Spiced Lentils and Collard Greens

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

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.

Apple Applesauce Pie, Oh My

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??

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

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

www.goodfoodthemovie.com

Harvest Heaven

I was invited by LouInda and Budd Churchward to join their annual wine bottling at Birch Bay, which involved an ingenious tank and valve setup assembled by Budd, which allows one to fill three bottles at a time and (mostly) shuts off automatically when each bottle reaches the right corking level, a tank of argon gas (to blanket the exposed wine and keep it from oxidizing), a $1000 Hungarian oak barrel, and several old friends who have done this many times before. My main contributions were to set one of the bottles in the corking contraption at the wrong angle so it slipped out and broke, and to mislabel several cases so that “08 Merlot Reserve” will appear upside down in storage. So it’s not surprising that before long I found myself over at the picnic table, sampling a glass of last year’s bottling and eating LouInda’s divine crab pizza while the more experienced crew members finished up.

We chatted about gardens—LouInda’s friend Laurel’s challenges include one I’d never heard before—her chocolate lab is a green bean fanatic, knocking down the vines to eat them.

On the way home—already provided with a bottle of the new wine and two Dungeness crabs from the Churchward pots—I treated myself to a drive down Kickerville Road where I got some sweet corn and $1 a pound bags of cherry tomatoes and new potatoes from a no-name farm stand, and then some blue potatoes and a half-round of Mutschli cheese from Pleasant Valley Dairy. The potatoes were fresh-dug. The cheese is four years old, crumbly, and so sharp it makes your tongue tingle. By then I was in a food trance, so I doubled back and stopped at Twisted S Ranch for a package of bison osso bucco and a chat with Jim Sanford. He told me about the butcher he admires at Silvana Meats, who after some trial and error has figured out the proportions for the perfect bison/pork bratwurst.

I got home in time to mow the grass, pull some weeds, and stir a couple bags of coffee grounds into the compost. In the evening I took Hailey to the Urban Barn Dance, to raise funds for a village water project in Ethiopia. Hailey and I polished off a late dinner of injera, potatoes, lentils and cabbage.

Tomorrow I’m thinking corn fritters and roasted blue and white potatoes. The crab already is gone—one shared with friends and one given to my son-in-law, who is as besotted with good fresh food as I am, and the wine is set aside for Thanksgiving. Life is good!

Summer's end

I was out in the garden yesterday, picking a few dinner vegetables: twilight, rain, tangles of late summer vines and a few doomed squash blossoms. I got tomatoes and chard, noted the slightly spooky feel of a warm rain in the near dark, and was surprised by a soft golden glow on the deck. Despite a gray day, my little solar Japanese lantern had managed to pick up enough rays to gleam its way into early evening.

I wish we would get another extended summer like last year, but that misty, murky, transitional scene was beautiful.

I braised the veggies with some lemon-marinated tempeh, and they were very, very good.

No good deed, part 2: damage control

Damage control for gardeners and farmers affected by tainted compost is slow and labor intensive. They can dig up and dispose of (how??) all their contaminated soil, or they can wait a year, or two, or three, until the chemical biodegrades and is no longer active. Chemical testing is expensive, so the recommendation is a bioassay, which is a fancy term for planting some seedlings and seeing if they curl up and die.

Damage control for the industry takes a different form. Smit Compost's website makes absolutely no mention of the problem. However, the word from other sources is that he is working to "rebuild trust," which of course he'll have to in order to stay in business. Everything I've heard indicates this is a good guy who is now in a real bind. Some of the commercial growers with crop losses up to six figures may be coming after him for restitution at a time when his own sales have probably dropped off substantially.

Dow Chemical has a whole lot more experience with this kind of dilemma, and has perfected the trick of passing the buck while wearing an expression of deepest sympathy and concern. Check it out at:

http://www.ncagr.gov/SPCAP/pesticides/documents/AminopyralidGardenerResponse29Apr09.pdf

a few highlights, show how the pros do it:

We're the good guys:
"Aminopyralid is also used to control invasive weeds and some brush that threaten our native plant communities and wildlife habitat."

It's not our fault:
"How could aminopyralid have gotten into the manure or compost I used?"

"The short answer is that it shouldn't have. Product labeling contains warnings and detailed instructions about the use of aminopyralid-containing herbicides. If these instructions are followed, aminopyralid residues should not reach your garden."

Note the careful use of "should." Well of course the stuff should not have reached our gardens. But this has zero to do with following application directions. The folks who sprayed it on Eastern Washington hayfields may or may not have followed instructions, but they aren't the ones who fed it to Whatcom County dairy cows. Unless that label says "be sure and tell anyone who buys your hay that they mustn't sell manure to a composter," and the hay farmer then labels every single bale, the stuff is going to get into our soil. It's another illustration of John Muir's quote: "Everything you pick up, you find the whole universe is attached."

Things will be fine in no time
"How long does it take for aminopyralid to break down?"

"Aminopyralid breaks down through the action of soil microorganisms over the growing season and in many cases dissipates by the following year. However, you can only be sure that the product has completely degraded to a level that won’t injure susceptible plants by conducting the bioassay method."

Once again, note the wording "in many cases dissipates by the following year." The implication is that we can take a summer off from that pesky weeding and harvesting and be good to go next year. Not so fast. To use the same syntax, the molecule does its damage at very low concentrations and in many cases does not dissipate within one or even two years.