september clear

A week ago I was leaning over the counter eating a luscious little Chanterais melon from Dutchess Farm and finishing up Jacob de Zoet’s thousandth autumn. I’d sprinkled the orange flesh with sea salt and freshly ground pepper. It tasted so sweet and so refreshing and had such a clean, honeyed scent, as well, that I couldn’t help imagining this elegant globe lying in a field on the end of a vine for so long – all this long hot, dry summer, really –  in Steve’s Castleton field– growing larger – but not very large, some as big as softballs, some hardball size, and some slightly larger than a golf ball – and rounder, the delicious seed pod expanding from that tiny yellow blossom, under the sun and the rain, to end up here in MY kitchen, satisfying MY hunger, while this extraordinary September light pours through my clean windows.

We’ve been busy practically all summer working on the windows of this old house, painting, mending, taking down storm windows and putting them up, and, all the while, washing them. We washed them several times until they gleamed, but next day early morning and evening sun illuminated smudges that were awe-inspiring. I tried Windex. I tried my own DIY of one part water to one part ammonia to one part rubbing alcohol. Smudge City. I tried microweave cloths, paper towels, newspaper. “Take the storms off once more,” I directed my helper. Belatedly, I googled the experts. A drop of dish detergent in hot water and a squeegee, they said.

That worked. Just in time for this September sun to angle down in the way I’ve gloried in for *gasp* forty years now, to warm all the well-worn wood in the most delightful way.

We take the mysteries of the growing season so much more for granted than we do the mysteries of fall. We eat directly off the vine, with very little preparation, because everything is so glorious it’s best just fresh. Plants are a great leveler, feeding rich and poor alike, in great houses and humble – in both you find people gnawing corn off the cob.

The mystery of this particular crux of seasons, is that while this lights slants more and more from the south, some of us are still picking basil off the bush, tomatoes off the vine, and cutting okra from its stem, too, while mountainsides are incredibly slow to turn crimson and gold, and unusually dun-colored leaves spiral off the trees over the deck and you have to pluck them out of the tarragon before you pick it. Our frost comes later and later. So, apparently, does the color.

What we’ve been eating most of all this highly prolific summer is vegetables – and one of my favorite ways of preparing them is to fry them. Eggplant, green tomatoes, just-ripe tomatoes, zucchini, okra. I slice them (except I leave the okra whole), dip them into a tempura batter and fry them in lard that Pine Woods Farm in West Pawlet has rendered from their own pigs, or in some butter and olive oil. I’m not tired of them yet. I gave a recipe for that tempura batter a few weeks ago. It’s mostly a scoop of flour, salt, coupla tablespoons olive oil, water enough to make a thinnish batter, let it sit, then add a whipped egg white before using.

But now, with September light, a different mode makes itself known. Last Saturday, before I went to the Rutland Farmers’ Market as usual, I threw a couple of still-frozen lamb shanks into the slow cooker – my kitchen could use some warming up but if it had been warmer I would have plugged the cooker in on the porch, which I did a few times this summer. I was very happy to find lamb at the Dorset Farmers’ Market two weeks ago – I do not believe Rutland’s has anyone selling lamb anymore. The question begs to be asked: Why Not?

Along with the shanks went some chopped tomatoes, red wine, garlic, shallot, celery, and whatever herbs I found quickly in the garden – a bay leaf, oregano. A Hungarian hot pepper. Slices of fennel. An anchovy or two (read Karen Ranz’s latest Rutland Bites article, Amping Up Flavors for Cool Weather Cooking. It’s excellent). Two shanks, maybe a teaspoon of salt. I set it on low and left for pretty much the whole day. When I came back at three the shanks were tender and melted into a glutinous sauce. I turned the switch to warm and later on boiled some potatoes and carrots and served the shank stew over them with some good Kate’s Butter from Maine. I added some of the veg cooking water to the stew. It was awe-fully good! That first dish of the proverbial “long simmered stew’ season.

I used what I had. You don’t need a recipe – you need lamb shanks and flavors and some wine and tomatoes for making the stew, and then some vegetables or pasta to serve it over.

Enjoy your veggies and this extraordinary September light; and go wash those windows. It’s worth it!

bitter beer and sweet dried figs

Enigmatic and evocative words sprang out at me when I opened my book first thing this morning. Sometimes books are sources of unexpected food inspiration, as this was, from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell. “Eelattu brings two beakers of bitter beer and sweet dried figs.” Nothing more is said. Mitchell does not ordinarily talk about food, but the bitter/sweet picture this brings to mind is irresistible.

And it brought to mind some food scenarios that have occurred to me over this last fortnight.

First of all, Mother Nature’s on the move again – the other day my scalp jetted sweat while I gazed at the Malabar Spinach at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens, and today (it is Sunday) I’m thinking about building a fire in the fireplace. Brrr, dank and dark.

Do you all know about Malabar Spinach? I thought I did, but I didn’t. What amazing surprising stuff! The plant I was melting around had thick, almost succulent leaves, on a red-stemmed vine with tendrils of beautiful little waxy pink and white flowers. It was spinach! Yet with a hint, said our guide, of the texture of okra to it. Actually it is not spinach. It tastes like it, apparently, and relishes hot weather so will last all summer. I wish I’d plucked a leaf of it to taste –  after all, it’s probably freezing to death by now!

Next day I was on my way back from Bennington when I decided to stop at Al Ducci’s in Manchester. Al Ducci’s is no longer Al and Nancy Sheps’ love child. It’s been sold, but I know nothing about the transaction except that it’s bustling and Nancy is now happily vending gelato from a cart, and the clerk told me I could probably find her at the Farmers’ Market. Oh. Reminded, I would certainly check out a different farmers’ market. I did find her there. I also found another wondrous plant – tiny, tender, beautiful little pink and white ginger corms with their angular bamboo-like tops still attached. They were nothing like the round little leaves of the native ginger that grows in my shade. It is a spectacular plant that everyone at the market was talking about, and that peeked out of most people’s bags.

I bought summa dat, of course, as well as a loaf of the amusingly named Stevie WONDER Bread from Earth Sky Time Community Farm. It is, somewhat ironically, white, shaped like an old-fashioned loaf of bread, with shoulders, but much heavier than the original WONDER bread (made by Monsanto, wasn't it?) – and great for grilled cheeses. (Right now I’m eating this amazing sandwich of Stevie Wonder Bread, sliced Wallingford Locker ham, with Hellman’s and very thinly sliced baby ginger.) A mandolin comes in very handy with baby ginger. Careful now!

This Sunday morning, cogitating on the subject for my column this week, the exoticism and simplicity of those words from David Mitchell reminded me of those cunning little ginger corms and I regretted that I hadn’t noticed the name of the farm that grew them. A little investigation remedied that, however, and I realized that Karen or Steven Trubitt of True Love Farm would be at the Dorset Farmers’ Market this very day. And so I drove down and pestered Steven, who was very busy selling those ginger clusters, and he gave me Karen’s number to call, saying that she was anyway nicer than he was and would answer all my questions. Customers, though, broke in to tell me that although Karen was very nice she was not nicer than Steven (although they may have been taken in by his exuberant hair and smile).

I did call Karen and she did tell me that they grow fava beans and broccoli raab, two of my favorite foods, in the spring, and that they have had some success in teaching people to eat them. I told her that I frequently urge my readers to, for heaven’s sake, buy the odd thing when they see it on the farmers’ stand and try it – farmers are not going to grow what they cannot sell!

And we did agree with Steven that two of the best things to do with baby ginger is to pickle it and candy it, both of which processes work better with fiberless, tender young ginger. You can also, of course, freeze it, since it will not last a long time fresh. We put our heads together to figure out how to pickle it, and I now have about 3 ounces of it, thinly sliced, salted and slightly fermenting in a bowl in the kitchen. Later I will add a syrup of ¼ cup of rice vinegar to ¼ cup of water and 1 tablespoon of sugar. I am not sure how long this might last in the fridge, but I imagine it could, too, be frozen if it is not lapped up like ambrosia fast enough.

There were other – wonderful – discoveries at Dorset. Besides finding what I think of as Rutland’s own Young La and Yoder’s and Ruane Farm there, I rediscovered Woodcock Farm’s cheeses, including a favorite chevre-type sheep’s milk called Summer Snow, and a rich nutty yellow Blue cheese. Oh. My. Goodness.

I urged all of these purveyors to come to the Rutland Market, and Woodcock’s new PR and sales person, Jordan, is particularly attracted by the winter market and the Vermont Farmers’ Food Center and the role it is playing in this whole area’s food industry! Woodcock Farm was one of the first Winter Market vendors back when the market started up in the back of the Co-op.

One more vendor caught my eye and followed up by tantalizing my taste buds. Sandra Kraehling’s Pan Latin Foods are scrumptious. I tried a corn cake topped with lightly grilled vegetables, sour cream, and then, for good measure, a zigzag of creamy ancho dressing. It was called Alepa de Choclo, and it was excellent. I found that it’s usually called Arepas de choclo, with  choclo meaning yellow corn. I believe they’re usually made of a batter that includes corn kernels, yellow cornmeal, and a fresh cheese, that is then cooked on a griddle.

I had hoped to have a recipe for you but must’ve gotten my signals mixed. There are quite a few online, but since I haven’t tried them I can’t recommend any particular one.  If you know of one, please let me know.

In the meantime, the very serendipitous event has occurred, that fennel and melon season have concurred, and I’ve been able to make the salad I talked about in the last column. The only difference I’ve made is the shaving of thin rounds of baby ginger in with the rest. 

As we enjoy the disparate and yet complementary tastes in this dish, the porch and patio are scattered with wild leaves that evoke such e words as enigmatic, and perhaps even elegant, and certainly elegiac, and Mother Nature tiptoes subtly into autumn.

email snimtz@gmail.com

fritterin'

Okay, this is what I think, before even a glimpse into Larousse Gastronomique – “fritters” imply frying. Fritters do not result or benefit from a lot of rules.  Got a dab of this veg or that fruit – or a boodle of it either – then add an egg or two and some flour and a bit of salt and maybe some chopped aromatics and fry it up in spoonfuls and you’ve got a fritter. The amount of flour depends upon the amount of veg or fruit versus how many mouths you have to feed. I’d bet in olden times you’d be hard-pressed to find a corn kernel or strip of zucchini in a hard-times fritter.

I didn’t grow up with fritters. They weren’t a staple in my family’s food arsenal. Dumplings, yes; fritters, no. Obviously we put more stock in boiling than in frying. But not always. Anyway.

As a matter of fact the first fritters I remember eating – and they were mysterious to me – were the corn fritters made by Leo’s mother, Ida Mae. And those weren’t round puffy well-coated fritters at all (like the apple fritters you guiltily reach for in the baking section at Price Chopper), they were flat like pancakes but lacier, with sweetcorn kernels in them. I don’t remember if she served them sweet or savory, but I’ve adapted her instructions, “oh, nothing, easy, simple, little egg, little flour, corn...”, and learned to make them savory – with chopped garlic and a bit of hot pepper and onion in with the corn, but then to top them when they’re just out of the buttery pan with a few drops of maple syrup and a sprinkle of sea salt. I’m making those tonight.

We’ve been enjoying zucchinis up the yingyang because they’ve been plentiful in my garden this year and I l-o-o-o-o-ve the flavor, the freshness, the wateriness, and it will be a cold dark day in heck before I buy one in February from the culinary department store, from California, or Egypt, or wherever. So enjoy them I have, while I may, with no apologies, especially to Leo, who’s been on the verge of being a baby about them, sniffling a bit, squinching his eyes and fists, about to give voice to dissent; dissuaded perhaps because of my attitude, which is – Just do it! Eat the wonderful soba noodles and zucchini strips with ricotta and olive oil and lots of pepper, and a little parm that awaited him after an Audubon meeting the other night. And perhaps he was dissuaded from any hissy-fits the next night when I made zucchini fritters in the form of fat little pancakes sprinkled with chopped parsley, Hungarian peppers and Egyptian onions and lots and lots of freshly and coarsely ground black pepper. And topped with that great ricotta from Maplebrook Farms – a pint of that good stuff goes a very long way.

I took a platter of those to our beach gathering to mix and mingle with all the other great food and they were polished off quickly, further quenching any even faint zucchini roars from Leo the Lion.

Unfortunately, a quick circuit of my zucchini vines finds very few pending ones coming along, so that season seems to have just about spent itself. For this year.

A season that has not quite renewed itself is that of fennel – apparently it is available as an early summer crop and again as a late one. I’m embarrassed to say that I’d kept a bulb of it in the fridge for far too long and when I pulled it out the other day and, after skinning it of some of the outer layers that had aged rather unfortunately, sliced it thinly, I combined it with tiny cubes of muskmelon and chopped garlic and teensy squares of Hungarian pepper and thin slices of Egyptian Onion, all of which I dressed with a bit of white balsamic vinegar and olive oil and, again, lots of coarsely and freshly ground pepper, and some sea salt, only to discover that this unlikely mating – muskmelon and fennel – was an absolute holy alliance! I only hope that the end of melon season overlaps the beginning of fennel so that I can experience it once again. Without recourse to the Egyptian department store; which, of course, I would never do.

Keep this in mind, Dear Reader, because it is one of the few instances that I’m giving you notice of something that’s about to come IN to season rather than just going out.

Corn, however, will be here for the duration and so I offer you:

Ida Mae’s Corn Fritters

I say these are Ida Mae’s, but when I asked Leo if his mother’s corn fritters were savory or sweet, he said “corn’s sweet, maple’s sweet, how could they not be sweet.” I think hers were an egg, a little bit of flour, the corn and possibly some salt. But this sweet/savory is the way I have adapted, and we both like them this way.

·         2 eggs, whisked until frothy

·         2 tablespoons flour

·         2 cups cooked corn kernels

·         1 tablespoon chopped onion

·         1 tablespoon chopped cilantro or cilantro berries

·         1 teaspoon chopped garlic

·         1 teaspoon chopped mildly hot pepper – Jalapeno or Hungarian

·         Salt and pepper

·         Olive oil and butter for frying

·         maple syrup for topping

Combine the first 7 ingredients – egg, flour, corn, onion, cilantro, garlic, and pepper – the batter should not be thick and pasty, but light and slightly runny. Then add salt to taste – start with half a teaspoon.

Drop by soupspoons full into a hot mixture of olive oil and butter and fry over medium high heat until golden, flip and do it again. Eat hot with just a few drops of maple syrup.

***

Fritters are simply a way of incorporating food onto the table or into our gullets; mixing vegetables, fruit or fish, fowl, or ... mushrooms into a paste of some sort, whether it be tempura, choux, waffle. Larousse Gastronomique translates fritter into ‘beignet’. Yes, that’s New Orleans for donut, of course. It really is just spreading real food out thin with flour and egg. It’s what we do.

Go for it! 

I leave you with a photo of the fennel and melon salad

warning

Okay, friends and neighbors, readers and scoffers, I am just going to start posting columns from back when I stopped posting them, which I think was in August, and if you are notified by email or something more esoteric, and you don't want to be bothered with a whole boatload of notices and columns, well, just ignore them.

At your own peril, of course. You might miss something.

I have been having more and more fun with them, so I do hope you keep reading.

All my best,

Sharon

PS: No, I have not, in the end, done any real work on the blog... I'll keep tweaking. I think it's a little easier to read. Suggestions and feedback are welcome.

clafouti patootie

Last Saturday I came home from Market with a fresh chicken and corn on the cob, respectively from Plew Farm and Charlie Brown. I take turns getting corn from Grabowskis, Charlie, and Woods. They’re all good, only difference being Woods’ is organic. Problem is, Leo likes his corn small and tender and sweet (you may precede each of those adjectives with ‘very’ if you like). I like mine assertively corny, with large, firm kernels, probably because I grew up with what I think was young, field, dent corn, at least at the beginning of the season. Cow Corn. Then we would switch over to real sweet corn from Grandma’s garden. That was a treat.

So I was looking forward to firing up the big green egg come evening, and sitting out on the deck with a glass of wine, my journal, my book, and NPR to satisfy my various senses while I grilled dinner, and to that end I cut up the chicken and, salting each piece well, fitted them into a bowl. In a couple of hours I’d add water to them and put a plate on top, thereby combining dry brine with wet in order to tease out those sinewy little chicken joints that happen with happy, flavorful, free-range chickens.

I don’t put anything else in the salt or the water because I’m convinced marinade is just a waste of good ingredients unless you do a dry rub just before grilling. Most people I know are passionate about their marinades, though. They’ll describe all these wonderful ingredients they put together to soak their meats in. I’m like – What a waste! But I just nod my head because what can you say. People think they’re tenderizing and flavorizing. Who am I to object? They only look at me in a puzzled way and kind of fade away. “I thought she was a foodie,” they’re thinking. It’s enough to make a person doubt their own findings, so I was glad to see Russ Parsons of the LA Times last week spouting my opinion in an article called “The Truth About Marinades: Most are a waste of time,” (not to mention product). He does recommend salting the meat in advance, an hour or two, or brining. “Simply salting meat and letting it stand may not have the romance of more complicated marinades, but it works.”

Anyway, then I saw my phone message blinking and it was my friend Wendy inviting us up for dinner that night! My first impulse was to make a counter invitation – invite them down, because I had this chicken, you know, and fresh corn... “But hey,” Friend said, “My dining room table is unloaded, uncluttered, and we have to take advantage of that...” She’s a set designer, so that’s her mindset, and after all, I could sit on her deck with a glass of wine and good conversation with good friends, so of course... My chicken would only get tenderer in the fridge. The corn was a different matter... day old corn? Doesn’t compute! So I sliced it from the cob and froze it. We will appreciate it even more come February.

My only problem then was to come up with a dessert. It’s kind of understood in Wendy’s and my dining relationship that I’ll do that. It’s usually a pie, but I didn’t want to make a pie. So there. I’d made a peach upside down cake for Leo’s birthday a few days before, so I had a couple of peaches – 3, to be exact – left over. I had eggs, very little flour, very little sugar... what could be done with these things.

As I was going through my ‘old recipes’ file, somehow – from whence? – up popped the word ‘clafouti’. I hadn’t made one in years, the idea had dropped right out of my food memory, but I did remember it was simple. And I did want simple. And really good. Delicious, in fact, and you always want Delicious!

And there were my notes on it, Larousse Gastronomique explaining that it was from the French Limousin region and consisted of unstoned black cherries arranged in a buttered dish and covered with a fairly thick pancake batter, served lukewarm, dusted with sugar.  Clarifying that Clafir in Provencial dialect means “to fill”. It’s odd that the French dictionary calls it a pancake batter rather than a crêpes batter, which I think it more accurately resembles.

And Madeleine Kamman, comparing it to a cobbler “without baking powder”, although she also says the batter is never made according to fixed rules, and contains as much fruit as you can afford, “a good way to use bruised and partly overripe fruit”. And, might I add, fruit of any kind. Cherries, peaches, plums, berries...

The recipe I used – and wrote down so many years ago – came from the New York Times magazine, back when it actually had a smart cooking column. This is a cakier clafuti than what many people think – some think of one as simply a puff, a shell that then is filled with fruit. Anyway, this is the one I make:

Please note: Make the batter ahead of time, at least 15 minutes, but you could make it an hour or so ahead of time, too, to allow the gluten to relax.

Cherry (or Peach or Plum) Clafouti

or berry or apple or...

Preparation time: 10 minutes. Baking time, 40 to 50 minutes.

• ¼ pound (1 stick) butter, melted and cooled; Plus a tablespoon for buttering the pan;
• 3 eggs
• ¾ cup sugar (4.5 oz.)
• ¼ teaspoon or pinch of sea salt
• ¾ cup all-purpose flour (4 oz.)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder (this really is optional; I’ve made them with and without)
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 quart of Bing or Queen Anne cherries, about 1 pound, stemmed and (if you like) pitted, OR 3 or 4 peaches dropped into boiling water briefly, peeled, halved, and stoned OR a pint or so of plums, halved and stoned OR... your choice of fruit;
• Confectioners’ sugar for decoration
• lightly whipped cream*

Heat the oven to 350°

In a medium bowl, beat the eggs with the sugar and salt until the mixture is thickened and light lemon color. Add the melted butter, flour and vanilla, and beat until thoroughly blended. Set aside for at least 15 minutes.

In the meantime, evenly coat a 10 inch pie pan with the 1 tablespoon butter. Place the fruit over the bottom of the pan.

When ready to bake, pour the batter evenly over the fruit and bake for 40 minutes or until golden and puffy.

Put a couple tablespoons of confectioners’ sugar into a fine sieve and gently tap it to sprinkle it on the clafouti.

*If you’re transporting whipped cream put a sufficient amount of heavy cream into a pint canning jar, add a sufficient amount of sugar and a touch of sour cream, buttermilk, or yogurt, put the lid on and shake it until it thickens. Proportions might be ¾ cup to 1 tablespoon to 1 tablespoon. A touch of the sour stabilizes the cream so it doesn’t weep.

***

We had a marvelous dinner... Grilled corn on the cob (from Woods at the Market) smeared with a mashed cumin, garlic, and chili butter, marinated pork kabobs (grilled and charred, that marinade toasted the outside of the kabobs quite nicely), and a pestoed pasta.  And the peach clafouti ended it nicely.

I liked this so much and the batter is so simple (and tasty) that I made a savory – Chiles Relleno – clafouti with poblano and jalapeno chilis, garlic, cheddar, tomatoes and some of that corn off the cob midweek. It was delicioso. And today I’m going to make one with little golden plums that I got from Rebecca Worthing at Rebecca’s Kitchen at the Rutland Farmers’ Market. She took time out from making her marvelous French pastries to pick them from her father’s trees.

Now, I know you’re wondering::: What does clafouti have to do with patootie. Well, if nothing else, you can bet your sweet one that it rhymes!

vitality veracity

I lie about my garden all the time, if not overtly then at least covertly. I allow you to imagine my wafting lofting hillocks and berries and greens and pods just bursting with color and clarity and taste. And no weeds.

What was it last time? Oh, peas. Well, they were quite wonderful, but then it got so exasperatingly hot, and then it poured. Another thing I allow you to think, really exhort you to do, too, is that I get out there every day to see what needs to be done. You can’t garden from behind your desk. Sometimes days slip by so fast, almost as fast as weeds grow and so do zucchinis.

The other day a friend stopped by and wanted to see the garden. How embarrassing! The peas should have been pulled this long time if only to allow the Brussels sprouts and broccoli to get some sun and perhaps begin to thrive. The lettuce has been allowed to bolt, weeds are taking over the herb beds, the kale is blowsy and tough, the chard has gone wild, and tomatoes need to be tied up higher. Zucchini is in logs and its enormous leaves are shading the eggplant. Even the grass needs to be mowed.

The mere thought of all that work makes me sag. Some people need a pool boy. I need a garden girl.

Thank goodness for the farmers. I mean really. Thank God For The Farmers. Those hardy fighters that started the first farmers’ market back in the early ‘70s – that would be the nineteen 70s. It was tough going. They – the growers and their eaters – really had to fight the city to find a place to set up, and then a larger space, and then even larger. The starters were Jeff Bender, Andy Snyder and jonny-come-lately Greg Cox. Along came Steve Chamberlain of Dutchess Farm, and Ray and Chris Powers powering their Bear Mountain Bread stand.

Because of them – and others – my fridge now contains slim little French green beans, a pint of tiny patty pan squash with their blossoms, 17 pounds of Pratico tomatoes waiting to be frozen, a lovely large cauliflower, a magnificent ovoid purple eggplant.

A fresh chicken went into a strong brine yesterday as soon as I got it home from Market, and then onto the grill last night. This would not be the picture without comparative newcomers Alchemy Gardens, Grabowskys (grilled corn on the cob, too), Radical Roots, and who had those beautiful little beans? It might have been Scott Hewitt from Fields of Manna in Wallingford. Or maybe it was Singing Cedars from Benson. Plew Farm has fresh chicken all summer, they told me. Larson’s Farm is able to sell raw milk from the Market due to new licensing laws.

Plethora, Baby! Plethora!

My only problem now is how am I going to eat all this stuff. And, what with planning and cooking, where am I going to find the time to mow and weed?

Nice thing about this kind of plethora is it all needs to be very simple. Simplicity allows the wonderful fresh taste to come through.

So, I won’t lie to you, I rely on some quick sauces and cool techniques to get through this so-highly-prized time of year.

#1: The first is quick fried tempura.  Eggplant, green tomatoes, just-ripe tomatoes, zucchini, okra, those little patty-pans with their blossoms on. I slice them – not the okra or patty-pans – dip them into a tempura batter and fry them in some lard, or coconut oil, or a mixture of butter and olive oil. I don’t deep fry them, just pour in a kind of lavish amount of oil. Garnish them with little Thai (or other) basil leaves. Eat’em up.

Elizabeth David’s Tempura Batter

This is an excellent coating. I think it’s the oil in the batter that keeps the coating on the food rather than in the grease:

Take 4 ounces of flour, about a cup, and put it into a bowl. Add 3 tablespoons of olive oil and a teaspoon of salt, then gently and slowly whisk in “3/4 teacup of tepid water”, or until the mixture is about the consistency of somewhere between thick cream and half and half. Let it sit for a while to let the gluten relax, and, when you’re ready to use it, whip one egg white and fold it in. Dip your food into it and fry it up.

I’ve been using 2 egg whites lately, and I think it makes a better covering.

#2: The other day I had some friends over on the spur of the moment, or hour, and I hustled up a few tidbits quickly to nosh on. One of them was zucchini cut into sticks to be dipped into this dressing. It got accolades. It has no added salt but it is salty enough. Probably because of the Hellman’s.

Creamy Dill Dressing

Whisk together ½ cup Hellman’s or homemade mayonnaise, ½ cup sour cream, 1/3 cup dill weed, chopped fine, 1 clove garlic, chopped fine. Allow the flavors to marry, and serve it up.

#3: And this! Kind of a first-timer, the first time, I think, that my dotter Zoe arrived with a jar of homemade stuff and off-handed it to me without much ado and... it was wonderful – as dressing, as dip, as marinade, as eat it with a spoon. My little string beans, lightly steamed, buttered, are going to love this drizzle. The recipe is from her friend Caroline’s Aunt Jane. Caroline lives in North Carolina. I don’t know where Aunt Jane lives. Make it!

Aunt Jane’s Ginger Dressing

• 3 inches of ginger, grated (minimum)
• 4 (or more) garlic cloves, finely chopped
• ½ cup tamari
• ½ cup olive oil
• ¼ cup raw apple cider vinegar
• ¼ cup or more tahini
• 1/3 cup raw honey
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne
• ½ cup water

There are no directions, but I think I’d put this all into a blender and process it, in which case nothing would have to be finely chopped.

***

Yes, it’s been a long, worthwhile road from that first Farmers’ Market up to the present when it’s accepted as one of the premier events on a Saturday – outside in Depot Park in the summer and in the Vermont Farmers’ Food Center in the winter. Wednesday late afternoons present a smaller version.

Now, if the City would only recognize how important the Market is to Downtown, and put the benches back so longtime supporters like me – who are, after all, not as vital as we were in the ‘70s – could take a rest in the midst of the festivities, that would be nice. And smart. And maybe the gravel that has supplanted the grass could be dealt with in a splendid way? Get with the celebration, City Guys!

The next step in this glorious food revolution is to continue renovating the Vermont Farmers’ Food Center to make it truly a center for food for the entire area.  Greg Cox and his Board of Renown is on that like stink on a pig. Important revelations and revelry are on tap for this Sunday, the 16^th.

$20 a ticket, friends, all proceeds to go to building a shared use commercial kitchen and processing facility, and a large scale storage and aggregation infrastructure. A biomass Heating System is in the works, as is a community teaching kitchen.

Okay, and now, no lie, I need to get out there and weed!

pea epiphany

One of the glories of summer is pea vines and their end purpose, peas, and I’m talking about peas safely nestled juicy and tightly in non edible pods, real shelling peas, the only kind I’ve ever grown. Perhaps this phenomenon will be more understandable when I tell you I have never owned a microwave, either. Isn’t that just amazing? I’m a gardening and cooking Luddite.

Leo is the pea-planter. This is because the act of gardening, to Leo, means planting. Never mind the fall cleaning and putting to bed, the seed ordering, the spring weeding, the deciding where things should be located this year as differentiated from past years... no, gardening is for planting, and he starts yearning to put seeds in the ground in April. Plus, he has a somewhat elaborate system of 4 foot tall fencing cylinders that need to be staked down for the peas to grow on, and only Leo knows their secret. And so, this year, when he said he wasn’t going to plant peas because he’d had no luck with them the last couple years, I had already made the bed for them, spring weeds out, soil loosened and quiveringly receptive.

I was disappointed but had done nothing about it when Zoe came out and said, “Did you plant your peas yet?” I gave her the news and she said, “No peas! What nonsense. Do you have any pea-seeds?” I said yes I did but they were two years old, and she said, “What are we waiting for?” So she fetched a bag of compost from the pile by the fence and drizzled a good amount from a cut corner of it in 8 different hills in a row and I worked it into the soil and fetched the seeds and she planted them in eight circles and got her dad to erect his pea towers, all in the time it would have taken Leo and me to argue about whether it was worth it or not.

I swear, each and every one of those peas sprouted and grew, and for the past week that’s all I’ve been doing is picking peas and sitting in the hammock and shucking them and eating them and throwing the shucks in the lilac tangle. Good compost.

Well, that’s not all I’ve been doing but it’s been a pleasurable thing to do.

This year’s peas form just one more story. Here are two I’ve told before but are – in my opinion – worth repeating:

Once, long ago, my friend Carol spent a good long hour or so at our lawn sale sitting on my front stoop shelling peas from her own garden into a big green bowl. Plink, plink, they went, slowly covering the bottom of the bowl. She’s never going to fill that bowl, I thought. But steadily she worked, and steadily the emptied pods towered beside her; slowly the peas mounted in the bowl. That night she served them simply steamed in a lettuce leaf, a pad of sweet butter topping them, salt and pepper, in that same green bowl. The bowl was at most half full. It was a beautiful sight, the peas delicious, and my realization, that something as precious as fresh peas should never overflow, one that I’ve never forgotten.

Isobel G Nimtz drawing

That memory reminds me of M.F.K. Fisher’s paean to peas in An Alphabet for Gourmets, when she recalls a difficult feast enjoyed with family and friends over a campfire on a Swiss mountainside where she and her husband were building a house. I rummage on my bookshelves and settle down to read the passage. “...what really mattered, what piped the high unforgettable tune of perfection were the peas, which came from their hot pot onto our thick china plates in a cloud, a kind of miasma, of everything that anyone could ever want from them, even in a dream. I recalled the three basic requisites, according to Fanny Farmer and Escoffier [they must be very green, they must be freshly gathered, and they must be shelled at the very last second of the very last minute], and again I recalled Sidney Smith, who once said that his idea of Heaven (and he was a cleric!) was pate’ de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. Mine, that night and this night, too, is fresh green garden peas, picked and shelled by my friends, to the sound of a cowbell.”

And that, my dear reader, is the way peas should be shelled – by your friends.

I’ve grown lazy, or at least simplified what can be simplified while retaining the best of itself, and this year I have not shelled peas in any quantity – I have even been known to take a basket of the first ones – fresh picked – to a gathering at the beach for everyone to shell their own.

I did shell enough for two omelets, which was not very many.

Pea-ifany Omelet

Serves 1

Have everything ready before you start because this omelet goes very fast once you pour the egg into a hot pan.

• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 1 teaspoon butter
• 2 large eggs, whisked with a fork until not stringy
• 1/3 cup freshly shelled peas
• 1/3 cup freshly grated gruyere (or other) cheese
• 2 tablespoons freshly picked mint, chopped
• Sea salt and freshly ground pepper.

Heat a small skillet or omelet pan – about 9 inches – over high heat until hot, then add the olive oil and butter and heat until hot. Pour the eggs in all at once and with a spatula lift the edges all around and tilt the pan to let the liquid flow under the cooked egg just until semi-solid then sprinkle in the peas, cheese and mint, cook for a moment and then carefully fold the omelet in half with the spatula and let cook another minute. Very carefully flip the omelet onto the other side and cook a moment more, then slide onto a plate, sprinkle with the salt and pepper, garnish with a bit more mint and/or cheese and serve.

When I’m serving more than one omelet, I cook each one consecutively.

***

But here is what has become one of my favorite ways of treating those peas:  pick a big mess of them and throw them all at once – unshelled – into a very hot, dry, wok and stir fry them until they are charred and juicy, then toss them with plentiful coarse sea salt, put them into a big bowl and take them to the beach as your offering. You eat them like you eat an artichoke leaf or edamame, scraping the tender peas and juices out with your teeth and discarding the pod. Make sure the discarded pods are plainly identified as inedible, and, um, Used!

So that’s about it for peas for another year. I’m going to invite three little girls who really enjoyed eating the charred peas from the pod the other night to come over some day next weekend and help me harvest the last of them. We’ll toss them in a hot wok and perhaps have another epiphany! 

feed your head

Lewis Dodgson would have felt at home in this pile of stones and tiger lilies across from my house

One of the most astonishing questions I’ve been asked lately is, “Where do you want us to put the porta-potty?”

“I don’t want you to put a porta-potty anywhere,” I answered. And then, “What porta-potty.”

“Well,” Charlie said, rolling his eyes toward the porta-potty truck that I’d just noticed out on the street, “There are five men here, and nature calls, or at least it may. Unless you want them using YOUR bathroom...”

Since my office is between the kitchen and the bathroom, I told them where to put the porta-potty, in no uncertain terms, and they put it there, and all the following questions, from other people, have been “WHAT is going on at your house? You have a...”

“Porta-potty,” I supply.

Dirty grins.

Especially since the scaffolding is all hidden on the other side of the house now and the porta-potty stands alone. Just like the Cheese, in the Dairy-O.

Speaking of cheese... or perhaps I shouldn’t.

Perhaps I should speak of compost, instead. It’s all part of the same system. I wouldn’t need a porta-potty if these men didn’t eat, and what do they eat? They eat what comes from the earth or they eat what eats what comes from the earth, grows in the soil, and what is soil but a lot of micronutrients that come from the stars and from the compost; and that compost is composed of all the things that are supposedly used up – dead 

 leaves, grass clippings, vegetable leavings... and manure. Which, with a little microbial action come back as a fertilizer to grow things out of the soil again. Life, used up – death, but not really – then life again. At least that’s the way it always worked before Monsatan came along (it’s all very religious, isn’t it?). Which brings us back to the porta-potty. Or not.

The other day I was listening to the radio and I heard the novelist, Margaret Atwood, talking about age and she said something to the effect that ‘young people worry a lot more than we do because they don’t know their own life’s plot yet.” Yep, it could be anything. And it started me thinking.

All of my life I have known that there is really nothing, basically, when you get right down to it, more important than food. At this realm, at this layer of existence... food is supreme. It’s one thing you can do something about, practically. We need it three times a day or at least once every few days, we cannot live without it, and we have been given such bushels of nonsense and ill-truths about it by government and corporations and even doctors, because none of them knows anything about food and its relationship to the human body, that somebody has to try to keep the puzzle pieces straight, and talk about it and give it – food – the respect it deserves. The most we know is that real food comes from the soil and the better the soil the better the food. It’s important to remember what real food is, to keep the consciousness of it through the dark years. So that’s been my path. Nice to recognize it. Thank you Margaret Atwood.

Food connects everything. I heard Meighan Kelley belt out White Rabbit, that old, great, Grace Slick song, at a RAFFL benefit at Mary Ashcroft’s Standing Stones the other afternoon, and that, of course, put me in mind of Lewis Carroll and Charles Dodgson and Alice, and how logical everything really is but not in the way we think it is. Lest you think that Alice in Wonderland has nothing to do with food remember the pills, and the tea parties, and the little/big drinks. And of course there were, er, ah, those little girl picnics on the river.

Connectivity. RAFFL is all about food and farming and feeding. Meighan? I’ve known her since before she was born with that amazing power of voice. She now works for my old friends who gave us hippy-types a place to gather in Rutland back in the ‘70s, and who are now giving community a place to gather in Hinesburg. That would be Will and Kathleen Patten, the old, original Back Home Café on Center Street in Rutland, and now the Hinesburg Public House.  Grace Slick was loud and original and had nothing to do with food that I know of – none of us did back then – and the grin slid off the Cheshire Cat until only it remained. Mary Ashcroft’s husband, Harold Billings, was fascinated with the stones and collected them and stood them on a hillock behind their house and studied practical astronomy for placing them. Mary herself gave Radical Roots a start. And I sit here writing about porta-pottys and standing stones in a food column.

That’s the thing, Food is connection. Food is real. There couldn’t be anything more real than the box of new red potatoes, smaller than tennis balls, at the Rad Roots stand at Saturday’s Market. I scoffed ‘em right up, and it was only later that I decided to tenderly boil them in well salted.... well, let me just make up a recipe here and now. You deserve it for at least trying to follow my train of thought here.

a salad of new potatoes with feta

·         New red potatoes – 1 lb+, equal to or smaller than a golf ball

·         Salted water to cover

·         Olive oil – ¼ cup or more good tasting, best virgin

·         Garlic cloves – 2 or 3, chopped

·         Snow peas – two handfuls, stemmed and strung, then cut into ½ inch pieces

·         Tiger Lily pods – a dozen, sliced in 1/4 inch slants

·         Scallions or Egyptian onions – ¼ cup sliced at a slant

·         Tarragon leaves

·         Mint leaves

·         ½ cup feta cheese pinched into pieces

·         Coarse sea salt

·         Fresh ground pepper

·         Vinegar, cider or balsamic – optional

Swish off the potatoes in cold water to clean, put them into a large saucepan and cover with water. Add 2 teaspoons of salt, cover at a slant, bring to a boil, turn the heat down to medium high to keep them at a low boil.

In the meantime, pour the olive oil into a serving dish, add the garlic, peas, lily pods* and scallions. If you’re using the Egyptian onions, peel a handful of the tiny top bulbs and cut in half and add to the bowl. Then slice some of the tenderer stalks and add them to the bowl. Add the tarragon and mint. Stir this all up so the flavors permeate the oil. Actually, this would be good to do an hour before cooking the potatoes.

When the potatoes are tender to a table fork, drain them and put the pan over a very low flame until they are completely dry. Be careful not to scorch. Then add them to the bowl and toss with this delicious oil. Let them cool to room temperature and toss with the feta cheese. You may want to break some of the potatoes roughly in half with the tines of a fork.  You may want to add a few drops of cider or balsamic vinegar. Salt and pepper to taste.

If you don’t grow the perennial Egyptian “Walking” onions, please see me. Because you should.

Can you eat lily pods? Of course you can. Just remember that one will make you larger, two will make you small. And Remember what the Dormouse said/Feed your head!

***

All kidding aside, the guys who are working on our house replacing roof slates and painting the high points and trim are professional all the way, acceptable to have around, and are, porta-potty excepted, just super. I know they’ll forgive me for making them the butt of this column. No pun intended, of course. Or perhaps they’ll imitate the Red Queen and say “Off with her head!”