Old Northwest Foodie Thinks It Through

Independence Days challenge week 2

2012-02-17T12:52:00.000-08:00

I’ll post this hereuntil it gets transferred to Sharon Astyk’s blog at www.sharonastyk.com

Plant something – Sugar snap peas and earlylettuces are in. I’ve been clearing out in the garden during our nearly annualearly-February warm spell, aka the “sucker season” since it lures us intothinking it’s time to start the warm weather crops. The peas and lettuces shouldbe fine, just slower, even if we do get more snow and hard freezes. Next up ispotatoes in tubs.

Harvest something – Mixed greens—kale, chard,radicchio, and corn salad. Not much of any of them, but it added up to thegreens for one dinner.

Preserve something—Roasted red peppers; winter squashpurée.

Waste not: I’ve logged another week ofcooking with the produce that the Food Bank can’t distribute: It’s Food BankFresh 2 at nwlocalfoods.blogspot.com
My neighbors also letme glean from their winter garden; they have surplus leeks that soon will beheading to seed.
I’m going to try a hotbed this spring to jump start some tomatoes and peppers, so I’ve beenstockpiling coffee grounds from the local stand. Probably I’ll get some of myneighbor’s surplus chicken manure too. I’ll be using the instructions from myclassic 1914 guide, Garden Work for Every Day.

Want not—I finally made it to Cash andCarry to get my baking yeast by the ½ pound instead of those little glass jars.Now that I’ve begun baking bread again, this saves money and keeps a supply onhand.

Eat the food –I put applesauce from lastfall into some baked goods and made fruit salad from odds and ends that nolonger looked so enticing as snacks.

Build communityfood systems –Bought cheese, and had a nice chat, at PleasantValley Farm, which has been supplying artisan raw milk gouda and farmsteadcheeses in Whatcom County for decades, and got eggs from Twisted S Ranch,which, sadly, no longer supplies buffalo. They sold the herd and closed down inDecember after a dispute over environmental requirements. It’s ironic that itseems to have been a conflict between buffalo and salmon habitat—two onceessential native food supplies that people are trying to preserve.

Skill up (learn todo something new)—Nothingthis week, although I’m soon to see if I remember how to darn socks. My bestpair of Smartwool hiking socks have weirdly developed holes on top of bothtoes—worth a try to see if I can keep them going.

Food Bank Fresh #2

2012-02-17T12:02:00.000-08:00

This week's Food Bank rejects included some limp purple kale, several red peppers with small cuts or soft spots, pears and apples (likewise), a couple zucchini, a chayote squash, and a bulk food bag of ground cardamom, smelling like heaven. There was also a mysterious pale yellow "squash" that turned out to be a melon. (The tub at left in the picture has a couple of chards and raddicchios that are waking from their winter's nap. There were more before I used some as a bed for marinated chicken the night before.)

I don't usually buy non-organic sweet peppers, which, given the cost of organically grown ones, means that I rarely eat them unless it's a good year in my garden. (I've learned the sticker code from my fellow volunteers. Organic produce has a 9 at the start of the ID number.) Bell peppers are a regular on the Dirty Dozen list of produce that shows up in the market with the most pesticide residues. But it was just too hard to throw these beauties away, and part of this project is about learning what it's like to plan meals from what's available at the Food Bank. So I decided to roast them and remove the skins to sort of split the difference. (A good resource for pesticide residues on food is www.whatsonmyfood.org)

I roasted the peppers by putting them on the burners of my gas range, turning them as the skins began to blacken. It was an arresting sight--the bright red peppers arrayed across the shiny black stove--and as Ron pointed out, it smelled as though someone in the house was smoking weed. Once they were blackened and blistered over most of the skin, I put them in a plastic bag. The resulting steam loosens up the skin and makes them easier to peel. I stored them with just a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and boy are they good. We had pasta with the peppers, the zucchini (grilled), a little garlic, oil and salt. Grated cheese on the side, home made bread, and some Organic Girl salad greens, also from the Food Bank courtesy of Trader Joe's. Volunteer sorters always hope to get the TJ boxes because they are top quality and tidy--no rooting around through rotten apples and assorted scraps to get at the good stuff.

I made fruit salad from the melon (which provided more bulk than taste, I have to say), pears and apples, and a couple of oranges whose skins were starting to harden up in my fruit basket. We had that at breakfast for the next few days. The saggy kale went into a glass of water and has now revived and looks fresh as can be. I'm having it for lunch today. I ended up composting the chayote, and I am still deciding what uses to make of the cardamom. Clearly some curries are in my future, and cookies. I also got a full box of rolled oats that couldn't be distributed because of a small tear in the security seal, so my granddaughter and I made oatmeal raisin bars and I'll crank out another batch of granola shortly. My friend Gale shared her granola recipe with me; it's simple and quick, and I never get tired of it:

3 cups rolled oats

3/4 cup sunflower seeds

scant 1/4 cup light oil

6 tablespoons maple syrup

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup chopped nuts (I prefer walnuts)

spices to taste--I like cinnamon and ginger

raisins, cranberries or other dried fruit to taste (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Combine everything but the fruit in a large bowl.

Spread out mixture on a lined cookie sheet, bake for 15 minutes. Remove and stir to redistribute the granola and bake another 15 minutes.

Remove from oven, add dried fruit (if used) and cool before storing.

Even with the pricey maple syrup, this is way cheaper than store-bought, and so good.

I have yet to "work the line" at the Food Bank, meaning actually helping with distribution to clients. I'm eager to get to know some clients and see who gravitates to the fresh produce, since canned goods and box food are also a big part of the distribution. When I think about how well we've been eating using Food Bank produce the past few weeks, it's easy to discount the reality that I have a well-stocked kitchen, no picky eaters (aka children) at home, and the time to chop, roast and simmer. Still, I'm guessing that many clients could do more if they knew more, and we are looking for ways to share that kind of knowledge.

Food Bank Fresh

2012-02-06T18:40:00.000-08:00

I’ve started volunteering at the Food Bank, sorting andcleaning donated vegetables and fruit one morning a week.

My co-sorters are a lively crew, ranging from teenagers topeople in their 70s, and they have been teaching me the rules. Especially inwinter, when fresh produce is scarcer, there are many judgment calls aboutwhether a tomato is too soft or a carrot too wiggly to go out on the line tothe waiting clients. However, some rulesare clearly stated: If there’s a break in the skin, it can’t go out. And if yousaw the company some of those items keep in the donation boxes, you would seewhy they can’t risk anyone eating them raw. (Produce that doesn’t make thegrade for distribution to humans goes in a bin for a local hog farm, except forthe apples and carrots that are boxed up for someone’s horses.) Still, it’stough to throw away a beautiful firm potato with a one little nick, or a carrot that’s bendy but not rotting, just a bit dehydrated. At least it's tough if you make as much vegetable stock as I do. That's what bendy carrots are for. Volunteers are allowed totake some produce home, and though I feel funny about helping myself to anything that could have gone to someone in need, I figure it's ok to take the ones that would otherwise feed pigs. Today I decided to gather some of thenot-quite-good-enough items to see what I could do with them that wasboth safe and tasty.

The top photo shows my nicks-and-dents veggie haul for today, plus a log of Trader Joe's brie that couldn't go out because the outer plastic had a tear. In includes tomatoes (organic), carrots, parsnips, zucchini, potatoes, peppers, and a chayote squash. Also a pear, but on second thought I've sent that to the compost, although it's pristine except for the small cut. Hidden from view somewhere is an avocado.

I didn't want to have any of it raw or lightly cooked--better safe than sorry. So here's what I made:

Roasted peppers, tomatoes and chayote and lentil soup

I roasted the chayote and most of the tomatoes and peppers at 400, stirring occasionally, until they were very soft and starting to char. (Non food bank additions were a bit of olive oil, salt, and hot sauce.) That's at left.

Most of the rest of the produce went into lentil soup. I didn't get the lentils from the food bank, but they are available to clients, so I figured it was still a realistic meal. I used olive oil, a little red wine, Spike seasoning salt, lemon juice, and paprika. If I'd had a soup bone I wouldn't have needed as much extra flavoring, but there's hardly ever a surplus of meat for distribution.

Same basic information from the food bank website:

Who We Serve

You might be surprised to learn who asks Bellingham Food Bank for help in feeding their family. Did you know that most recipients waiting in line at the food bank also work?

15% of all families in the Bellingham city limits use the food bank at least once a year
50% of food bank recipients are children or senior citizens
60% of food bank families skip or cut the size of meals on a weekly basis

Every month Bellingham Food Bank receives more than 9,500 visits and responds by handing out approximately 220,000 pounds of food.

"Independence Days" Challenge, via Sharon Astyk at The Chatelaine's Keys

2012-02-03T09:57:00.000-08:00

Sharon Astyk, who farms, writes books and blogs, teaches homesteading skills, and raises a big family in upstate New York. is relaunching her Independence Days challenge. The idea is for people to document the steps they are taking to build independence (and community interdependence) to adapt more gracefully to changes in climate/economy/fossil fuel availability. Part of the point is that small changes can accumulate over time to create a new way of looking at the resources around us.

Participants post weekly to her blog, detailing steps they've taken in the categories below. As she has lots of followers, the result is a compilation of ideas and mostly small, feasible projects around the world. Here's my opening contribution, which I have arbitrarily expanded to the cover the last month.

Plant something -- Not yet. I will have reduced garden space this year and the bed that usually houses my earliest plantings won't be available.

Harvest something --The parsley, thyme, and rosemary made it through our last snowstorm and hard freeze (thank goodness the snow preceded the single-digit temps to provide insulation) and have been going into soups and sauces. Kale, collards, chard, spinach and corn salad all are waking up as daylight reaches that magic 10 hours threshold. Garden veggies tonight!

Preserve something--My granddaughter and I got a box of apple seconds at a local orchard and made applesauce.

Waste not: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without." With an eye to the reduced garden, I went through my seeds and took ones I won't be using to the community seed swap (see community food systems below); my nice neighbor Kate gave me used chicken bedding for my compost pile, and I continue to pick up used coffee grounds from the espresso place down the street. The compost bins are in good shape for the soil amending that will take place soon. We are lucky to live in a city where recycling is easy--between the curbside pickup for glass, plastic, papers and food/garden waste, and the drop-off center near my house for stuff like broken plastic flowerpots and plastic film, not a lot goes in the garbage.

I also recently went on metered water--it's still optional here--so that I can track what I use and be more mindful; good thing all three rainbarrels are full to the brim.

Want not-- This is about stocking up, building long-term supplies of storage foods and household essentials. Not much going on here at my house. The only supply I've added to lately is soup bowls. I bought a bunch at Goodwill to accommodate my guest list for a monthly Soup Night gathering.

Eat the food --This category includes trying new recipes that make the most of what we have on hand, rotating our stocks of stored foods rather than saving them for an even rainier day, etc. When making the vegetable stock for the aforementioned Soup Night, I was able to use most of the no-longer-in-their-first-youth parsnips, carrots, and Jerusalem artichokes that were languishing in my fridge. Soup for 27 people means a lot of stock, and it was delicious. I'm also proud to have caught a couple of stored winter squash just before they went bad. Given the space they take in my small garden, it would be a real shame not to eat them.

Build community food systems-- The Community Seed Day, aka Seed Swap, is in its fourth year in Bellingham. It's a great idea and a wonderful place to meet and greet fellow gardeners. Hundreds of people came.

On Monday I had my first volunteer day at the Food Bank, preparing vegetables for distribution. It's impressive how much food flows through one big room, and where it goes. Since no vegetables with any kind of cut on the skin can be distributed, and since some of the donations are marginal at best, a lot doesn't make it to the clients. But neither does it go in the garbage. Volunteers can take home the slightly mangled onions and nicked zucchinis that can't go out on the distribution line. A local pig farmer picks up the less savory produce, except for apples, which go to a horse farm.

Skill up (learn to do something new)--I just learned how to remove and replace a toilet and how to check for natural gas leaks with soap spray.

For more information on the Independence Days challenge:

http://sharonastyk.com/2012/02/01/independence-days-challenge-is-back/

For more on Sharon Astyk and her books:

http://www.newsociety.com/Contributors/A/Astyk

For the Community Seed Day, in case you want to start one of your own:

http://www.sustainablebellingham.org/event/4th-annual-community-seed-day/

Rotten Times

2012-01-28T22:21:00.000-08:00

Remember Col. Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now—“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”? Well me I love the smell of compost in the morning. It’s a sweet, ephemeral fragrance, similar to a chanterelle or a Woods blewitt mushroom and it reliably makes me happy.

Recently I’ve been doing some reading to learn more about one of my favorite processes and to refine my techniques. City compost has some extra challenges. It can’t waste space and it can’t stink, so you have to pay attention to detail. I use three bins, one as a sort of preprocessor, for woody and weedy stuff that I don’t want to put directly on the pile, and two as the working composters. Within that restricted system, I’m trying for maximum completeness, so that I don’t have weed seeds surviving to sprout in my soil and so that all possible nutrients are available to my plants, and maximum speed, so, that I can produce as much as possible as fast as possible in a limited space.

Compost making has three main variables: content, temperature, and aeration. Those are the boundaries within which a host of bacteria and invertebrates turn a bit of this and a lot of that into the fragrant, crumbly material that improves soil structure, provides the big three of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, boosts plants’ immune systems, and supplies important micronutrients such as manganese, copper, iron and zinc. Besides all that, it gives a free and honorable resting place for your kitchen scraps, fallen leaves, dead houseplants, and shredded financial papers.

No more compost--Claudius is rank enough already

Composting is a natural process—leaves fall off the trees, browsing deer add their droppings, rain falls, mice tunnel through the resulting moist layers of carbonaceous and nitrogen-rich stuff—and next spring you’ve got another layer of humus to keep the cycle going. Humans have been concentrating that system for agricultural use for thousands of years and writing about it for nearly that long. Shakespeare has Hamlet tell his mother to stay away from the wicked Claudius by saying not to “spread the compost on the weeds/to make them ranker.” Gertrude didn’t do so well at taking that metaphorical advice; I have troubles with it myself in the literal domain. I sometimes wonder if I am composting for the sake of the buttercups more than for the squash.

H.H. Thomas, in the lovely little British guide from 1913, Garden Work for Every Day, does not specifically address compost making, but he does talk about the hotbeds, which use the same principle:

“Leaves alone will make quite a good hotbed, they are more lasting in heat than stable litter, but are not so violent. Undoubtedly the best thing is a mixture of the two. When making a hotbed see that it is trodden very firmly, or the heat will be very violent at first, but will quickly be spent. Instead of forming a large heap and then treading it, let the litter be put on in layers and trodden frequently and well. … Do not use the bed until the violence of the heat has subsided.”

Thomas worked for years in the Baron de Rothschild’s French gardens and of the Royal Gardens of Windsor before turning to writing and editing, so he should know. And his warnings about the violence of the heat are well taken. I recently learned, courtesy of University of Illinois Extension’s excellent series of articles, that three main sets of bacteria are responsible for composting decomposition, each operating in a different temperature range. They are the bridge between the basic compost ingredients—carbon and nitrogen—and the humus that results from their work. As they oxidize this organic material, creating the bacterial equivalent of heavy breathing, the pile heats up. Psychrophilic (psychro is from the Greek word for “chilly”) bacteria start the process. When their work gets the pile up to around 70 degrees F, mesophilic bacteria take over and pump things up to around 100 degrees.

When I headed out this morning, frost was on the grass but a little stir made the compost bin steam—Mesophilia in action. This is also the temperature preferred by Actinomycetes, which it turns out are the ones I have to thank for that smell I like so much. They are “a higher form bacteria similar to fungi and molds,” says Illinois Extension, so the fragrance similarity isn’t surprising. They also get credit for working through my shredded paper and woody Jerusalem artichoke stalks because they can handle the cellulose that is beyond the scope of most of their less-complex relatives.

As the pile gets hotter, the mesophiliacs migrate toward the cooler outer edges where the temperature is more to their liking; in summer this strategy works well since the ambient temperature is likely to be enough to keep them happy, In winter it’s not so successful, one of the reasons winter piles decompose more slowly and less completely. Without major messy effort, I can’t completely mix in the material from the outer edges of my enclosed bins, so the outer reaches tend to lag well behind the inner core.

In the hotter inner regions, thermophilic bacteria pick up the tempo, heating up to as much as 160 F. These are the “live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse” members of the composting world. They break materials down rapidly and thoroughly, they kill off weed seeds and pathogens, and they generally burn out after a few days, after which the temperatures drop again and the mesophilic bacteria return to the field.

The thermophilic bacteria are the reason that big municipal composting facilities—with much greater mass and with mechanical systems for moisturizing and aerating, can handle lots of the animal products, pizza boxes, and woody plants that can overwhelm home systems. But having said that, I’ll happily admit that I ignore the warnings against composting cheese, milk, fats, meat scraps, etc., in home systems. They are all organic materials and they rot just fine. The problems they can cause are twofold: smell and varmints. Rotting meat smells a lot worse to us and a lot better to rats, raccoons, and skunks than rotting lettuce does. A determined rat will chew right through a heavy-duty plastic compost bin, and raccoons are skilled lid removers (I once saw one unscrew a gallon glass container). So you do need to be careful. My cats and big silly dog seem to be enough keep away the local rodent population; probably they are so well fed in my neighborhood that they don’t need to take extra risks. But the smell can be an issue. One summer I got carried away with salmon scraps in the compost bin, and the stench was appalling for a few days. But generally there are no repercussions as long as you bury the scraps deep, provide nitrogen for quick bacterial action, and keep the bin mixture aerated.

A far more common source of bad smells in compost is lack of oxygen. If oxygen levels fall below 5 percent, the aerobic bacteria die off and the anaerobic ones move in. This is bad for several reasons. Anaerobic decomposition is much, much slower (and slimier); the nitrogen it produces is often in forms plants can’t use; and it stinks: guess what compounds named cadaverine, and putrescine smell like? You can buy a flashy compost twirler for aeration, but I get by fine by poking in air holes with a piece of rebar.

Another issue for city people tends to be a reliable nitrogen source. You want a ratio of about 30-1 carbon to nitrogen in your starting pile; decomposition will use up carbon and produce nitrogen, resulting, if all goes well, in the ideal 8-1 ratio of the finished product. The carbon is easy—leaves, shredded paper, hay and straw, dry stalks of this and that are all good sources. But avid gardeners can get pretty emotional about their nitrogen. I remember my mother-in-law, who was definitely not a country girl, practically caressing the buckets of aged cow manure we used to bring from the farm to her splendid Seattle camellias and rhododendrons. “This stuff is gold,” she would say.

In my long composting career I’ve used all sorts of things. Horse manure, our standby during my childhood, has a number of problems. Horses are inefficient digesters, one of the things that makes feeding them so expensive, so their manure tends to be rife with sproutable weed seeds. And since they eat lots of hay, the chances of getting a batch that has been contaminated with broadleaf herbicides is greater than with many other animal manures. On the other hand, the smell isn’t offensive, at least not to me, and that’s a plus in urban neighborhoods. Cow manure is sloppy and a bit stinkier, but it’s good stuff, especially if the animals have been bedded in straw. For a really good manure source and a really terrible smell, there’s fermented turkey droppings. When I lived in Glen Ellen, California, we used to get it by the truckload from a nearby farm. That stuff created a horrific, miasmic reek that filled the air and clung to clothes and skin. Luckily I was living on up on a ridgetop, hundreds yards from the nearest neighbor. The tomatoes we grew with it were the best I’ve ever had.

Chicken manure is a local favorite in my poultry-obsessed neighborhood. Fresh chicken manure is very high in nitrogen, too hot to handle for direct application to plants, but able to get right to work on the straw or wood chips that often comprise the bedding. It can smell pretty bad on its own, but it’s not so offensive when mixed. The chicken/wood chip mixture I’m using now from my nice neighbor Kate across the alley is working much better than the horse/straw combo I tried last year. That stuff just sat around month after month; I know it was slowly, slowly breaking down, but I don’t have the space for the patience required. Another less than successful experience was llama dung (some aficionados call them llama berries, but I’m not going there). Llamas are browsers, more like goats and camels than like cows, and their manure is correspondingly more concentrated and less seedy than that of cows and horses. It barely smells at all. My problem was getting it moist enough to make a home for the bacteria. I’m guessing that their evolution up on the arid altiplano makes them efficient retainers of all available water. The clumps sat for months unaffected by the moisture in the rest of the pile. I had to soak them in buckets of water, and that’s just too much work. Eventually I loaded up the remainder of my pile of dung plus straw and used it to mulch my raspberries for the winter. I’m figuring a bunch of rain and some freezes and thaws will eventually make it give up its integrity and head back into the carbon cycle.

Coffee grounds are the new compost savior around here, where there’s almost literally an espresso stand on every corner. The Buzz Inn stand in my neighborhood puts out its daily blend of espresso disks, coffee grounds and filters, lettuce, eggshells, and the odd orange peel and tomato slice in kitchen garbage bags. It is a first-rate composting material—good nitrogen ratio/decent amounts of phosphorus and potassium/good water retention—it’s got it all. You can also put it right on the garden as mulch, but then your yard smells like stale coffee. So I put most of it in the bins. I do, however, mix it with the fallen leaves I leave for mulch around the ornamentals and with the sawdust I used to acidify the blueberries. On its own, sawdust will pull nitrogen that’s already in the soil to aid its own decomposition, and that’s counterproductive. I’m hoping that it can grab the nitrogen from the coffee grounds instead.

I’ll admit that I’m sometimes feel just a little embarrassed about the intensity—not to say violence—of my connection with my compost piles, so I was delighted to find the following quote from Bette Midler, aka The Compost Queen.

My whole life has been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God's presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that lets you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first compost heap.

Soup Night #1

2012-01-27T16:56:00.000-08:00

Soup Night--lots of chopping, but the rest was easy

On Monday night I had my first Soup Night at my house: 26 people, 16 cups of cauliflower and three heads of garlic for roasting, 4 cups chopped leeks, 4 potatoes, a couple big celeriac, homemade vegetable stock. Add a few herbs and spices and some olive oil and you've got a delicious vegan soup. Folks ate every bit, with bread and wine and a couple of fine desserts brought by friends, and spent the rest of the time talking talking talking. It was fun. Here's the recipe, from Winter Harvest:

Roasted Cauliflower Hidden Garlic Soup

This warming, subtle soup, adapted from The Voluptuous Vegan, uses an entire head of garlic, but I know from many taste tests that no one will guess. The trick is the roasting. Depending on the stock and condiments, it can be meat-based, vegetarian, or vegan.

1 head garlic

4 tablespoons olive oil

4 cups cauliflower, in florets

1 cup chopped leeks, white part

1 medium potato, peeled and cubed

2 cups chopped celeriac

6 cups water or stock

bouquet garni

1 teaspoon hot paprika

2 teaspoons lemon juice

Preheat oven to 400 F.

Slice off the top of the garlic head and pull and rub off as much of the skin as comes off easily. Put the head on a square of foil, big enough to cover, pour on about a tablespoon of olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Wrap the garlic up in the foil and bake until soft, at least 30 minutes.

Put the cauliflower on parchment paper or silicon sheet on a cookie tray. Pour a little olive oil on your hands and rub them onto the florets. Sprinkle with salt and spread onto one layer. Roast, checking often, until tender. It’s ok if they color up,

Warm 2 tablespoons oil in a large pot. Saute the chopped leeks over low heat until soft. Do not let them brown. Add potatoes, celeriac, liquid, cauliflower, and bouquet garni. Squeeze the roasted garlic out of the cloves and add to the pot.

Bring to a boil and then simmer, covered, until vegetables are tender. Remove the bouquet garni before pureeing the soup. I favor an immersion blender over a food processor for this, because I like just of bit of texture in the soup.

Return soup to pot, add paprika and salt and pepper to taste and stir in the lemon juice.

Garnish with chopped Italian parsley and serve with a dollop of good plain yogurt. Serves 6.

I quadrupled the recipe for Soup Night. I should have made more.

We're doing it again next month. I recently gave an unused twin mattress to a neighbor and he traded me a big bag of beautiful firm storage onions, grown just a block away. So February's menu will feature French onion soup.

Browsing and foraging

2011-11-26T22:33:00.000-08:00

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I read Jane Kramer’s New Yorker piece on foraging. It’s much in vogue at present; she quotes a blogger as naming this the era of the “I foraged with René Redzepi” piece. Free, wild foods, the kind of eating that could keep you alive through a starvation winter, are used these days to create some of the trendiest, priciest meals going. People wait months for a reservation at Redzepi’s restaurant Noma to sample dishes made from ingredients their grandparents might have felt shamed to bring to the table.

Just compare the photos and recipes in my friend Jenny Hahn’s recent Pacific Feast, a beautiful paean to the wild tastes of our coastal woods, beaches and waters with the looks and style of the Stalking the Wild Asparagus and other Euell Gibbons titles from the 1970s to see how foraging has moved from quirky and funky to quirky and chic. It’s an interesting evolution, and I’m curious what will happen next.

Now, at least in the developed world, it’s the poor who eat the purchased, processed foods that used to be a sign of wealth, while the affluent head out in search of seaweed, barnacles, and tubers, and treasure each laborious step of their cleaning and cooking.

In poorer societies, as traditional foods expert Elizabeth Luard points out to Kramer, adults may be reluctant to talk to visitors about the shoots and roots they use to vary a diet of limited staples. It’s a sign they can’t afford to eat whatever they might want. Children often make better information sources; they have the time to range through the countryside in search of edibles, and they do it for fun as well as from hunger.

As a country kid, and also a bookish one, I roamed the woods behind our house with a copy of Erna Gunther’s Ethnobotany of Western Washington, where I learned that Makah women drank nettle tea during labor “to scare the baby out.” That didn’t seem applicable to a nine-year-old, but I tried the salmonberry shoots and fern fronds she listed before going back to the berries and mushrooms that provided the most taste and the most colorful adventures.

In college, I hoped to impress a guy I liked by serving up a plate of wild berries—salmonberries, thimbleberries, salal, red huckleberries—with some woodruff-flavored wine. I think I was trying to recreate a scene from “Elvira Madison” (the romantic picnic part, not the murder/suicide that followed). It didn’t work, but since I later learned he was gay, I can’t really blame the meal.

Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa

My next reading after the New Yorker was a folder of manuscript fragments from a novel my parents started in 1958 and never completed. It was based on the life of Dave Beck, the Teamster Union leader who came to grief and a term at the McNeil Island Penitentiary after famously pleading the Fifth Amendment 117 times in front of a Senate committee. Beck had moved to Seattle at the turn of the last century as a young boy and grew up poor. In the novel, he and the narrator spend the kind of childhood morning that Luard was talking about.

One morning in the late summer we got up early and went over the hill to Shilshole Bay, where thickets of evergreen blackberries grew near the shore. It was a bright, dewy morning. The scent of cedar was sharp and bitter in the morning air. The distant splat of jumping fish came like music across the water.

There was an Indian campground not far down the beach and the bushes and been well picked over down low. By leaning driftwood against the tangle of vines, however, we could walk up high enough to reach the dusty, popping ripe berries on the uppermost shoots, big as walnuts, sweet as honey.

I was looking for more planks to pile against a promising climb in the eel grass of a low draw leading back from the bay I found the canoe. It was a dugout, the kind the river Indians used, seldom seen on salt water. It was short and flat-bottomed, with a narrow shovel nose and a wide, flat stern. There was a crack a third of the way down the right side but cedarbark fibers had been pounded into the breach. It had been lying in the draw a long time. Ferns grew from the dirt accumulated in the bottom.

Drawn by my posture or my expression, Marc appeared at my side before I could call him. I looked from the boat to him and he nodded.

We fell on our knees and clawed out the accumulated dirt with our bare hands. We dragged her down to the beach and turned her over the scraped the soft wood of the bottom with a sharp rock to get rid of the muck that clung to her. We rubbed her down inside and out with fern and horsetails. Then we respectfully lifted her and carried her over the round, barnacled rocks and set her on the flat, cold water.

She floated high. The water was flat calm and so clear we could see the barnacles waving their pale feelers in search of food.

Marc, deferring either to my local knowledge or foolhardiness, held her while I gingerly mounted her. She was unstable, rocking, it seemed, with my very breath, but she did not go over.

I climbed out and ran along the beach looking for a paddle. I found a length of one-by-four worn smooth by the water and brought it back. She was steadier when in motion. I brought her back to the beach and somehow Marc got in without spilling us.

I paddled north, staying close to the shore. Flotillas of jellyfish drifted past, their delicate edges pulsating languidly. Across the rock floor of the bay an occasional small sole darted and disappeared, or a crab race murderously on tiptoe after some unseen victim. Enormous purple starfish hugged the rocks. Once a hair seal thrust his head from the water and studied us with quizzical spaniel eyes, then leaned back and slid backwards out of sight, like an old colonel slipping out of a rocking chair.

We passed the spot where the Mukilteos camped on the beach, and farther on a run-down shack where somebody yelled at us that the dugout wasn’t safe. We kept yelling “What?” until we were safely out of earshot. Nobody came out after us.

All through the long, gentle morning we worked north along the shore. Marc tried paddling but almost tipped us and gave me back the board. “I don’t swim so good,” he said, sitting very straight and tense. We ate the berries from the pail and when it was empty landed and filled it with water that dripped from a clay cliff, in which we carved our initials.

Shortly before noon we landed again to look for more berries. The tide was well out and as we dragged the dugout up the mud beach clams sent up little geysers about our feet. We found broken branches in the tide wrack and came back to dig. It was a good bed. Within an hour we had a big pile of clams, maybe two dozen. I went down the beach to some rocks to look for mussels; there weren’t any but I did find a couple of rocks covered with tiny limpets, the kind called Chinese Hats or Chinese Slippers. I brought them back, rocks and all.

Marc had matches, kitchen matches, which he carried in a small bottle and sold for a penny apiece to men along his paper route who needed a light for their cigars or pipes. We found a cedar board and broke it by leaning it against a boulder and dropping big rocks on it. We scraped a hole with our fingers in a stretch of clay beach and filled the bottom with round, flat rocks and built a fire in the hole. When the cedar had burned out, we put the clams on top of the rocks, and set the rocks with the limpets in the middle, and piled kelp streamers on top, the way the Indians did. Then while the clams steamed we went berrying again.

There weren’t any blackberries but we found a bank covered with huckleberries. The berries are small and hard and they grow close to the branches between brittle green leaves. I showed Marc another trick my brothers had learned from the Indians around the lumber camps. We stripped the branches, leaves and all, into the berry pail until it was almost full, then we went back to the beach and found another cedar plank in the driftwood. We wet down the plank in the Sound, leaned it against a log, and rolled the berries down the board. The leaves struck on the hairy surface of the wood but the berries rolled on down.

By the time we had finished culling the berries, the clams had steamed open and the limpets loosened their grip on the rocks. We mashed some of the berries between rocks and spread the tart mush on the shellfish, and found a level spot in the shade of a madrona. As we ate we looked out across the water, past the islands, to the purple barricade of the Olympics, sudden against a cloudless sky. The snow was almost gone from the mountains and they looked very near. -- Murray and Rosa Morgan

Huckleberries

I don't know if Beck actually any mornings as idyllic as that, but as a kid I also cooked clams and limpets in the sand at Harstine Island, and later learned from Jenny Hahn that kelp is a superior thickener for stew as well as a good moisturizer for steamed shellfish.

The correct huckleberry picking technique—whether to pick each tiny ripe fruit individually as I do or to strip the branches as the boys did and then clean and cull—is still a debate among my island friends. One of the 11 pies served up at Thanksgiving was huckleberry; I don’t know which method Sonja used, but the result was sensational.

"Frankfurters take on new glamour..."

2011-10-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

My mom had many cookbooks and even more clipped recipes—big paper bags and boxes full of recipes from newspapers, from can labels, from cream cheese packages, from friends….usually not from magazines because the New Yorker and I.F. Stone’s Weekly are short on cooking tips. They were stuffed into baskets in her bedroom, in various drawers of various dressers all over the house, sometimes mingled with the clippings on local transportation issues that she also saved obsessively. (How she would have loved to ride the Sounder train to Seattle.) I found many hundreds more in the attic after she died. It was hard to toss them in the recycle, but I but I knew I would never look through them all. And of course now we have the Internet, so a personal copy of an interesting recipe is not so important. I kept that ones that actually made it to the kitchen, so I can recreate her salmon mousse and Yule log cake, and I know from apprenticeship how to make her one-egg omelet, her peerless mushroom soups and beef stews.

A crown roast of wieners

I also kept her New York Times Cookbook, The American Heritage Cookbook, the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, and of course Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vols. 1 and 2. I already had a Joy of Cooking, though I mourn the loss, somewhere along the way, of her wartime edition with its many tips to deal with rationing. But up in the attic I found another tome I’d never heard of-- The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedia of Cooking and Homemaking, from 1940. This consists of 17 pamphlets, bound together on a metal comb, comprising more than 5000 recipes, plus menus and household tips, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer, who got her start in the recipe business by teaching nutrition in immigrant settlement houses.

Since I’m old enough to remember as simply dinner (or school lunch) the retro foods people laugh about now, I had a pretty good idea what kind of recipes I’d find. We had lots of those elaborate Jello salads when I was a kid, the ones with cauliflower and carrot slices shimmering inside. The Edgemont School cafeteria served up truly awful scalloped potatoes and beans with Vienna sausage. And I still fondly remember making and eating the bacon-wrapped water chestnuts that accompanied the martinis at New Year’s Eve. I figured I knew about the fare promoted by “one of America’s foremost organizations devoted to the science of Better Cookery.”

I was right about a lot of that. Some of the suggestions are mind-boggling, and I want to thank Mom right now for never bringing them to the table: “Frankfurters take on new glamour in this gleaming aspic,” reads one photo caption. “Whole hard-cooked eggs in this jellied tuna loaf add a gay and decorative note,” is another. There is a whole section in the Snack chapter on “balls on picks,” including one called Burning Bush--cream cheese and chopped onion rolled in minced dried beef. (That one we may actually have had.) But as usually happens when we start feeling superior to our forebears, further study turned up complications. Though I might not want to make a frozen fruit salad topped with maraschino cherries, I was surprised that it was to be served on a bed of chicory. Tossed salad suggestions included “lettuce, chicory, spinach, chives,” “watercress, dandelion greens, spring onions,” and “spinach, chervil, chopped onion, parsley.”

The vegetable section is full of varieties that we tend to think of as our own foodie discoveries, ferreted out from more authentic locales: salsify, kale, kohlrabi, fennel, collards, broccoli raab, dasheen, leeks, and more. There are five recipes just for salsify and several for cooked radishes. Desserts include persimmon meringue, ground cherry and elderberry pies, and avocado cranberry sherbet.

The meat section shows how to debone and stuff a chicken, with photos that brought back the duck scene from “Julie and Julia,” minus the hysteria, as the Encyclopedia admits no qualms, only chipper uncomplaining efficiency whether the challenge is a freshly killed bird or an almost empty larder: “A crown roast of wieners is an ideal solution for guest problems when the budget is low.”

"Use a skewer to pull out the tendons one at a time."

Furthermore, whatever cut you may be faced with, it’s got you covered: Maryland stuffed hog maw; beef heart with prune stuffing; calf brain rissoles; stuffed goose necks. It has a moose recipe, though I have to say that the one I’ve used (it’s Pot Roast with Hazelnut Barley in Winter Harvest) is better. It explains in the detail that I needed when we first did our own butchering, how to pluck and clean a chicken. Should I really have been surprised that a generation where at least a quarter of the population had grown up on farms would know about dandelion greens or have the backbone to tackle a goose neck?

What is strikingly lacking in the Encyclopedia is the array of spices, herbs, and other condiments we, or at least I, take for granted in cooking. Salt, pepper, parsley, occasionally celery seed—that’s about it, except for ginger and nutmeg in cookies. Ambitious hostesses evidently focused on elaborate presentations—carved vegetables, piped cream cheese decorations on aspic, diamond-shaped tea sandwiches—instead of on fusion flavors.

Another thing missing is the sense of enjoyment in the kitchen that comes from Joy of Cooking and from Mastering the Art… There are no chatty introductions to the recipes, and the captions focus more on the satisfaction of a job well done than on the pleasures of the table. From what I’ve read, Berolzheimer herself, though a formidable organizer and community activist, was not much of a cook. No doubt the tone also reflects the reality that her readers mostly had to cook three squares a day whether they liked it or not, being in the generation after household help was common but before box food and takeout were ubiquitous.

I’ve yet to cook from the book myself. I’ve been too engrossed just looking through it. But I’m going to hit the candy section this Christmas season to see if I can recreate my Great Aunt Gertrude’s divinity. (As Gertrude aged, her packaging got a bit sketchy. We stopped eating her candy the year we found mothballs mixed in with the bonbons, and I’ve waited a long time to let that memory fade before trying my own.)

The Encyclopedia went through several more editions, though the Institute itself is long gone from its Chicago offices. I see that the 1988, and final, edition is in stock on Amazon. I don’t know what’s in that one.

Pear Squash Soup

2011-10-27T15:18:00.000-07:00

This started out as a recipe on Saveur.com, developed by Leah Koenig. Hers suggests chicken stock and crème fraiche, and it was delicious that way. I’ve been fiddling with it and am also happy with this vegan version. If you prefer to head in the other direction, I think this could be an example of the unknown (to me) omnivore’s advice about the original Moosewood Cookbook: “Take any recipe and just add some bacon.”

I used the sugar loaf delicata variety pictured here. Any flavorful winter squash would be fine. Do keep in mind if you have delicatas that they, like acorn squash and most pumpkins, are the same species (Cucurbita pepo) as summer squash like zucchini. They don’t hold their flavor nearly as well as the Hokkaidos, butternuts, kabochas and their ilk. So if you have a harvest of both, use the delicatas first.

It’s also easy to have too many pears this time of year, since they tend to ripen in a rush. This could be a good recipe to make in quantity and freeze, or have friends over for Soup Night.

I just figured this one out, so it is not in the Winter Harvest Cookbook. My friends and I have decided that at my current pace of a revised edition every 20 years, the 2030 Winter Harvest will be the Winter Puree Cookbook as we’ll mostly be in our 80s. This would fit right in, not that I intend to wait that long to make it again.

Pear and Squash Soup

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 ½ cups chopped onions or shallots (I used leeks and yellow onion)

A bout 2 cups baked winter squash.( I used the Sugar Loaf Delicata variety pictured)

About 2 cups ripe but still firm pears, peeled, cored, and chopped

About 1 cup chopped potato (Suit your taste on the peel. If you want a smoother purée, then peel it; if you like a bit more texture, just give the spud a scrub)

½ teaspoon dried or 1 teaspoon fresh thyme

1 tablespoon balsamic or red wine vinegar or sherry vinegar (the choice depends in part on how much you may want to cut the sweetness of the squash and pears)

4 cups vegetable stock

2 teaspoons miso (I used yellow miso)

1 teaspoon paprika

Salt and pepper

Maple syrup (optional)

Heat oil over medium heat. Add onions and cook 3 or 4 minutes until they are limp. Stir so they don’t stick. Add chopped potato, cook another 2 or 3 minutes, and add chopped pears for another few minutes. Onions should be soft.

Add roasted squash, stir in thyme, add vinegar and stock, stir again, and bring to a simmer. Put miso in a small cup. Ladle out some stock and mix with the miso to liquefy. Add to the pot and simmer until potatoes and pears are completely cooked.

Remove soup from heat and purée to taste. I used an immersion blender. Stir in salt, pepper, and paprika.

Drizzle a bit of maple syrup over each serving if you want.

Note: I nearly always roast squash no matter what the original recipe says. It’s a hassle to peel a winter squash, especially a ribby one like an acorn squash, and I like the caramelization that happens in roasting, as I’m not generally a fan of ultra-sweet vegetables. Also, it’s much easier to deal with excess if it’s roasted. Just scoop it into a container and freeze it; that’s it. I also intend to try drying the roasted purée, an old treatment I saw somewhere. I'll report when I have more information.

The Beet Goes On

2011-10-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve been doing some editing and research for Binda Colebrook as she prepares the 5^th edition of the estimable Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest, (look for it next year from New Society Publishers) and she is paying me partly in produce.

Among my takings was a big, really big Robuschka beet. Robuschkas are a rare variety, at least in the U.S. A bit of Googling did bring up dozens of references in German. A lot of people hate beets, and even those who like them often avoid the great big ones, fearing they will be woody and not sweet. But Robuschkas are known for consistent sweetness, and this one was bigger than a softball and firm and fine-grained all the way through.

First we made borscht. It was wonderful. Here is my friend Gale Lawrence’s recipe:

Grate or chop in matchsticks: beets and carrots

Mince onions

Sauté onions briefly in canola or other unflavorful oil. Add a small amount of fennel seeds and sauté for 2 minutes. Add grated beets and carrots and continue to sauté on low for 5-10 minutes to develop flavor.

Add vegetable broth and simmer for 15 minutes or until beets are almost tender. Add diced potatoes and/or chopped cabbage and cook an additional 10 minutes until soft.

Add honey (not much if beet is very sweet), juice from 1/2 lemon and chopped beet greens. Cook about 10 minutes more. Add salt, etc.

Serve hot or cold with yogurt or sour cream and chopped parsley or dill.

We had it hot. Gale’s note was that this beet was so sweet that very little honey was needed to balance the flavor. It was delicious borscht, and we made a lot of it, but there was still more than half the beet remaining.

Next I cubed a bunch of it and roasted it along with onions, garlic, sweet potatoes, and mushrooms. That was OK, a bit on the sweet side for my taste despite a liberal hand with the soy sauce. And there was still a hefty chunk of beet.

A few days later I made beet risotto, a suggestion that came originally from Mike DeArmand in Seattle (thanks, Mike!). I used at least a cup of the grated beet, along with some of the greens and a couple of cheese ends—fontina and romano. It was bright magenta and really delicious. I ate it for dinner, and for lunch the next two days. And there was still lots more of that beet. I was beginning to think it had arrived from a fairy tale, along with the endless cup of mead and the love that never dies. Or maybe it has a sort of beet Midas touch; everything it encounters in the vegetable drawer turns to Robuschka.

I was getting ready to make a dessert for a potluck, my never-fail carrot/date bars from Winter Harvest, when I remembered that at least one of the other guests avoids gluten. So I switched from wheat flour to coconut flour. Coconut flour is great for folks who are allergic to gluten and/or tree nuts, as the coconut is a different botanical family as walnuts and their ilk. But as a baking medium, it has the problem of being very dense and very dry. Dishes made with it tend to crumble and lack that moist lusciousness we want from our pastry treats. Enter, Robuschka. I grated in a hefty chunk of beet along with the carrots and dates. It was hit, but the beet remains.

I do have a recipe for a luscious beet/hazelnut/chocolate cake (Also in Winter Harvest, see below), but I’ve finally whittled my monster down below the necessary for that one. Instead I’m going to braise it with some red wine and a red onion my across-the-street neighbor gave me when I came over to buy eggs. And I’d better get on that, because today when I went out to get the next installment of my produce pay—leaf lettuce, spinach, lettuce, pears, chrysanthemums—I also got another Robuschka.

Robuschka beet seeds are available from Turtle Tree Seed: www.turtletreeseed.com Lutz Winterkeeper is another good variety for large, sweet beets

Nutella Pudding Cake

Rich, dark, moist, non-dairy, and gluten-free, this treat delivers one of my favorite flavor combos—chocolate and hazelnut—with the hidden surprise of beets, which provide the texture and tint of an old-fashioned velvet cake. It is a fine use for the great big, overwintered beet varieties, and a reminder that sugar beets used to be a major crop in the Pacific Northwest. It’s modified from a recipe by Elana Amsterdam, author of The Gluten Free, Almond Flour Cookbook and the Elana’s Pantry blog, www.elanaspantry.com. Elana’s motto is “simplify, satisfy.” In this case you could probably add, “seduce,” rich and silky as it is.

2 ½ cups chopped, peeled beets

¾ cup agave syrup

½ cup water

4 eggs

½ cup light oil (canola or grapeseed)

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

½ cup cocoa powder

½ cup fine-ground hazelnuts (I use a coffee grinder)

½ teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Pour the syrup in a medium saucepan, add the chopped beets, and bring to a boil. Cover and simmer until beets are soft, about 30 minutes. Purée the mixture until it’s as smooth as you can get it. Mix in the eggs, oil, and vanilla. Mix the nuts, cocoa, and salt, into a large bowl, add the beet mixture, and stir thoroughly.

Pour batter into a greased, 9-inch cake pan and bake until a knife in the center comes out clean—30-40 minutes. The sides will puff up a bit and the center will stay moist.

Catch of the Day

2011-07-08T18:12:00.000-07:00

Purple and white potatoes from the tub on the deck, sugar snap peas, new garlic, and a tiny golden beet from the alley beds, all harvested today and served up with a just a bit of salt and vinaigrette. Life is good!

The WSU website informs me that this hissing, stripy critter, which was deep in the potato tub until I unearthed it today, is a ten-lined June beetle.She's about 1 1/2 inches long. I know she's a she because she lacks the large feathery antenna ends that the males use to scent out female pheromones.

The larvae eat plant roots, but they are not numerous enough to be a problem, so I left her here in the lettuce after the photo op.

After and before:

This shot of snap peas, (many) volunteer poppies, garlic, a calendula, and a bit of bindweed, was taken today. The one below is the same bed in April.

Believing It

2011-03-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

The Boy Who Didn't Believe in Spring, by Lucille Clifton. Illustrations by Brinton Turkle

There’s a children’s book that was a favorite with my daughters and that I have now started reading to my granddaughter, called The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring. A little boy in, I’m guessing, Brooklyn named King Shabazz gets irritated with the grownups’ talk about nesting birds and flowers and crops, things he has never seen, until he and his best friend Tony Polito take an unauthorized walk on their own to the next block. There they find a vacant lot with a fabulous-to-five-year-olds dead car….and some flowering weeds (“Crops!”) and a birds nest. Tony’s big brother finds them out of bounds and they’re in lots of trouble, but they don’t care. Spring is here.

I thought about King Shabazz and Tony yesterday while spreading compost and gathering the first “new growth” garden salad of the year: corn salad, kale tips, and tiny bits of lettuce and radicchio from two plants that mysteriously survived the hard freezes and torrents of the last couple of months, while my artichokes, rosemary, and even some of the leeks bit the dust February-sown spinach is up outside, along with the first few chards and lettuce sprouts, and leeks and artichoke starts are thriving on my glassed in front porch. Granddaughter Hailey and I planted peas in a raised bed in the alley, her main job being to walk over the row to tamp it down. Parker the dog took a nap in a patch of sunlight. Although it will be a couple of months before I can figure to get most of my salads from my own yard, all this cheers me up. I admit to being tired of roots, and greens at the store are both expensive and travel weary, a dreary combination.

Besides their existential pleasure, these “crops” make me feel self-reliant and sustainable, and that’s where reality threatens to intrude. Mostly I subscribe to the “every little bit helps” school of response to uncertain times. A Post-Carbon Future looms? I’ve got my peas, artichokes, and 50 heads of garlic on the way, and I can walk to the grocery store. Western Washington is overdue for an earthquake and tsunami that could rival the tragedy in Japan? I’ve got a windup radio under my bed and rain barrels full of water—I’m ready. Commuting solo in my car contributes to global warming –at least it’s a Prius, and I bought it used. I recognize the magical thinking involved in these responses, but since I can’t personally create the societal and economic retooling it would take to meet a global challenge, I take some small steps, and teach people how to cook with local vegetables. Like most everyone else I know, at least people of my age, I do want a comfortable life as well as a useful one. I want to be, as I recently read in a beautiful eulogy that showed up on my Facebook, “worthy of rest” when my time comes. Plus I want to eat good food, get good haircuts, and go dancing a lot while I still can.

Do small steps matter? In any revolution, and a drastic change in climate and fuel supply is likely to resemble (if not create) one, there comes a time when moderation gets swept away, for good or ill. Years ago my friend Marilyn memorably described the kind of 1970s style academic Marxist who was all for the revolution, unless it would interfere with tenure. I cringe a bit at being the kind of environmentalist who is all for sustainability unless it would interfere, for example, with my plans to jet off to our next international tour with the Kulshan Chorus. Some of the wildly varying estimates for the carbon footprint of passenger jet travel put it at twice the use per mile of single occupant car travel, even allowing for hundreds of passengers on a flight. (One factor complicating the estimates I’m seeing debated on science blogs is that emissions produced at higher elevations have a stronger greenhouse effect.) Add that to the longer distances of most air travel and one would have to make a whole lot, a lifetime’s worth, of bike rides to the post office to offset one trip to Europe, let alone reduce energy use. For people who don’t accept Peak Oil scenarios, that’s irrelevant as long as they can afford a ticket. For people like me, for whom the end of the carbon age seems plausible, and quite likely preferable to the alternative of stripping oil out of every fragile ecosystem under which it hides, it creates a dilemma. As long as I’m burning jet fuel at 30,000 feet to sing about peace, justice, and human understanding, does that make it ok?

Presumably, the right thing to do is to start living a post-carbon life in advance of dire necessity. If this is what awaits our children and grandchildren, aren’t we more likely to get it right if we practice? And if I believe that living in tune with what the planet actually can provide its own rich satisfactions, I shouldn’t feel that staying home is a sacrifice.

It’s easy to way overthink the simplest things. The obsessively examined life, or diet, or political philosophy, can be a great big preachy bore, and most people won’t live a preachy bore of a life unless they have no choice.

Meantime, spring is coming whether or not my carbon conscience is clean, and thank goodness for that. When I was a teenager, my dad was diagnosed with a cancer that was generally terminal. The next spring when he walked out to the “Druid’s grove” of trilliums in the woods behind our house, he promised himself he would see them the following year as well. Thirty-five years and many health scares later when he was finally too ill to make that short walk, I knew for sure that he wouldn’t be with us long; he died a few months later. Since I left home, everywhere I’ve had a patch of dirt I’ve planted trilliums from that grove. Once they get established they go on and on, so I assume they are fulfilling their own vows of renewal in the hills of Sonoma County, on the end of E. Yesler Way in Seattle, and on the border in Sumas, just as they were in my yard yesterday, when I pulled back some mulch and saw them unfolding. Like King and Tony, I may be in trouble but I believe in spring.

For a much crisper take on some of these issues, written a couple of years back by someone younger, more energetic and with a stronger scientific background, here’s the “friendly neighborhood Apocalyptic Dominatrix of Doom,” Sharon Astyk: http://sharonastyk.com/2009/02/04/fast-train-revisited-whats-a-doomer-chick-to-do/

And for general inspiration about doing what we can where we are, Wendell Berry:

The question which must be addressed… is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious and exciting way different from all the others.

Onward and ForeWord with Winter Harvest

2011-03-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

My good news of the morning:

ForeWord Reviews is pleased to announce the 2010 Book of the Year Awards list of finalists. Representing more than 350 publishers, the finalists were selected from 1400 entries in 56 categories. These books are examples of independent publishing at its finest.
The winners will be determined by a panel of librarians and booksellers selected from our readership. Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners, as well as Editor’s Choice Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction will be announced at a special program at the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans this June.

Keeping in mind the standard used by booksellers and librarians for purchases/acquisitions, judges will take note of the following:
Editorial excellence
Intent of book met by author
Originality of subject matter
Accuracy
Author credentials
Professional packaging

I’m getting the impression this is sort of like Sundance for independent publishers, except -–as we would have to expect of a contest run by librarians--without the designer dresses, tabloid coverage, big money, and Robert Redford (though I’m sure Redford has the greatest respect for librarians).

Anyway, I’m thrilled that Winter Harvest is a finalist in the cooking category, and that gives me another chance to thank New Society Publishers and to say that Celeste Enriquez is the surely the world’s best illustrator of gnarly root vegetables. She can make celeriac and Jerusalem artichokes both recognizable and glamorous, and that is no easy feat.

Here's the list:

America's Little Italys by Sheryl Bellman
Bis on Main by Joe Vilardi & James O. Fraioli
Brothers Cuisine by Matt & Jeff Nichols with James O. Fraioli
Flavors of Friuli by Elisabeth Antoine Crawford
French Cooking by Foreword by Paul Bocuse, Written by Hubert Delorme and Vincent Boue
From Terra's Table by Jeff Rossman
Greek Revival by Patricia Moore-Pastides
Sarabeth's Bakery by Sarabeth Levine, Rick Rodgers, Foreword by Mimi Sheraton
The Fishes & Dishes Cookbook by Tomi Marsh, Kiyo Marsh, Laura Cooper
The Turkish Cookbook by Nur Ilkin and Sheilah Kaufman
Warm Bread and Honey Cake by Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra, photography by Vanessa Courtier
Winter Harvest Cookbook by Lane Morgan

Grow Northwest Magazine

2011-03-12T23:52:00.000-08:00

The new issues has lots of good stuff, including a Winter Harvest review focusing on the earliest spring produce. Wonderful photos, CSA lists, chef and restaurant profiles, how to build a raised bed, and lots more. Check it out:

http://www.grownorthwest.com/2011/03/books-lane-morgan%E2%80%99s-revised-winter-cookbook-offers-plenty-for-spring/

New growth in the garden, holdovers in the kitchen

2011-03-01T10:14:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, once the temperature reached the low 30s F, instead of the 11 degrees of a few days before, we got busy with the new potato barrels. Andrew cut 55-gallon food grade barrels from the fish processing plant in half and drilled holes in the bottom. Now I have four planters ready for the fingerlings I'll be planting soon and the sweet potato slips that I intend to try one more time, come June.

Another happy sight, maybe not beautiful but a pleasure to see, is the garlic sprouting. Both the fall-planted cloves and the more recent plantings are charging forward. Thanks to my friend Bill Bowes, I have several new varieties to try although as usual I have faltered in my plans to keep close track of which type is which. Fortunately he also gave me a cheat sheet illustrating the subtle differences in leaf shape and growing habit, so all may not be lost.

Snowdrops and marsh marigolds are unfazed by the weather. So were the collards and kale, but they are not quite as photogenic.

In the kitchen, I was looking at the final little kabocha squash from last year's garden. I also have some cabbage in the refrigerator and collards in the garden, plus a couple links of frozen chicken sausage. So we'll have soup. The base recipe is in Winter Harvest, reprinted below. This version is going to get some potatoes too, since I have some that won't last much longer.

Basque Soup

Heat lard or olive oil in a large, heavy saucepan or soup pot. Add onion and brown. Add pumpkin, cabbage, beans, and garlic and cook briefly, stirring to coat the vegetables with oil. Add stock or water, salt, and pepper, and bring to a boil. Lower heat to simmer and cook gently, covered, until beans are tender, about 2 hours. Adjust seasoning before serving.

1/4 cup lard or olive oil

1 medium onion, chopped

1/2 pound pumpkin, peeled and cubed

1 medium cabbage, sliced

1/2 pound dried haricot beans or navy

beans, soaked overnight and drained

2 cloves garlic, sliced

2 quarts stock or water

salt and pepper

This is adapted from Elizabeth David’s book of Mediterranean food, a great sourcebook of traditional recipes (with traditionally vague measurements). You may substitute olive oil for the lard; it won’t taste the same, but it will be good. This soup has a robust flavor, as you’d expect, and with good bread and a salad, it makes a complete meal. Serves 6.

Seed Dreams

2011-01-15T13:42:00.000-08:00

Placing my bets on the future, I ordered my seeds this week, from Territorial and a new place for me--Bountiful Gardens, in Palo Alto.

The Bountiful Gardens order gets me scorzonera and Tyfon, two crops I've had trouble finding seeds for.

Scorzonera, from recipemuncher.com

Scorzonera is often called black salsify or black oysterplant, which I suppose only takes it up a notch or two on the recognition scale for most people. It's a long, slender, very dark-skinned root, extremely hardy, with a rich, mellow taste that I prefer to parsnips or rutabagas.One drawback is that it requires deep, workable soil, which is hard to come by in my clayey backyard, but I have a plan. My nephew-in-law Andrew has provided me a couple 50 gallon food-grade plastic barrels from his job at the fish processing plant. I'm already using two of these as rain barrels. These new ones are destined to be root towers. I'll cut them in half to create four containers deep enough for fingerling potatoes, sweet potatoes, and scorzonera, fill them with nice loose soil, and we're off to the races. When it's harvest time I can just tip them sideways onto a tarp collect the roots, give the soil a compost boost, and replant with a rotation crop. This is the time of year when all these plans seem foolproof.

Last year my sweet potatoes didn't get nearly enough heat, but as the global "hottest year on record" stats keep piling up, it's surely only a matter of time before Western Washington gets its turn and I am rolling in sweet potatoes, eggplants and tomatoes while my peas and lettuce wither or bolt.

Here are a couple of recipes for scorzonera. The first is from Winter Harvest, courtesy of Bruce Naftaly at Le Gourmand in Seattle

1 pound salsify or scorzonera
1 cup heavy cream
nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon white pepper
1 tablespoon chopped chervil, Italian parsley, or sweet cicely
salt

Peel salsify or scorzonera and cut into pieces the size of your little finger. Put cut pieces in acidulated water as you go. Drain, then steam until barely tender, about 5 minutes.

Combine cream, nutmeg, pepper, and herbs in a heavy, nonaluminum saucepan or sauté pan. Bring to a boil, lower heat, and cook gently until cream is reduced almost to the consistency of sauce. Add salsify or scorzonera and continue cooking until liquid makes a sauce. Add salt to taste.
Serves 3 or 4.
Vegetarian, gluten-free

Johnny's Selected Seeds in Maine is another good source for scorzonera and other unusual varieties, and their catalog includes this simple vegan treatment:

Oven-Fried Scorzonera

10 or 12 scorzonera roots

4 cups water or stock

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

chopped parsley

Wash scorzonera but do not peel. Parboil in water or stock for about 10 minutes. They should still be firm.
Drain thoroughly. Peel and cut in half—lengthwise. Brush slices with oil and arrange in a shallow baking dish.
Bake at 350°F for 30 minutes or until golden brown. Outside should be crisp and the inside tender. Garnish
with parsley.

Serves 4-6

Vegan

Tyfon is a very hardy mustard/broccoli cross that is used for livestock feed and green manure and is also a good kitchen green. I used to sow it as a winter cover crop in Sumas. It has vigorous roots that are supposed to be able to penetrate clay. That wasn't an issue in Sumas, but it certainly is here. When you cut off the tops come spring, the plants die, the roots decay, and the soil benefits from more organic matter and better drainage.

This just in: the Territorial order came today, minus the sweet potatoes, which will arrive in May. That was fast, and I am excited. In fact I'm heading out right now to do some soil testing.

Winter Harvest Cookbook Corrections

2011-01-12T11:10:00.000-08:00

The good news is that a second printing is planned for Winter Harvest. That’s really gratifying.

The embarrassing corollary is that in going through the book to mark any needed changes before the presses roll again, I found I had made some careless errors in labeling that were not caught during editing. My intention was only to label recipes that are vegan or gluten-free “by nature,” meaning that you don’t need to modify them or to shop selectively for condiments or prepared ingredients. I did not always follow through with that. Especially if you are following a vegan or gluten-free diet and you have a first printing copy of the revised edition, please note the following:

Broccoli Yogurt Soup on p. 53 is not vegetarian unless you substitute vegetable broth for the chicken broth.

Oyster Parsnip Stew on p. 75 is generally gluten-free as most brands of bacon are, but you need to check the label.

Broccoli Dal Curry on p. 122 is not gluten free unless you omit the flour. To do that and still get the same texture, mash some of the lentils into the liquid when you make the sauce.

Brussels Sprouts in Lemon Curry Sauce on p. 161 is vegetarian but may not be gluten free depending on the chili powder.

Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Sweet Potatoes on p. 163 may not be gluten free, depending on the soy sauce and hot sauce. There are gluten-free versions of both, but you need to check.

Dry Spinach Curry on p. 212 is not vegan if you are using ghee.

On the other hand

There also are some more gluten-free and vegetarian or vegan options that I forgot to label as such in the rush to publication. Here they are:

Beet Salad with Garlic Sauce on p. 81 is vegetarian and gluten free.

Tibetan Salad on p. 93 is vegetarian.

Rutachoke Salad on p. 96 is gluten free.

Polenta-Stuffed Cabbage on p. 106 is vegetarian.

Jerusalem Artichokes with Rice on p. 187 is vegan and gluten free.

of course Kale Sprouts on p. 190 is vegan and gluten free, since it is ingredient free except for the kale.

Mint Chutney on p. 234 is vegan and gluten free.

Ghee, another one-ingredient recipe on p. 236, is vegetarian and gluten-free.

The idea behind the labeling was not that cooks can’t figure out what’s what for themselves, but to save time for busy people. I’m sorry if I caused any glitches in your dinner preparations.

Unplug that second fridge...and read this article

2011-01-02T08:11:00.000-08:00

I've been wishing I had an easy-to-follow breakdown of energy use along the food chain. Now I do, thanks to Grist food and ag writer, Tom Philpott. The basic good new/bad news for home cooks is that a larger proportion (larger at least than I had realized) of the energy use bound up in food comes from personal choices rather than agriculture food miles. Food production and preparation takes energy--whether it's human in the form of gardening, cleaning, and chopping, or mechanical in the form of tractors, trucks, factory trimmers and baggers. A second refrigerator out in the garage, a impulse car trip to Trader Joe's (or the farmers market), running the dishwasher for a few dishes, the choice to buy premade burger patties instead of forming them one by one with your own two little hands--all those indulgences add up to way more energy than it takes to ship loads of rice or sweet potatoes across the continent. All those teenagers standing lost in thought in front of all those open refrigerators all across this great nation?---fire up another coal plant.

This should be great news for environmentalists in, say, South Dakota, where the local sourcing options must be pretty thin on the ground this time of year. It should not, in my reasoning, let us off the hook in terms of supporting local food production, especially in regions like this one that are so well suited to it.

Here's the article:
http://www.grist.org/article/food-our-energy-gulping-industrial-food-system-in-eight-bullet-points

Busted at the Bistro

2010-12-29T22:54:00.000-08:00

I had a book signing here in Bellingham a few weeks ago, and a couple days after that, as I was polishing off dinner at the Fountain Bistro near my house and trying not to get salad dressing on the papers I was correcting, my neighbors Bob and Selma stopped by my table. They told me they were shocked, shocked after hearing my talk to see me eating restaurant food instead of staying home to scrub the topsoil off my rutabagas.

Lucky for me that my profile is low enough so that a bit of teasing from the nice folks two houses down is the extent of my exposure to public expectations. I would hate to be, say, Barbara Kingsolver or Michael Pollen and have every my every public mouthful scrutinized.

Christmas Eve vegetable plates, in lurid, blurry living color

But speaking of Michael Pollen, one treat of my vacation is to read through

months-old copies of magazines that I don’t get to during the work weeks. This week I browsed a six-month-old copy of the New York Review of Books, where Michael Pollen has a roundup essay on modern food movements. His thesis is that unlike many movements—say feminism, or Protestantism--which tend to fragment into ever more specialized concerns as time goes on, food campaigners may be finding more mutual connections. I don’t know if he’s right about this, but the essay, which discusses books on hunger in America, vegetarian activists, locavores, government food policy, sustainable farming, and critiques of bureaucracy (and more!), did help me put some ideas together.

One of them is the economic relationship between American food prices and our health and family life. Pollan writes that on average, we spend less than 10 percent of our incomes on food and only half an hour a day preparing it (including cleanup). Those are the lowest numbers in the industrialized world, and they imply enviable quantities of disposable income and time to create great things outside the kitchen. But here’s the web in which those figures are tangled. That cheap food is the stuff that’s made directly or indirectly from heavily subsidized corn and soy—pop, McBurgers, chicken nuggets, milkshakes, processed cheese etc. (Fresh vegetable and fruit prices have not stayed proportionally low) And we all know the health consequences of that diet. The money we save on groceries gets spent instead on the medical consequences of our obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and diet-related cancers. Big Agriculture and Big Pharma get bigger yet, while we go broke paying medical bills.

The French and the Italians--to pick two famous foodie cultures--pay a higher percentage of their incomes on food, spend a lot more time preparing and eating it (though less than they used to), spend a lower percentage of their income on health care, and live longer on average than we do.

But what about the time saved? Convenient food was supposed to liberate women, especially, from drudgery and resentment in the kitchen, and there is a case to be made there. Not every household contains someone who enjoys cooking, and though I love to cook I’m not in the mood three times a day every day. But it’s also true that it takes about as much time to go through the drive-through window as to throw a salad together. If you have the money, you can get food that is both nutritious and convenient. The people who make their livings at the fast-food windows, or processing the chickens that make the McNuggets, or stocking the Quick Mart shelves with Top Ramen, are the ones who can’t afford to buy nutritious quick food and often lack the time and training to cook more economical healthy meals from scratch. This plays into the familiar critique of mainstream feminism, that it is a creation of and for comfortable middle class women.

And that brings to mind an old poem by Marge Piercy

What's that smell in the kitchen?

All over America women are burning dinners.
It's lambchops in Peoria: it's haddock
in Providence; it's steak in Chicago:
tofu delight in Big Sur; red rice and beans in Dallas.
All over America women are burning food they're supposed to bring with calico smile on
platters glittering like wax.
Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined but spewing out missiles of hot fat.
Carbonized despair presses like a clinker
from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.
If she wants to grill anything, it's
her husband spitted over a slow fire.
If she wants to serve him anything it's a dead rat with a bomb in its belly ticking like the
heart of an insomniac.
Her life is cooked and digested,
nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.
Look, she says, once I was roast duck
on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

Burning dinner may be war, but having the dinner to burn is good fortune. That’s why it’s so important that we link up the issues of food equity and food quality. It’s not enough to have cheap food, if the real costs are our health and environment. It’s not enough to have sources of nutritious and delicious food if only the comfortable can afford it.

Here's a link to a Bellingham Herald story about increasing access to real food: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2010/12/20/1780871/bellingham-food-bank-garden-project.html

If Pollan is right, and I hope he is, we’ll see more Food Bank Farms, more farmers markets taking food stamps and WIC, more community gardens, more gleaning, and more opportunities for people to make a decent living providing good food to their neighbors.

And speaking of that, I hope Geoff and Anna at Osprey Hill are making a decent living, because they certainly are providing good food. Our Christmas Eve dinner relied heavily on their produce from my CSA box—delicata squash, carrots, and onions in the risotto; onions and garlic stuffed in the pork roast, with parsnips and potatoes cooked alongside; applesauce for those who like it with pork; mixed braised greens. It was all great.

After writing this ramble, and thinking about how I am one of the fortunate few who not only has the resources to grow and buy good food, but also gets to make a little money while promoting it, I decided to make my donation to the food bank automatic and monthly instead of by whim. Join me? http://www.bellinghamfoodbank.org/get_involved/donate

A community of vegetables

2010-12-12T22:21:00.000-08:00

Check out the latest issue of the estimable Foothills Gazette for two stories on local food initiatives dear to my heart.

http://foothillsgazette.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Gazette-Vol-6-5.pdf

One is a profile of Nooksack Valley High School's use of local produce in its foods classes. (James Ortiz, who is pictured giving his usual intense scrutiny to a tray of potatoes, is one of my students this year.)

The other story talks about community gardens in rural Whatcom County. While at first thought it might seem redundant to have neighborhood garden plots out in the county, when I thought about it I realized that of course not everyone in farm country has ground to plant. Even house renters may not have permission to dig up the back yard for a garden plot, and some yards are too shady to grow vegetables. Many county residents live in apartments, including recent arrivals to this country who have both the skills and the need to grow their own produce.

I had a chance to talk briefly with Gretchen Hoyt of Alm Hill Gardens and Growing Washington when she was at the high school last week. She brought me up to date on Everson's Community Garden, which is thriving in its spot behind the library, producing vegetables for the Food Bank as well as for home tables. I'll go into more detail here when time permits.

Winter Harvest Cookbook Corrections and Comments #1

2010-12-01T17:39:00.000-08:00

Here's where I note corrections, comments and updates for Winter Harvest. The plan is to repost the list, with additions, every week or two.

Sunday Brunch Frittata (page 125)

It should say : 3 tablespoons light oil

Never mind the "cup."

Winter Fruit Bars (page 256)

The bars hold together better if you use quick rolled oats rather than the thicker steel-cut types.

Also, Carolyn--the recipe's creator--says that when she is using fresh fruits such as pears along with dried fruits, she doesn't reconstitute the dried fruit. The liquid from the pears is enough to do the job. And we both agree that these reach are even better the next day, when the layers have had a chance to consolidate.

And while I'm thinking of Carolyn and her household, the author's photo credit was omitted. It should have gone to her husband, Tim Pilgrim.

Stirring the Pot

2010-12-01T11:23:00.000-08:00

This is my season of book promotion, especially since the winter produce topic and the Christmas shopping season coincide. Thankfully I am still teaching, so I can’t go overboard with time spent smiling and signing and passing out samples. It’s fun in small doses.

At the Community Farm Store in Duncan

Last week’s dose was on Vancouver Island, where my friend Gale organized events in Ladysmith and Duncan, hunted up the ingredients, turned over her kitchen to our sample making, and drove us through the snow to get to the dates. She also unearthed the batiked banner I had made for a natural foods deli we ran together in Mountain View, California, 38 eventful years ago.

Using the book and talking about it with people also means that the inevitable glitches and errors of any project come to light. Someone in Ladysmith pointed out a typo and Gale and I realized that the winter fruit bars, though variable by nature, could still use some more explicit instructions for accommodating different combinations of fresh and dried fruit.

At The Worldly Gourmet in Ladysmith. I found the fancy stove intimidating, but the audience was great.

So I am going to start posting Corrections and Comments pages on this blog periodically, and I invite your participation. If you see a typo or an omission, or if something isn’t clear, or if you have created a variation you’d be willing to share, let me know. The book is selling well and a second printing is not a complete pipe dream, so improvements could be included then. Meantime, I can at least make them available to blog readers.

Next event: Wednesday, Dec. 8, 7 p.m. at Village Books in Bellingham. Samples provided by the great young cooks and their teacher Lois Rienstra at Nooksack Valley High School's Pioneer Catering.

Colcannon in color

2010-11-20T10:18:00.000-08:00

Colcannon with real and fake squash, plus a pear.

It was a stormy Friday night, snowing and blowing so that the evening dog walk was severely truncated. It was fun to walk (or in Parker's case gallop in excited circles) with my back to the wind as the snow zipped by and whirled around in the street, but facing into it was another matter. I needed full Sumas Northeaster gear instead of the girly little scarf and hat I'd grabbed on the way out the door. It was hard to breathe, and the sleety flakes stung.

So we came back early and I made some colcannon, the Irish potato/cabbage combo that got many a poor family through winters like these, until the potato famine wiped out even this basic fare. Colcannon is mashed potatoes, boiled cabbage, butter and salt, and maybe some scallions. Winter Harvest has a recipe, but you don't really need one.

There's a nostalgic song about colcannon, which the Kulshan Chorus will be singing at our concert this December 11. One verse goes:

Well did you ever make colcannon,

Made with lovely pickled cream

With the greens and scallions mingled

Like a picture in a dream

Did you ever make a hole on top

To hold the meltin' flake

Of the creamy flavoured butter

That our mothers used to make...

Well, I like colcannon well enough, and I like the song, but I don't seem to be true enough to my Celtic roots to dream about it. It's not exactly exciting stuff. And that got me thinking....what if it were more colorful, literally? So I whipped some up with the purple potatoes and red cabbage from my Osprey Farms CSA, with results seen above. Whether this is a picture from a sweet dream or a nightmare depends on how you feel about purple food, I guess. My housemate says it would look better on a hotrod. The bread is celeriac bread (also in Winter Harvest), which is basically Irish soda bread, with celeriac. It's tasty.

Costco here I come

2010-11-17T16:57:00.000-08:00

One of the great things about my Bellingham neighborhood is that I can walk or bike to the grocery store, or make a quick stop on the way to somewhere else. So I haven't set foot in a Costco for years, probably since the girls moved out on their own. But I'll make a day of it Saturday for Winter Harvest book signings: Burlington from 1 p.m. (ish) until 5 and Marysville from 7 to 9. Greg Atkinson--a James Beard Award winner and nice guy--will be there too, promoting his latest cookbook, Northwest Essentials.

My winter CSA, weeks 1 and 2

2010-11-16T21:31:00.000-08:00

What I’ve gotten so far

Week One --Nov 4-10

Onions, garlic, red cabbage, parsnips, pea vines (with November flowers!), rainbow chard, baby beets with greens, purple potatoes, pickled garlic scapes.

Week Two -- Nov. 11-17

Shallots, garlic, fennel, fingerling potatoes, romanesco, kale, canned heritage tomatoes, specialty carrots—Purple Haze and a pale, pale yellow variety, rosemary

What I’ve made so far

Mashed potatoes and parsnips with chopped garlic scapes and a splash of Worcestershire

Beet greens and chard braised with garlic, garlic scapes, and kalamata olives

Stir-fried pea vines: Ehhh. This is the first time I've cooked pea vines and I was underwhelmed. I'll try a different approach before I give up on them.

Lentils with garlic, roasted sweet potato and roasted purple potato; this was good, and was further improved by the addition of caramelized onions.

Risotto with pureed fennel and romanesco. Nice, but the kind of risotto that is clearly meant to accompany a meat course. I like my risotto as the main event.

Kale and carrots braised with shallots, a few olives, and a smidgeon of bacon. I added a few tiny boiled potatoes in there too.

I think the next project is going to be a Day-glo Colcannon, with purple potatoes and red cabbage.

I also need to do something with the beets and remaining parsnips, pronto. I'll feel lousy if I let this beautiful produce go to waste.

Squashed, but not complaining

2010-11-04T22:53:00.000-07:00

I am proud of this recipe (which I recently invented myself, so any duplicates are due to independent inspiration). The name comes both from the mystery ingredient and the fact that the first time I made it I inadvisedly used a tube pan and then turned it upside-down to cool like an angel food cake. So instead of a nice round creation with a tidy hole in the middle I ended up with a pile of moist and tasty chunks. I put it in a casserole for transport to school, where it passed the teenage test and was quickly polished off. Even when I told them it contained baked squash, they still came back for more. That’s because it was moist (the squash), but not leaden (the egg whites), and just flavorful enough (the spices) to be interesting without getting in the way of the chocolate.

If you’re not wedded to pumpkin pie, this could be a good addition to the Thanksgiving table.

Squashed Cake

1¾ cups flour

1½ teaspoons baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt

1¼ cups sugar

3-4 tablespoons cocoa powder

½ teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon ginger

2/3 cup vegetable oil

1 cup baked, pureed pumpkin or winter squash (I used a small kabocha)

½ teaspoon vanilla

3 egg whites

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Mix together the flour, baking soda, salt, sugar, cocoa powder, and spices.

In a separate bowl, beat the oil, squash, and vanilla. Add the oil and squash mixture to the dry ingredients and stir or beat to form a stiff batter.

Whip the eggs into stiff peaks and fold into the batter.

Spoon into a lightly greased Bundt pan or a rectangular cake pan and bake until the cake springs back when pressed in the center. Baking time will vary with the pan and moisture content of the squash. Start checking at 25-30 minutes.

A well flavored squash keeps more familiar company here in this simple dish from the Winter Harvest Cookbook, which, I am happy to say, is starting to hit the stores.

Coming up on November 26 is International Onion Day, which is the kind of holiday I can get behind. It’s also my son-in-law Ronny’s birthday, another big day around here. I’m very fond of both—Ronny and onions. This Greek recipe reminds me of good diner food—maybe those sweet potato fries that even the healthiest eater can’t resist every now and then.

2/3 cup flour
salt and pepper
2 cups cubed winter squash

3 cups diced yellow onions
1 teaspoon dried thyme
olive oil

Put the flour, salt and pepper in a large mixing bowl (or you can do what my mom did when flouring stew meat and put it in a paper bag). Add the squash and onions and coat evenly, by tossing the veggies in the bowl or shaking the bag.

Heat ½ inch of olive oil in a large, heavy skillet. Watch it carefully and don’t let it smoke. Olive oil has a lower smoking point than many frying oils, but you want it for the flavor. Use a slotted spoon (to remove extra flour) to add the vegetables in two or three batches, depending on the size of the pan. They need enough room to fry rather than steam from the moisture in the onions.

Fry until browned on one side and then turn over and brown the other side, maybe 4 minutes per side. Remove from heat and drain. Repeat with the remaining squash and onions.

Sprinkle with thyme, check for more salt and pepper if needed, and serve hot.

SERVES 4

Vegan

The Coolness of Cauliflower, the Charm of Chard

2010-10-28T10:06:00.000-07:00

photos are from Growing Whatcom's winter produce list

When my mom took Home Ec in the Great Depression, Lincoln High School couldn’t afford much in the way of ingredients for cooking classes. She remembered making shirred eggs, over and over. A little margarine to line the custard cup, an egg, a splash of milk, salt and pepper---bake and done. However she learned to be a cook legendary among our friends, that wasn’t it.

Thinking back to my own Home Ec classes in the 1960s, it’s probably telling that I cannot recall a single thing we cooked, although I’m pretty sure Jello was involved. I can remember meals going back to early childhood, but that class at Sumner High with Mrs. Boushay, who was very nice, is a culinary blank spot. (Recalling the madras miniskirt suit I made in the sewing unit is another matter. I was not born to match seams in plaid.)

I’m pretty sure that the students taking Lois Rienstra’s cooking classes at the high school where I teach will remember what they ate. The other day Bobbi Sue came to my English class bubbling about the dish she and her cooking partner had made that was “pure awesomeness.” When I asked her about it, she zipped back down the hall and brought me some, and she was right. Bobbi Sue is not one of your teenage vegan greenie types, nor does she think a whole lot of things in life are awesome, but the recipe that made us both happy featured cauliflower, chard and potatoes, fresh from the Growing Whatcom CSA.

Obviously, things are changing in high school kitchens. Lois has put a portion of her program’s buying power into local food this year, which is particularly appropriate at our rural school since many of the students are from farming and farm-working families. Some of her young cooks spend summers and vacations growing the very vegetables that they are learning to cook with imagination and respect. It’s good to see those transformations—fieldworkers into chefs, a kid’s response to Swiss chard going from “gross!” to “awesomeness!” Lois’s catering class takes the local food message back out into the community by including CSA produce in their monthly Lions Club dinners and other commercial jobs.

Growing Washington has recently added a Winter CSA, extending the season another 8 weeks into late December. This is good news for me, because the catering class has agreed to make food from Winter Harvest for our Literature Live night at Village Books, Dec. 8. I hope that any local readers will stop by to say hi, have a snack, and see what good work they do.

I am also excited to start getting my own winter CSA box from Osprey Hill Farm in Acme, starting next weekend.

Both programs have information online:

http://www.growingwashington.org/foodbox/csadetail_winter.php

http://www.ospreyhillfarm.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/CSA_info__sign_up.pdf

And here’s the recipe for Bobbi Sue’s “pure awesomeness,” courtesy of Growing Whatcom CSA:

Cauliflower, Chard and Leek Gratin

1 medium head of cauliflower, florets only

1 bunch of chard, cleaned, stem removed and chopped

1 leek, white and light green parts only, washed well and chopped

¼ cup chopped shallot

1 T olive oil

2T butter

2T flour

¼ cup cream

1¾ cup 2 percent milk

1 cup grated Grana Padano cheese (optional)

½ cup grated Parmesan

salt and pepper to taste

Steam the cauliflower until tender crisp, about 10 minutes. Set aside. Heat the olive oil in a large pan, sauté the leek and shallot for a few minutes until just starting to turn golden. Add the chard and sauté until just wilted. Mix with the cauliflower in a roasting pan.

Make the béchamel. Start by melting the butter in a sauce pan. Add the flour and whisk until it begins to turn golden and smells “nutty” and no longer like raw flour. Add the cream and milk slowly, whisking as you go to keep it smooth. Add the nutmeg. Whisk over low heat until it thickens. Add the Grana Padano cheese and whisk until melted and smooth. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Pour the sauce evenly over the cauliflower mixture. Sprinkle with the Parmesan cheese. Bake at 350 F for about 15-20 minutes until the top turns golden and is heated through.

Sweet Potato Report

2010-10-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

Probably I couldn’t have picked a less promising summer for my first try at Pacific Northwest sweet potatoes.

I bought five slips from Territorial Seeds, rooted them in water, waited in vain for that burst of June warm weather to get them started in dirt, and finally had to put them in their container ready or not, because I was about to leave for Romania. When I got back in mid-July, three of the babies had given up the ghost, presumably discouraged by the endless chilly rain. The last two hung on, and I wheeled them around the deck like invalids on a cruise ship, following the fickle sun.

They sat, and sat, and sat, neither growing nor dying, until August when they finally perked up during our brief heat wave and put on a little growth. Then they sat some more. A week ago I upended the pot and harvest about a dozen hairy little roots. Little is the operative word. The entire “crop” probably came in at under a pound.

I roasted them along with some romano beans that weren’t going to make it to the shell stage but were getting too stringy to sauté. The flavor was excellent, actually--not as sweet as the garnet yams I get at the Co-op, but rich and fresh. I realized I’ve never knowingly eaten fresh sweet potatoes. Unless our forecast is for another non-summer, I’ll try them again next year.

Another semi-casualty of a cool summer in my shady yard was my kabocha squash. It actually produced four fruits on the one vine, which impressed me, but each one was the size of a medium cantaloupe, about half the usual girth.

Oh well. In a couple of weeks my winter CSA will start from Osprey Hill Farm, and while I doubt it will include sweet potatoes, I’ll bet I will have all the squash I could want.

Spiced Lentils and Collard Greens

2010-10-09T22:27:00.000-07:00

Another recipe from Winter Harvest: I have a lot of collards this year, and I've been using them in all sorts of ways. This one is an East African combination familiar to fans of Ethiopian restaurants. The blend of strongly flavored greens, mellow lentils and hot spices makes a feast out of plain materials, and a dab of yogurt or cottage cheese adds a cool counterpoint, rather like the Indian curry/raita pairing. Despite their association with tropical cuisines, hot peppers are more reliable producers in cool summers than are most sweet varieties. Their smaller size and thinner flesh require less sun and heat to develop. My friend Mary Jean preserves her hot peppers from the garden by removing the seeds and freezing them on trays. They stay in freezer bags until needed for cooked recipes and they retain their fresh taste although not their crisp texture.

2 tablespoons canola oil, butter, or niter kibbeh (an Ethiopian spiced butter)

1 medium onion, chopped fine

1 tablespoon finely chopped ginger root

4 cloves garlic, minced

2-3 fresh or frozen hot green chilies

1 cup lentils, rinsed and drained

2 cups water

½ pound trimmed collard greens, shredded or chopped (about 3 cups)

1 teaspoon ground cardamom

1 teaspoon salt

black pepper

yogurt

Heat oil or butter in a large heavy saucepan or skillet. Sauté onion, ginger, garlic, and chilies over medium heat until the vegetables soften, maybe 5 minutes. Add lentils, water, and collards. Bring to a simmer, and then cook over low to moderate heat, stirring occasionally, for about 20 minutes. Lentils should be tender but not dissolved into mush and the whole mixture should be more like porridge than soup. Stir in cardamom, salt and pepper. Add hot sauce or sprinkle with cayenne if you like it hotter.

Pass yogurt on the side.

SERVES 6

Vegetarian, gluten-free

To check out a collards discussion by folks who really care, eg, Southerners, go to http://blogs.ajc.com/food-and-more/2010/10/07/alternative-recipe-for-collard-greens/

The new Winter Harvest should be off the press next week! At that point in a book project, when it's too late to make changes, anticipation always turns to fear that some glitch got through that will frustrate any cooks who use it. But right now I'm very excited to see it between covers. New Society has done a beautiful job with the design, and Celeste Henriquez's vegetable drawings are exquisite. I'm really glad they will be getting another viewing.

Arugula

2010-10-08T09:04:00.000-07:00

For years, actually decades, I’ve grown arugula, loved it in salads and sandwiches when it was young and zippy, then felt bad and yanked it when it inevitably and quickly got big and too hot for comfort. For some reason it never occurred to me to try cooking it.

Arugula, by Celeste Henriquez, from Winter Harvest Cookbook

But now I have, and of course a bit of checking online makes me realize that many have gotten there before me. It’s good stuff. Cooking takes away the extra bite, so it goes back to being a strongly flavored green with a pleasant note of sesame, somewhat similar to cooked nettles. Last night I pulled some arugulas that were crowding out the winter lettuce and braised them in a splash of water and olive oil. I roasted a head of cauliflower (in florets) with some Cajun spice mixture and garlic cloves; added some partially boiled potato slices (Yukon golds) to the roasting pan to get just a little crusty, and mixed the whole shebang together with a little grated Romano for a quick green, white, and yellow dinner that was the perfect transition from “long day at work” to “new songs to learn at chorus rehearsal.” There was just a bite left this morning, and it tasted fine cold, too.

I found a number of intriguing arugula recipes at Mariquita Farm’s website:

http://www.mariquita.com and next I figure to take their version of Arugula Vichyssoise and make it into a hot potato/leek/arugula soup. Mariquita (Spanish for ladybug) is in Watsonville, California, where vichyssoise in October makes perfect sense. Here the rain is pelting down and it’s dark before dinnertime, so I want something warmer.

I Found the Vegetables

2010-10-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

Awhile back I was grousing about the lack of greenery in the otherwise very tasty sandwiches at the Lightcatcher Café. According to the law of conservation of matter (is it possible I’m misapplying this?) those veggies must be somewhere, and Sunday night I found them, over at Super Mario’s Salvadoran restaurant on Northwest, across from Yeager’s. Three of us walked over and checked out their vegetarian options. I ordered a veggie Wonder Burrito. Because I wanted corn tortillas, which don’t come big enough to accommodate a burrito, I got a plate with the filling, a small side of refried beans, dab of sour cream and good fresh corn tortillas on the side.

Unlike a lot of vegetable burritos, which “make up for” the lack of meat with masses of sour cream, mystery sauces oozing like lava, and lots and lots of cheddar for that English-Latino fusion touch, this one features a variety of vegetables, piles of them, sautéed but not greasy, cooked but still crunchy. The refritos were just as I like them—cooked down to an intense dark thickness—and the whole thing made me feel well fed and happy for $6.95.

We were so engrossed in conversation, about music, old friends, social media, and the virtues of St. Louis that I completely forgot my foodie duties and didn’t sample anyone else’s meals or even take note of what they ordered, but I’ve been there before and can tell you that the chicken is good, the rice pupusas (a traditional Salvadoran dish) are particularly nice, there is a selection of baked goods in the pan dulce mode, and everything is cheap.

Super Mario’s operated for many years out of the taco truck across from the old Wilson Toyota location on James Street, where the owners did not have scope for much decorating. So if you were waiting for the chance to have your cheap Latino eats under a large portrait of Napoleon on a rearing charger, a Louis the 14^th style ballroom scene, and a number of Vermeeresque still lifes, this could be your one and only chance. Bruce Olson says they are all reproductions from the Louvre; probably he’s right, though they look different under fluorescent lights.

Apple Applesauce Pie, Oh My

2010-10-05T21:31:00.000-07:00

The new Winter Harvest will be in stores in a few weeks, which means I'll be doing some promotion, which means it's time to reacquaint myself with some of the recipes I haven't made in awhile, and with the whole idea of following recipes faithfully. Once the manuscript went to the publisher, I mostly went back to my casual approach to measurements and cooking times. That works fine for real life, but less so for food demonstrations when I want to be able to assure people that if they follow the same procedure, they will get similar results.

So tonight I made an old favorite from the book, Apple Applesauce Pie, and it was reassuringly good. I used Tsugaru apples from Bellewood Acres, the last of last year's applesauce from Sumas apples, Breckenridge Farms milk and butter, an Organic Valley egg, and Grace Harbor Farms Guernsey yogurt, which gets my vote for the world's best. Tsugarus are maybe not the ideal pie apple as they are very crisp and resist softening up much during cooking, but they taste just great.

Here's the recipe, from the book:

APPLE APPLESAUCE PIE

One day I set out to make Mrs. Anderson’s Sour Cream Apple Pie (the recipe is in Lila Gault’s Northwest Cookbook and it’s great) and found I didn’t have any sour cream. The following improvisation is a bit easier on the arteries, and it got raves. I hate making pie crust so I use a pat-in-the-pan kuchen pastry whenever possible.

1 3/4 cups unbleached flour

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 tablespoon sugar

1/3 cup butter

Sift flour, baking powder, and sugar into a bowl. Add shortening, cut into small pieces, and blend with a fork or your fingers until it resembles coarse cornmeal. Press mixture into a pie pan and bake 10 minutes at 400°F. Remove from oven and cool before filling.

Filling

2 1/2 to 3 cups apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced

2 tablespoons flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup unsweetened yogurt

1/2 cup applesauce

1 egg, lightly beaten

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 375°F. Place apples in pie shell. Combine flour, salt, and sugar in a medium bowl. Add yogurt, applesauce, egg, and vanilla and mix well. Pour over apples and bake for about 30 minutes or until mixture has set.

SERVES 6.

Yam Cake--Why??

2010-10-03T18:39:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago I stopped on the way home from Trout Lake to hear my friend Karen Shivers sing jazz and—not incidentally—to eat great sushi at Hiroshi’s on Lake Union. Along with the sublime house rolls I decided to try konnyaku, “yam cakes” with miso sauce.

What I imagined was a sort of vegetable version of Japanese fish cakes, which I’ve always liked, right down to their dayglo dye jobs. They are about as processed as a McDonald’s chicken nugget, and I rarely eat them anymore, but I have happy memories of chomping them down in one-pot meals at Tonkatsu in Seattle’s International District, several decades ago.

At Hiroshi’s yam cakes were on the separate menu slip more oriented to the Japanese catering side of their business. The server warned me that non-Japanese don’t usually like it because of the texture, which she described as “hard jelly,” and that did give me pause, but I ordered anyway and promised not to complain. I was glad for the warning because “hard jelly” was the perfect description of these dark brown, basically tasteless cubes, coated in a really good spicy miso sauce that redeemed the experience.

Later I asked a friend whose mom is Japanese and she began to reminisce happily about yam cake in soup, yam cake in stews, so I do know at least one person who appreciates its subtle qualities.

I did a bit of research and learned that they are made not from sweet-potatoes themselves but from the starch of a relative called devil’s root, so they bear about the same relation to actual sweet potatoes the way I love them--roasted with garlic--as potato starch does to a perfect fingerling. As in, no taste: The point is the texture, and its ability to carry other flavors. This puts in it in the category of aspic (hate it!), tofu (best after a stretch in a pungent marinade), factory-farmed chicken breasts (a waste of cholesterol), and a Chinese specialty, dried jellyfish, that underwhelmed me the only time I tried it.

(By the way, the white meat of pasture-raised chickens actually has an identifiable flavor, something most of us have not experienced and that therefore caused a good deal of comment this summer as we ate our way through many, many examples in Romania.)

That got me wondering about the point of such food. With tofu, one could make the case that the protein is the point, so it’s just a matter of finding ways to make it palatable. But with devil’s tongue and jellyfish, there is no such justification and there’s a fair amount of labor involved in creating it. So many cultures have examples of basically tasteless traditional favorites—lutefisk!!--that it must go beyond nutrition.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten—no compelling theories have come to mind.

"Good Food" focuses on local farms

2010-10-03T18:17:00.000-07:00

When we first moved to Whatcom County, began homesteading, and got involved in Tilth, I had a conversation with Gretchen Hoyt of Alm Hill Gardens that I still remember 30 years later. Although I grew up in the country around gardens and animals, I knew basically nothing about farming, except that the migrant workers I met as a camp liaison for a summer education program (my summer job after freshman and sophomore years in college) were living in third world conditions in the Puyallup Valley.

(It’s interesting in another light that at the time, the late 1960s, the workers in the camps I visited were First Nations people from a reserve on Vancouver Island. Their annual migration to pick berries and beans outside of Sumner was a continuation of the seasonal cycle of food gathering their tribe had followed, probably for millennia. Of course the significant difference was that instead of putting by their own stores for food and trade, they were now living in squalor while they harvested a product for someone else’s profit.)

What Gretchen said was how many skills you needed to be a successful farmer or farm worker, especially on a diversified small farm. She said if farming rewarded according to the knowledge and management abilities it took to do it well, fieldworkers would be paid like lawyers. [Gretchen, if you ever read this—I’m sure those aren’t your exact words; it’s the gist that stayed with me]

I thought of that when talking with Gretchen and Ben’s son, Joshua Craft, this summer at the Bellingham Farmers Market. Josh is farming on his own now, at Nooksack Nine Fruits and Veggies. When I saw him in mid-June, and not a sunny June as we may remember, he already had glorious ripe heirloom tomatoes. Well, actually he didn’t have them, because he had just sold the last one, at $5 a pound. In order to produce flavorful ripe tomatoes in a rainy Northwestern Washington spring, Josh had rigged up a wood-fired furnace and piped the water it heated under the soil of his greenhouse so he could plant tomatoes in January. By the time the little plants were up and in need of light, the days were getting long enough to provide it, with the actual heat still coming from below. That’s just one example of the skills he uses to grow market vegetables and find a way to make them profitable.

I thought of it again last night when I watched “Good Food,” a documentary about sustainable agriculture in the Pacific Northwest, mostly Washington state. Made by Bullfrog Films and featuring, along with a lot of gorgeous scenery, David Suzuki, Mark Musick of Tilth, Ben and Gretchen at Alm Hill Gardens, The Bellingham Farmers Market, Mallard Ice Cream, Rio Thomas (founder of the Small Potatoes gleaning project), Anne Schwartz of Blue Heron Farm near Rockport, and many more, it is that rare thing, a feel-good movie about our food system.

In the movie Ben and Gretchen talk again about the mismatch between the service farm workers provide for us and the pay and respect they get. Ben says that growing and harvesting the food we depend on is the most necessary job there is, and deserves to be seen as such. “We pay our workers better than Walmart,” said Ben, discussing his and Gretchen’s priorities as business owners. “That’s not saying much,” Gretchen responded. (Of course Ben and Gretchen themselves don’t make anything like what Sam Walton of Walmart did. He was the second richest man in the world when he died in 1992.)

Besides better food and less dependence on ever-scarcer oil, local sustainable agriculture provides benefits that may not be as obvious outside the small communities where more farmers live. Among them are increased control and increased satisfaction for the farmers themselves, something we all want from our jobs. Billy Allstot grew up outside Tonasket on a commercial apple orchard and now grows vegetables, herbs, and flowers for direct sales to farmers markets. In the film he said that when he was an apple grower for a wholesaler, he would truck his crop to the warehouse and that was that. Except for the check, he never heard another thing. No praise or critiques, he never saw a customer bite into an apple and smile, never even knew what continent his fruit went to. Now he can get to know his customers, answer their questions, and literally stand behind his product. If tastes and trends evolve, he knows it right away and can adapt to meet them.

As a high school teacher out in the county, I see yet another benefit. Many of my students are the children of farm workers (and work the fields themselves in the summer). When I started teaching there in the mid-1990s, it was rare for a child from a fieldworking family to graduate high school. Constant moves and the frequent need to stay home to help out thinned the ranks of children who could stay in school. Rarer still was a farmworker’s child who participated in extracurricular activities, which presupposes a degree of stability and some spare time. Now it’s different. Diversified sustainable farms, are labor intensive, and the skills they require mean that workers are less interchangeable. The children of the families working at Alm Hill Gardens have some stability, they can make plans, and they don’t always have to grab every possible chance to make another dollar for their families in the short run. Those kids are taking AP classes, they are heading to college, they turn out for sports, they head after-school clubs and run for ASB

You can get the movie from the Bellingham/Whatcom County Library.

Some links:

http://www.sustainablenorthwest.org/stories/blue-heron-farm/ has a very interesting interview with Anne Schwartz

http://www.facebook.com/smallpotatoesgleaningproject