sure that it’s edible, I’ll include a recipe for Lindsay’s

Glorified Brussels Sprouts

•    1 pound Brussels Sprouts, trimmed and cleaned
•    Salt and pepper to taste
•    1/2 cup dried cranberries (or other dried fruit)
•    1 tablespoon butter
•    1 tablespoon olive oil
•    1 large leek
•    1/2 cup pecans
•    Optional: Sherry or Marsala  wine

Steam the Brussels sprouts until they begin to soften, sprinkle with salt and pepper and steam until fork tender. Meanwhile, melt the butter and olive oil in a skillet. Clean the leeks and slice lengthwise into thin strands about 2 inches long. Add the leeks to the butter and sauté over low heat until golden and tender. Add the cranberries or other fruit (shredded dried apricots are very good) and pecans and sauté a few moments more. A splash of sherry is nice here.
When the sprouts are done add them to the pan and combine. Correct the seasonings. Add more butter, to taste, just before serving.

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

Butz Redux

The sun is brilliant this morning, the thermometer is hovering at about +6° and it’s so beautiful I might even have to take a frigid walk as soon as  I can tear myself away from these seed catalogs. Seeds of Change, I’ve got here, from out west; and Pinetree Garden Seeds out of Maine, and Cook’s Garden from Manchester.

Everyone should have a garden, don’t you think? To keep us grounded, aware of what food is and how it gets here. We need to get those little dirt microbes under our fingernails and let them find a complementary home in our guts. They make us happy and healthy. We need the breath of trees, and their hugs, too.  Oh my goodness, I think I might be breaking out into a little sweat of exaltation here. What plethora. What bounty!

Well, it’s a good thing we can take pleasure in the simple things, because there’s enough to worry us on the larger front. There’s a little diffuse, niggling, gnawing ruffle of worry around my rosy satisfaction with the Farm to Plate Initiative, Vermont’s own ability to take care of its own self in the continuing food emergency, our ability to move forward agilely while the ship of state turns clumsily in a new direction, even as I dream of spring and eat up the pictures in the seed catalogs. Red Streaked Mizuna, anyone? A spinach called Indian Summer?

This unease comes from many directions. For example, a man named Atul Gawande, a prolific and intelligent thinker and writer about the nation’s health-care system, has begun to propound the idea that our future health care system should follow the pattern of the so-called “Green Revolution”. That, you will remember, was the child of Earl Butz, whom Nixon appointed in the ‘70s to design a food system. He was the guy who said to farmers, as Michael Pollan puts it so succinctly, “get bigger or get out, plant fence row to fence row, move toward monocultures, just crank out that corn and soy; and then he redesigned the structure of subsidies to encourage that whole program.”

Somehow Atul Gawande thinks that was a success. And it did bring down prices – we have unrealistically cheap (supermarket) food. Unfortunately it’s food that causes a variety of “Western Syndrome” diseases – obesity and diabetes, for instance. Those diseases cost us, oh, maybe around $250 billion a year. Not only that but we’ve put small and diversified farms out of business all over the country.  The environmental costs are stymieing.

Are you picking up on the irony here?

Thank goodness for those seed catalogs. Next spring I’ll plant hops to run up the utility poles, and white clover in my garden pathways.

But that reminds me that the federal government has deregulated Monsanto’s Round-Up Ready alfalfa. Not only does there not seem to be any good reason for this – alfalfa grows perfectly well on its own – but this stuff will almost surely cross-pollinate conventional and organic alfalfa. In the meantime, weeds have been adapting to be able to survive Round-Up, creating a whole other set of problems. And do you know how much of earth’s surface is covered with alfalfa? Do we need to make it all Monsanto’s? Remember – every time we humans screw around with Mother Nature we live to regret it.

Well, enough of this. I think I’ll have some breakfast. I like my breakfast about eleven o’clock in the morning, and I like it to be my lunch, too. I like it after I’ve read the paper and drunk 2 mugs of coffee, done all those personal morning things, worked a little bit, maybe taken a walk. I like maybe an egg, maybe some yogurt, perhaps some oatmeal. But, I simply can’t get out of bed and immediately sit down to  eat after having done nothing all night.

Tsk, tsk, my friends say. Don’t you know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day?

Well, Yeah, but ... can’t it be brunch, too?

Imagine my immense satisfaction at the new headline that said “Studies prove... (Never mind that studies can prove just about anything!)... that a big breakfast just adds calories to your daily total. Now I don’t care about calories but my friends do.

I might even have a banana for my brunch/breakfast. Which reminds me, if you’re a banana person you’d better eat ‘em while they’re still available. Because I’ll bet you’ve heard of the banana pest that’s killing the banana palms and threatening the entire industry. You see, banana palms are genetically modified – they cannot be grown from seed but must be cloned. Civilization’s favorite source of potassium is a vast monoculture, and if it falls ill we’re back to square one, as far as bananas go.

Okay, enough of the headlines. Back to the seed catalogs and the hope – nay, trust – that yet another spring will arrive in its own good time.

Let’s have brunch!

***

Ruth Reichl says this is the best waffle in the world!

Fannie Farmer's Yeast-Raised Waffles

Sprinkle 1 package of dry yeast (or ½ teaspoon bulk yeast) over a half cup of warm water in a large bowl and wait for it to dissolve.
Meanwhile melt a stick of butter, add 2 cups of milk and allow it to just gently warm up. Add it to the yeast mixture.
Mix a teaspoon each of salt and sugar into 2 cups of flour. Add this to the liquid and beat until smooth.
Cover the bowl and let it stand overnight at room temperature. In the morning beat in 2 eggs and a quarter teaspoon of baking soda, stirring well. Cook on a very hot waffle iron until crisp on each side.
This makes about 8 waffles, and will keep for a few days in the refrigerator.

***

And now, let’s celebrate bananas while we may:

James Beard’s Black Bananas

Take a hand of bananas (1 for each eater) and put them into a 350° oven for 15 or 20 minutes, until the skins turn black and the insides are soft.
For each person, slit the inside curve of the banana, and scrunch it open. The banana should be soft and fragrant. Top each with at least 1 teaspoon of butter, 2 teaspoons of maple syrup or brown sugar, 2 or 3 teaspoons of freshly squeezed lime juice, and a plentiful drizzle of dark rum. Serve hot.

***

Happy gardening!

Soda Protests

Years ago, in the late ‘80s and ‘90s I was dumbfounded to realize that our kids’ schools had soda dispensing machines in their cafeterias. I suggested that this was not a good thing, and that they should discontinue the practice and take those machines out because soda was about the worst thing kids could consume. I didn’t keep it in MY fridge! The schools told me that it wasn’t tenable to take them out because the contracts with the soda companies and distributors were very lucrative for the schools. My answer to that was a shrug. So what? The mere fact that the school had those dispensing machines within its walls gave all appearances that they were condoning the use of soda. It would be more expensive in the long run to keep them. At that point we didn’t know HOW expensive.

Skip forward a few years, er, ah, decades, and what do we have? Suggestions that soda should be taxed! I think that nothing any one of us decides to put into our mouths should be taxed. Namely because you never know what someone is going to decide we need to be protected from next. It might be cauliflower. Or radishes. Or good healthy hog fat. But wait, they already subsidized that out of existence. “The other white meat,” indeed – the hogs are so skinny now nobody wants to eat pork!

Judith Levine in an article she wrote in Seven Days, says it well. “So, keep the junk off the market. Pour on the industry regulation. End the corn subsidies that siphon high-fructose corn syrup into virtually every U.S.-made processed food and thence into the bloodstreams of American eaters. Support organic farms. Require schools to serve lentils and whole-grain bread, broccoli and watermelon.”

In other words, teach your children well, by example and not by punishment.  Sin Taxes are ... yucky.  They have that singy smell of outraged morality – the ‘I’m better than you are’ syndrome.

That is not to say that I agree with a very conservative woman by the name of Kate O'Beirne, who reportedly said, at a Republican Strategy Meeting, “Obesity is a substantial national problem that the federal government should have nothing to do with. It is largely a cultural problem.” 

Because the Federal government IS directly responsible for obesity, for paying farmers to grow corn and soy and changing our wheat so that our bodies don’t even recognize it and telling people not to eat animal fat, and then foisting the genetically modified grains, sugars, and fat back into our diets, very often hidden.

Oxymoron of the moment? The fact that since warning people that dairy fat is going to give us heart attacks people have turned to 1% or 2% milk. That’s ancient history, and the people have gotten fat without the dairy fat and had the heart attacks, too! But whatever happened to the cream? The fat? Well, we know now that it’s consolidated into some kind of weird machine-made cheese, and they’re slathering humongous portions of it over commercially made pizzas and who knows what else! But I mean where did it go all these years past? You can bet it was coming back to us in some hidden form. Better to drink your nature-ly balanced whole milk than only parts of it here and there.

Things get very crazy when the government gets involved in our food.

And that’s why it’s a very good thing that Vermont is reclaiming its ability to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” as Michael Pollan put it so simply. When everything comes to your table whole and fresh and unadulterated and you cook it and sauce it and butter it to your own taste, then you’re kicking the government right out the window.


Many people are taking the “mostly plants” part of that exhortation quite seriously, and more people are becoming vegetarian for one day a week or every day until supper – partial vegetarians – because they will not eat CAFO* meat –  supermarket meats; and grass-fed and free-range meat is expensive – for some people, too expensive and they can’t afford it at all.

O’Beirne touched on this affordability angle. She said that parents who couldn’t  stuff at least a bowl of cereal and a banana down their kids’ throats in the morning are criminally negligent.  She was saying that in defense of her position that schools should not be feeding kids breakfast. Is it criminally negligent to be poor, to be sleeping in a car, to not have a bowl, to live in a food wasteland, to not be able to afford a fast-disappearing species of banana? I think it’s tragic, but criminally negligent?

People are very, very upset about her elitist words.


As for Vermonters, if we become the breadbasket for the northeast – Montreal, Boston and New York City – maybe with those economics of scale we will be about to afford our own good food and help feed those who can’t, too. That’s what the Executive Summary of the Farm to Plate Strategic Plan is hinting at, and we’ve got farmers and fooders who will be very happy to spend their lives making it come true. 
It’s all coming together, folks, but don’t take your shoulder from that boulder – keep it moving, however slightly, up.

*Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation

***

So, how ‘bout some fat...
I’m here to tell you that cooking for two is lots easier than cooking for four. Coring two apples is not a chore, while coring four begins to be. Making an apple pie? Priceless.  I am coring two apples to roast the halves, and serve them with this lovely pasta dish that’s made with potatoes as well as pasta, caramelized onions, and three kinds of cheese. It appeared in Esquire magazine back in the dark ages, I think maybe even 1979. It is scrumptious and once or twice every decade I bring it out and make an utter flurry of appelzangrubincheeser.  You can make half a recipe for 2 people, and you can serve it with baked apples instead of sauce, and you can use any kind of cheeses you like – last time I used Parmesan, Cabot, and Gruyere.  It’s a Swiss Alpine dish, and it calls itself rugged.

Aelplermaggrone

Use cheeses from mild to strong, such as Emmentaler, Gruyere, Sbrinz (hard).  Served with big bowls of applesauce.

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 2 large  onions, peeled and thinly sliced
• 8 ounces potatoes, peeled, quartered, sliced thickly (1 very large)
• 10 ounces tubular macaroni such as penne or elbow
• 4 ounces shredded Emmentaler
• 4 ounces shredded Gruyere
• 3 ounces grated Sbrinz (or Parmesan or Romano)
• 1 1/4 cups heavy cream
• Salt and Pepper to taste

In a large skillet melt butter and oil over low heat.  Add onion and sauté slowly, turning frequently to brown evenly.  Cook about twenty minutes or until the onions have turned a rich brown.  Set aside.
Cook potatoes in boiling water for 5 minutes, then add macaroni and cook 6 to 8 minutes, until nearly done but still firm.  Drain under cold running water and set aside.

Mix together three cheeses in a small bowl.  Heat cream in small saucepan just until barely simmering.  Whisk in 1/3 of the cheese until sauce is melted and smooth.  Set aside.

Heat oven to 375°.  Butter bottom and sides of a large, rather deep baking dish.  In large bowl toss together potato/macaroni with second third of cheese, salt and pepper.  Place in baking dish.  Pour cheese sauce evenly over the mixture, sprinkle with remaining cheese, arrange onion slices on top.

Cover dish with aluminum foil.  Bake fifteen to twenty minutes until the cheese is melted and the mixture thoroughly hot.  Serve at once with tart applesauce.  Makes four servings.

This post was published as a Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland Herald on 1/18/11.

doin’ that crazy hambone

recently decanted cherry heering

Yawn. Oh, hi. Yup, I know, welcome to 2011, a whole new bright untarnished year rolling out in front of us, ready to be marred, patterned, designed, pleated, planted, cooked, harvested and, finally, composted..

But wouldn’t it make more sense for New Year’s to be celebrated on Winter Solstice, or on Spring’s, for that matter? The beginning of lengthening light or the beginning of the planting season? A localvore would never have chosen January 1 as the New Year. It’s arbitrary. A simple matter of paper. Just because January is when the Gregorian calendar makes the months begin anew. So it is literally if not intuitively the New Year. Oh well – gave us a chance to fill the still-dark season with yet more mindless and desperate gaiety. To be gay! ‘Tis devoutly to be wisht! And, truth be told, we do feel the beginning of something after the holidays, if only the need to sort out the detritus of the last twelve months and begin organizing for the next dozen.

Bah. It's enough to drive you to drink!

In the meantime, if you are like me, you are feeling a little tender, having been dumped into these new days that are not noticeably lighter longer. We’re in need of some quiet and simple kitchen time, and there IS that hambone.  Hambone, hambone, where have  you been? I sing as I dig that juicy thing out of the fridge.

Been all around the world and back again, it says to me in a gristly voice.

Well, that was surprising! My eyes flicker from side to side: hope no one heard. From the timbre of that voice looks like it’d rather be swimming with some collard greens and beans, but I intend to turn it into split pea soup. With dumplings.

But first have a cherry. Because this afternoon I decanted the Cherry Heering* that I started steeping last July with those sour cherries from Champlain Orchards. I’d decided to take the cherries to a party tonight as a snack, and I couldn’t resist trying them. Let’s have another one while we get busy on that soup. They’re so small they can’t do much harm, can they?

Okay then. Big pan, hambone in it, cover with water, about 2 1/2 quarts, drop a bay leaf into it, cover atilt, over high heat until it begins to spatter, then turn it to a low medium and let it simmer away for an hour or so.

Once you’ve got the hambone over the heat, chop up a fairly large onion and a clove of garlic. Cut the onion in half and then slice each half thinly, sprinkle the slices with some coarse salt and chop them fine.

We’re singing now: Hambone, Hambone where did you go?/ I hopped up to Miss Lucy's door. Where. Is this coming from? In any case, add the onions to the simmering hambone and have another cherry.

Then , measure out 3 cups of split peas, rinse them a couple of times and leave them to soak in water to cover. Sing: I asked Miss Lucy would she marry me? Make her say back, Well I don't care if Papa don't care! Roll your eyes like you were young Miss Lucy. Hambone. Hambone.

When the hambone has simmered for an hour to an hour and a half, and the meat separates easily from the bone, lift it out of the broth with some tongs and put it on a plate to cool. Drain the split peas and add them to the broth. And GIT your hands out of those cherries. Keep those peas and broth simmering.

Now. Scrape or scrub a large carrot and a medium-sized potato and make very small squares out of them. We will call them a brunoise. Now do the same with a stalk of celery and be sure to include the leaves. Very small squares, like quarter inch squares.

When you’re making squares out of oblong things like potatoes and carrots, take a thin slice off of one long side to give you a level resting edge; cut in quarter inch slices, then stack the slices and cut them into quarter inch logs, then stack the logs and cut them crosswise into quarter inch squares.

Those of you who already know how to cut a brunoise? Please bear with me. Here, make yourself comfortable. Have another cherry. Oh, what’d I do with them. Mm, I put ‘em away. Here, the dangerous part’s done. Have another.

Check the peas and broth. Add water if it’s too thick. Take the meat from the hambone, chop it up and put it back into the soup.

When the peas begin to lose their shape, after about 45 minutes, and when you taste one it’s al dente or just chewy in the center, drain the brunoise and add it to the pot. And while you tasted, did it need more salt? Add it, and some ground pepper, too. Want a little curry in there? Now’s the time. I’ll add a teaspoon of 5-Spice powder. Doin’ that Crazy Hambone.

Now for the dumplings. Break an egg into a small bowl, shmear it up with a fork, and sprinkle in some flour and stir it in with the fork. Add more and stir and more and stir, until you have a thick paste as for pasta. When the dough won’t incorporate any more flour, then take this up in your hands and knead it, dipping your hands in flour to ward off the stickiness, and when you have a smooth, non-sticky ball of dough flatten it out on a board or counter until it’s about, oh, a third of an inch thick reaching towards a half.  Cut into small squares. These little pillows will probably still be clinging to each other, so take up a hambone, er, ah, a handful, and pinch them into the bubbling soup. They’ll take 15 to 20 minutes to cook and then you can serve it up.

Pass me those cherries, would you? What? They’re all gone? Well, that’s okay. I don’t give diddley...Bo Diddley, of course... Let me just pour us a little bit of this Cherry Heering now.

Hambone, Hambone, where you been? ’Round the world and goin’ again!

Here’s to a jazzy Year!

*Cherry Heering -- cover 2 quarts of pitted sour cherries (save the pits) with 1 cup of sugar and a couple quarts of rum. Or vodka. Put the pits in some cheesecloth and put them to steep with the cherries. Cover and put aside until winter. Be careful!

This post was published as a Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland Herald on 01/04/2011

Holy Yum!

This king of salads has a place on the holiday table

It’s hectic, Sunday, got to write a column, looking forward to friends this evening, going to Albany to pick up my daughter tomorrow (looking forward to driving home on Winter Solstice AND full moon), and so I’m making and writing about THE Caesar Salad.

Besides making a great supper salad, especially, perhaps, in this solstice/new years season, it makes a refreshing breakfast – if you manage to squirrel a bit away – for the morning after. In this way I can have friends over, take pix, eat well, finish up the column tomorrow – the whole thing like a jigsaw puzzle, fitting it into the little pockets of time that this season repatterns.

This isn’t the original Caesar salad but I do believe it’s Craig Claiborne’s, from when he was the  food guru at the New York Times. I’ve made it many, many times and once had it served to me in an airport hotel restaurant where the waiter made it tableside.  I mean THIS Caesar salad. I’ve had lots of others that just don’t measure up.
 
The recipe, circa 1978, which is also taped (like the corn bread) to my messy cupboard door,  reads like this:

Caesar salad
Had this since time began.
- Combine and let steep -
1 clove garlic, smashed, with 1/2 cup olive oil
- Begin to make
2 c. croutons in garlic oil
- Tear
1 or 2 heads romaine lettuce
into a bowl.
- Sprinkle with
1/4 c. grated parmesan
1/4 c. crumbled bleu or Roquefort cheese
- Combine
1/2 c. olive oil
1 T. Worcestershire sauce
3/4 t. salt (?)
3/4 t. freshly grated pepper
drizzle over greens and toss.
-Place
1 raw egg
1/4 c. lemon juice
several anchovies (to taste)
on top and toss until no egg color remains.
- Add and toss
Garlic croutons.
Serve.

This is the perfect Caesar – yes to anchovies, yes to raw egg, yes to getting your hands into it and tossing, tossing, in the prescribed stages, until every last leaf is a bit limp with its unctuous goodness.

If you hate anchovies then don’t make this salad. If it’s only the texture of anchovies – and I dislike the little feathery bones – then chop them finely, or melt them over very low heat in a small frying pan before adding them to the greens. But this salad is nothing without the umphy umami that the anchovies add.

If you (sniff) Do. Not. Eat. Raw Eggs, then don’t make this salad, because ditto – if not umami then that egg contributes something just as important. If you buy your eggs, as fresh as yesterday, from a nice local farmer who lets her chickens roam around outside and helps them perch fluffily and huffily on roosts under shelter at night, and even coos to them sometimes below their own clucks, you have little to fear except fear itself.
If you want to be more local, use local spinach for the greens.

The recipe itself is a bit problematic. The olive oil and garlic, for instance, don’t add up. I do it this way., starting an hour or two, or a day or two, before you will serve the salad.

1) Smash a clove or two of garlic and put it with ½ cup olive oil into a 1 cup measure.  Add  a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, a sprinkling of salt and several grinds of black – or white – pepper. (I believe the ¾ teaspoon of salt has a question mark after it for good reason – it might be too much. Add a sprinkling, then wait till the end and taste to see if it needs more.) Set this mixture aside.

2) Make croutons. Cut 4 to 6 slices of – I like Baba Louis white sourdough – bread into ¾ inch cubes and let them sit out for a bit, then coat the bottom of a wide-bottomed frying pan with a skim of olive oil. It should have a bit of depth. Slice a clove or two of garlic thinly and add to the warming olive oil over medium-low heat. When it begins, just barely, to brown, toss the bread cubes into the oil until they’re coated. Watch them very carefully, shaking them and tossing them often so they don’t burn. You want them to get crisp and golden and a little dried out, but not burned. When they’re done – and that might take half an hour – sprinkle with salt, toss, and set them aside.

3) Wash 2 large or 3 small heads of romaine  (or spinach), shake it damp, wrap it in a thickness of paper towels, put it into a plastic bag and into the fridge until making time.

Ready to make the salad?

4) Tear the greens into a bowl (which could be rubbed with yet another clove of garlic), sprinkle with at least ¼ cup grated Parm and bleu cheese each, and then the olive oil/Worcester mixture and toss with your hands. The reason for this is that you want each leaf to be almost... massaged with the oil and cheeses. Think sensuous.

massage, massage, in this whirl of a holiday season: Photo by Wendy Hybl Fannin

5) Break the raw egg over the greens (maybe break it into a dish first. Just in case...), sprinkle the lemon juice over, then the anchovies, and toss and toss, massage, massage, until not a speck of recognizable egg shows. Taste for salt and sprinkle with more if needed. Ditto pepper.

6) Sprinkle the croutons over the greens and toss once again.

Holy Yum!

And have a seriously sentient solstice. See you next year!

Monday morning breakfast... Mmmm

the many faces of hunger

thanks for permission from Jeff Danziger to reprint

When my mother saw Injun Joe* and his wife Mary tramping up our long driveway she’d exclaim, “Oh, Lord, here they come again,” in spite of the fact that it had been a month or so since they’d shown up the last time. It was common knowledge that the little old man and the little old woman would periodically (when the Check came in) walk from their shack in the woods about a mile from our house to the tavern in a neighboring village five miles further on, where they would get roaring drunk until the sheriff drove them home. They stopped at our house to pick something up that we saved for them. I think it was newspapers, though I have no idea what earthly good newspapers would have done them.

In return they insisted on giving us some of their government subsidy brown rice or some other brown grain. My mother never used it. It was common knowledge that it was weevily. Mom seemed to resent those visits. I didn’t know why – they really were no trouble – but I got the feeling that it was maybe just that these two poor old Indians had the nerve to think they could give us something that we needed or would deign to use. And maybe also that the sight of them brought up a vestigial fear of impoverishment and hunger.

There were many ways we were impoverished, but hunger for food was never a problem. We were farmers in an extended family of farmers – our entire lives revolved around food. We had fresh milk everyday and butter and eggs and a chicken in the Sunday pot, vegetables from the garden, preserves, bushels of apples and potatoes in the cellar. We had pork from the annual slaughter. We had beef. It was really GOOD food, not the kind of crap that poor people eat today when a bag of chips and a soda pop are cheaper than a bunch of carrots and much more filling.

And it’s not just poor people. A few years ago I sat in a government office talking to an official. Behind the adjoining desk was a woman* whose upper arms fell away in tanned folds of fat above her elbows. One of those elbows rested upon the desk and regularly flexed to allow her forearm and fingers to descend to a carton of little orange cheese thingies and then rise to feed her mouth, which was set amidst several cheeks, jowls, and chins. Note that she was not wolfing down porterhouse steaks with their attendant mouth-watering fats and juices nor glasses of whole milk nor rounds of fully ripened cheeses, in fact, nothing made by nature, but tiny little crisp factory-fashioned morsels made of the most refined flours and sugars and oils, so far away from anything that grows from the earth that they were unrecognizable as food at all. A beautiful woman resided inside those layers of fat, a still-healthy one, it seemed. But if she wasn’t diabetic yet, she surely would be soon, because it’s a simple case of cause and effect: sugar and refined grains cause obesity and diabetes and other deathly diseases as well. And there goes that hand again, into the carton and there it goes fingering the evil little devils into the mouth.

Putting a face on hunger is not the easiest thing. In our world hunger crosses money boundaries, and in our world the hungry are most likely not skin and bones with bloated bellies – they are, not to put too fine a point on it – the fat people, and they may or may not know that they are hungry; and they may or may not be monetarily poor.

I asked friends and acquaintances if they’d ever been hungry, and their thoughts on hunger. After I recounted my Injun Joe story to my friend Susan, she recalled her elderly mother a few years ago asking her to pick up a “tramp-lock” at the hardware store. Susan said, “I don’t know what a tramp-lock is, Mom.” Why, it was a chain lock to go inside the kitchen door so that the door could be opened thus far and no farther, so that a dish of food could be passed out with no danger of the recipient being allowed in. It made me think of tramps and hobos and stews, but I had never heard the term before. So of course I Googled it and found only one reference to the term. It was used in the book, “Afloat and Ashore on the Mediterranean, by Lee Meriwether (1904). A tramp-lock was used for guards to open prisoners’ doors enough, ostensibly, to hear the priest down the corridor saying mass.

Another person told me, “Tramp lock reminds me of monasteries and churches where they still have special windows where foundlings (babies) can be left.” She went on to say, “Handing out food, feeding the poor (the sharing of bread & wine) has a long history in Christianity, and shame is still associated with that type of charity.” She found it interesting that in those terms the giver and receiver did not have to see each other.” Yes, shame is a big part of this, isn’t it? No matter how undeserved by either party.

“Like, REALLY hungry?” asked one friend. “Like, shoplifting a package of cheese to get through the day and not knowing about tomorrow? Like, panhandling enough for a box of crackers or swallowing pride to ask neighbors for something, anything? Even, gag, dumpster diving?” He paused. “Actually, yes, but not for many, many years, and never for more than a few days. But I do remember and I am always mindful of how much I have and how long it would last. Right now, in the house and garden, I could probably stretch it for about three weeks, if I had to.”

That sounded like “food insecurity” to me, and I asked what could be done about it. He said, “We need a community infrastructure to wean ourselves from the big business of food – food prepared for us, food conveniently packaged, food that has traveled too many miles, fast food, junk food, food marketed by brand instead of nutritional value.”

We kind of have that here with the Farmers’ Market and the Co-op, but what about the people who can’t afford that kind of food. Let them eat cheap meat and vegetables from the grocery store that have been adulterated by the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, antibiotics and hormones? Or a bag of chips and a can of soda? You know that that’s going to come back and bite us when we have this enormous diseased wave of people that society has to care for one way or another.

When I asked the question of Carol Tashie of Radical Roots Farm, she said, “Personally, I have never been hungry. Amazingly fortunate – especially when you think of the entire human community. What percentage of people on this planet could say that? What percentage in this country? In this state?”

When I talked to Carol’s partner, Dennis Duhaime, last Saturday at their stand at the Farmers’ Market, he told me they took a load of butternut squash down to the city for Thanksgiving, and gave it to a person who operates – entirely on his own – a little storefront soup-kitchen in Queens, and that he made squash soup from those Vermont butternuts to feed the hungry. I love this – a couple of people making a difference with no diminution from bureaucracy.

In that same spirit, RAFFL operates a Grow-A-Row program for which farmers and gardeners contribute some of their product to the Community Cupboard and BROC; and the farmers regularly contribute leftover produce after the market is over. Still, the Mission and the Community Cupboard and BROC need each and every one of us to contribute food and/or labor to help them feed the hungry.


Another friend wrote: “There is hunger in every community. My wife and I work at the Sunday Breakfast Mission in our town and serve between 150 to 200 meals Sunday evenings to homeless men, women, and CHILDREN! We don't see them during the day, or do we just choose not to see them? Some of both I believe. I encourage you no matter where you live give some of your valuable time to help feed another human being!”

In a Newsweek article, “Divided We Eat”, Lisa Miller has a conversation with a Brooklyn localvore and writes, “Over coffee, I cautiously raise a subject that has concerned me of late: less than five miles away, some children don’t have enough to eat; others exist almost exclusively on junk food. Alexandra concedes that her approach is probably out of reach for those people. Though they are not wealthy by Park Slope standards—Alexandra works part time and Dave is employed by the city—the Fergusons spend approximately 20 percent of their income, or $1,000 a month, on food. The average American spends 13 percent, including restaurants and takeout.” The woman answers, “This (buying local) is our charity. This is my giving to the world... We contribute a lot.”

You know, in this era of declining middle class and the rise of the ultra-rich and corporations with the rights of individuals, we are likely to be seeing more and more hungry people – there is greed abound in this land – and that hunger may be the result of impoverishment and/or ignorance, or simply the brainwashing power of mega-corporations and even the medical establishment. “We have rich farmers feeding lousy food to poor people,” writes Michael Pollan, “and poor farmers producing great food for rich people.” But here in Vermont we have great farmers needing our patronage – those of us who can afford it – so that they, and we, can continue to take care of our hungry, whatever face they wear.

So yes, once again, Support Your Local Farmer, but in addition call one of the following and ask them what you can do to help:

• Community Cupboard: 802-747-6119
• RAFFL: 802-417-7331
• BROC: 802-775-0878
• Open Door Mission: 802-775-5661

And when you hear the phrase ‘common knowledge’ dig a little deeper. You might be surprised at what you find.

simple foods like apples and squash are cheap and easy to prepare,
but some people don't know how to prepare them. Heck, some people don't even have a kitchen.

*I've taken the liberty to use what might seem to be stereotypes of the 'drunken Indian' and the fat lady eating crap, but please know that the first is simply an observation of the prevailing attitudes in the 1950s and the latter is my own observation as truthfully if not tactfully as I can describe it.

This post was published under the title "a common knowledge of hunger" in my Twice Bitten column in the Rutland Herald on 12/07/10.