A Sea of People and Produce

I'm lucky to live within biking distance of a year-round farmers market, no small feat here in the icy, snowy, slushy, sleety Northeast. That said, lately I've been driving because this is what the bike path looks like:



Last weekend the Northampton Winter Farmers Market transmogrified into the Northampton Winter Fare. This is part of series in which several local winter markets merge together and, like Voltron, create something even more formidable.

The Fare was jam-packed, partly with people selling packed jam. It was inspiring to see so many people come out on a frosty Saturday to support their local farmers, and the offerings were top notch: chickens, eggs, grass fed beef, honey, maple syrup, cider, apples, root veggies, blackcurrant cordial and so forth. My favorite purchase was a broccoli plant.



While most vendors were selling vegetables that had already been picked, one offered pots full of lettuce ($2) and broccoli ($5). For little more than the cost of a severed head of broccoli, you could buy a still-living broccoli and guillotine it yourself. The farmer assured me I'd have a nice, full crown and then smaller rabe-like offshoots for the next month or two. I'd say buying it was a no-brainer, except that the young crown looks like a little green brain.

While surfing the sea of like minded food devotees and gawking at people hawking frost-sweetened veggies and sacks of apples, I was overcome with a single powerful thought: imagine if none of this existed. A few years ago, it didn't.

I can't believe how quickly the local foods movement has come into being. A few years ago, the high school cafeteria that hosted the event would have been empty except for a few stale morsels of beefaroni and the ghosts of lunchtime insults still hovering in the air. Thousands of dollars would not have gone to small farms, and thousands of pounds of real food would not have had been bought.

Luckily, all that did happen. And luckily, the patrons had the good sense to ignore the sign on the door to the venue.

Real Eggs, For Real

A real egg has a thick shell that you actually have to crack, not just look at the wrong the way.

A real egg has a carrot-colored yolk, and it doesn't drip out of its shell: it leaps!

A real egg tastes like chicken butter.

The above photo features (real) eggs from my local far-mar scrambled with leeks, which is one of my favorite combos on earth, much more so than Combos. (Of the two, I prefer the one that doesn't sponsor a race car.)

When cracking the eggs to make this ideal breakfast, which also featured pan roasted taters and raw Napa cabbage with a sprinkling of cider vinegar, I remembered just how good a real egg can be, especially in contrast to the alleged supermarket counterparts that I've been using lately.

Don't be fooled by supermarket (or even gourmet supermarket) eggs claiming to be real eggs just because they come in cardboard and prominently display an image of a field at sunrise. A real egg comes from a chicken that has room to move about and eats real food, as opposed to sitting in a pen eating pellets that are technically organic but probably come from China. A real egg might come in a package that (gasp!) has nothing on it all.

Pseudo-real supermarket eggs may come in cardboard, they may be brown, and they may make claims like "cage-free," "organic," or "all-natural," but they just don't compare with eggs raised by your local dirty hippie socialist farmer.

A real egg has backbone. And I like to think that some of that backbone transfers to eater. But not literally, which would be gross.

Vermmmont 2010: Wood Stove Oyster Mushrooms

Chole's homemade Mexican food is not the only reason I like the Craftsbury, VT farmers market. I also like it for every other reason.

The market's produce is as picturesque as its backdrop: there are the Green Mountains, and then there are the mountains of greens.

Though it looks quaint, the Craftsbury market is a radical departure from the industrial food system that appears as though it keeps trying to poison us with salmonella. Maybe it's the fact that the market is a stone's throw from Sterling College, which teaches sustainable farming almost as a way of life, or the fact that's it's just Vermont.

This year I was surprised to find one farm selling gorgeous oyster mushrooms that they cultivate on inoculated logs. I bought a half pound (for half the price that I expected) and that night Peter cooked them up with a splash of sherry and some raw milk redolent of alfalfa.

It was a cold night for the summer, reaching down into the 40's, which made sleeping on the hammocks outside a little challenging for the same reason that bridges ice before roads. But that meant we had the wood stove going, and when you've got a wood stove going, why turn on the gas stove? Peter simmered the mushrooms atop it.

Locally grown oyster mushrooms simmered in local, raw milk, a wood stove, a communal meal, human interaction, no salmonella, community: this is precisely what Stephen Budiansky pretends to forget about the local foods movement.

Stone Soup Dinner, Part 1

This year I'm on the planning committee for the Stone Soup Dinner, an event that showcases the agriculture bounty of Concord, MA. We kicked off the planning sessions with what else but a pig roast.

I'd had pig roasted in a Caja China (now with bottle opener!) once before, and it was terrible. Not tender, it was kind of like chewing bubble gum that tasted like pork. Which isn't something I'd be adverse too, but eventually I do like to swallow my food. This pig, however, was divine, with tender flesh and super-crackly skin.

As good as the pig roast was, the full scale dinner promises to be even better. If you live in Boston or anywhere else in the Metro-West area, clear your calendar for September 26th. See here for a list of Concord businesses at which you can purchase tickets.

Mr. Vongerichten Goes to Boston

See today's Globe for my article on the Boston opening of Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten's 25th restaurant.

His farm-to-table concept, called Market, already exists in three other cities around the world. Which is why I thought it was so funny to write the following line:

"The Boston Market, not to confused with Boston Market..."

My editor disagreed. See the whole thing here:

http://www.boston.com/ae/food/restaurants/articles/2009/09/30/vongerichtens_latest_venture_has_international_flair_regional_flavor/?page=1

A Local, Vegan, Wacky Wedding

I spent this past weekend up in Maine at a wedding which revolved largely around food, as all festivities should. The bride is vegan, the groom vegetarian, and both are deeply committed to the local agricultural scene and to the DIY lifestyle in general. Which is why their cake was topped with shrinky dinks of themselves.



All of the bubbly, and there was a lot of it, was a ginger champagne brewed and bottled by the bridegroom and spray-paint stenciled by the groom's sister and brother-in-law.



Other menu items made by the couple included seitan (for 120), kimchee and sauerkraut made with local produce (I love the idea of Maine kimchee), a bowl of super garlicky hummus the size of a small child, and momos for all. For those who didn't want ginger champagne, they had also home brewed IPA, hefeweizen and ginger beer, which went into many a dark and stormy.



Also, all guests were required to wear fake mustaches like the one seen here on the groom's finger.

The wedding was a celebration of both love and local produce. Not only did they feed everyone with sustainably grown ingredients, but they did so creatively and colorfully. So I was struck by the contrast between that experience and this comment left on my last blog post:

"Good grief, your ideological crap about local produce has been debunked many times over and you are still on about it. Get a grip, retard."

Clearly, the anonymous author of the statement above has never been plied with locally made ginger champagne and kimchee. Also, they're stupid.

The Return of Local Fruit

In New England we're now safely into strawberry season, and I know this because I've been eating a few out of the garden every day. Finally, we can all stop pretending that rhubarb is fruit.

In this part of the world, the strawberry heralds the return of fresh, local fruit and produce in general. Some of us do eat locally grown fruit throughout the winter, thanks to canning, drying, freezing and stockpiling apples, but there's nothing like the taste of some fructose picked at its peak.



The rest of my meager but satisfying kitchen garden is also coming along. The old fence we filled with our landlord's (horses') manure has held up well, and we've got two of the beds pictured above. To the strawberries, sorrel and garlic that survived the winter, we've added cilantro, spinach, lemon cucumbers, broccoli, broccoli rabe, zephyr squash, arugula and romaine. There are a few spaces left that I'd love to fill with ground cherries or tomatillos.



We've also added several herbs on the notion that perennial herbs in containers are the most non-committal form of kitchen gardening. These include anise hyssop, lemon thyme, lavender, sage, rosemary, and eucalyptus. I look forward to making a tisane from one leaf of each.

There are also a handful of wild edibles around the yard that I plan to start chowing down on in earnest as soon as I test to make sure that the soil isn't too leaden. The most exciting of these are the blackberries that each of these white blossoms will hopefully turn into.



I think of gardening as an extremely low stakes game of chance with an incredibly high payoff (if something that is low stakes can also have a high payoff). The worst case scenario is that you lose a few bucks while still having gotten exercise, time outside, and that ineffable sense of joy that comes from planting something you, or rabbits and squirrels, can eat.

My Other Kitchen Garden is a Tropical Paradise

My apologies for not posting since last week, but I've been swamped. Literally: I'm visiting family in Florida. Yes, like Mark Bittman, my parents live in Delray.

There are many obvious differences between South Florida, where I grew up, and Maynard, MA where I now live. For instance, when I go swimming in Massachusetts, there's nothing in the water that can kill me. In Florida, there are many things.

The windows of my apartment look out over maple, walnut, and beech, none of which currently have leaves. But as I type this from my mom's porch I see palm trees, strangler figs, live oak, and Spanish moss, all cloaked in undying green.

Besides myself, there are some species that somehow manage to thrive both here and there. Blue jays and squirrels, for instance. I even saw elders in bloom at a nearby wildlife refuge, though they also grow on the pond behind my apartment that so recently was skateable. Our elders won't bloom for weeks, but I'm amazed that one variety of the plant can endure sub-zero temperatures while the other can withstand the constant gawking of sunburnt tourists.

But the greatest divide lies in the kitchen garden. As you know, mine has nothing but a tuft of sorrel and a few garlic sprouts. But my mom's has, in various stages of development...

Mango.



Avocado.



Meyer's lemons.



Lizards.



And the pineapple pictured at top, plus nine more, all grown from sticking the cut-off tops of other pineapples into the dirt. No aspect of life in New England, except being cold, is that easy.

Sadly, despite the drastic differences in locale, supermarkets in both MA and FL are full of the same exact stuff, most of it horrible: hard plums from Chile, flaccid asparagus from Mexico, and tomatoes grown by slave labor.

I dream of a world were regional food is more distinct than just saying hoagie or grinder, and not just for gastronomic reasons (there's also environmental, social, political and spiritual fruits to reap). Thankfully, we're getting closer to it.

Photography Note: You'll also notice a completely different quality of light in these photos than in any I've taken up North. As in the Low Country pics, the light down here is much whiter.

Happy (Tree) New Year!

I just wrote an article about Tu B'Shevat, a holiday which is known as the Jewish Arbor Day and the new year for trees. The date coincides with the blossoming of the first fruit trees in Israel, a fact which is hard to register given how numb my hands are as I type due to the eleven degree windchill that I just walked the dog in.

My Tu B'Shevat menu synthesized Middle Eastern fare, Israeli tree crops, and local, seasonal New England foods. Every dish contained at least one ingredient from a tree, even if it was just cinnamon. For instance, sweet potatoes glazed with palm sugar, naan with carmelized onions, goat cheese and dates, and banana cream pie.

For those of you who object because the banana is not a true tree, don't worry, the pie also had lemon curd. We washed it all down with hard cider and pine tea, both tree products and both locally made/foraged, even now in the dead of winter.

While it might seem strange to celebrate spring in winter, there is a convenient connection for those who wish to find a relevant, tree themed event currently happening in the U.S. Here, Tu B'Shevat also marks the start of maple syrup season.

Coincidence? Yes. See here for the article.

Finally, Something That Does Grow on Trees

As I pulled into the driveway last night, I caught two interesting objects in my headlights. One was my dog Oli, chewing a stick twice his size while on a walk with Elise. The other was a plastic gallon jug that clung to the trunk of our neighbor's maple. If you're from New England, you probably know what that means: syrup season.

Turns out that our neighbor, a retired engineer, started tapping all the sugar maples on the block about two years ago. When I inquired about the presence of the many floating milk jugs, he gave me a tour of the trees and explained the process, which he kept describing as "really easy" and "so simple!"

Though legally blind, he can still make out the sugar maples by their bark. He drills two to three inches into them, inserts a short metal tube, and sticks a milk jug on it. The sap flows when you've got freezing nights and warm days, and on a good day he might get a gallon of sap from a single tree. Of course this has be cooked down to about one fortieth its volume, but the (clean) plastic trash can in which he stores the sap already has about 30 gallons in it, and the season has just begun.

When I came home last night, I was hot, tired and cranky after an eight hour cooking shift. I parked the car, saw the jug on the tree, and didn't think twice. I walked over to the maple, lifted the jug off the tap, and took a swig. The tree filtered sap tasted like the cleanest water I'd ever had, with an unmistakable maple flavor. It was ice cold, it was delicious, and it was straight out of the tree.

Of course that's one-fortieth of a mouthful of syrup we won't get, but it was worth it.

The Thaw

Perhaps the only downside to locally raised meat is that much of it comes frozen. Unless you're vegetarian, in which case it's nothing but downsides.

Personally, I'd rather get my protein from a happy local cow than a soybean grown in Iowa. But this doesn't mean that I possess the forethought to thaw said cow before wanting to eat it. Hence the above photo, which captures my effort to simultaneously thaw and brown a frozen block of ground beef.

Actually, it worked. When one side of the meat-ice was done to my liking, I'd flip it and do the same to the B-side while using the spatula to shave off the finished portion. I continued doing so until the block had disappeared, at which point I turned up the heat, cooking off any remaining water and giving the meat a final toast. This served as the basis for a sauce to go with leftover (and also frozen) lasagna noodles. It was great, it was hearty, and it was local.

If you really want to eat seasonally in the winter, eat food that's as frozen as the hard, cold earth.

Clam and Celeriac Soup

Doesn't sound good, does it? Well it was.

Like most things I cook, this dish was born out of necessity. I was hungry to the point of headache, needed to use the clams, and had celeriac on hand thanks to my winter CSA.

For those who still struggle with the question of what to do with celeriac, here's my advice. Think of a dish that usually has both celery and potatoes, and just use celeriac instead, thereby killing two birds with one root vegetable. (Hmm, two birds and one root vegetable - that sounds good...)

Hence the pairing with clams, which are often served en chowder with both celery and potato. But the headache prevented me from thinking of any additional steps, so I went with a simple, clear soup.

As you may know by now, I'm a big fan of Mark Bittman, aka "The Minimalist," and this soup couldn't be more in the vein of his stripped down treatments. With only two ingredients, clam and celeriac, it was shockingly good, not to mention local, seasonal, and sustainable.

I sat down fully expecting a mediocre meal birthed from necessity and shellfish on the brink of freshness. What I got instead was one of the absolute best things I've tasted in recent memory. The pairing was unbelievably complementary, and the flavors rich, clean and bright. I slowly slurped spoonful after spoonful, completely absorbed in the marriage of surf and turf, almost in disbelief and how much there was to taste. Clams were clearly meant to release their liquor into soup, thereby creating an instant broth that you can catch every drop of.

And I'm glad I didn't spoil it with milk or other superfluous ingredients. It couldn't have been easier, and it couldn't have been better.

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Recipe: Clam and Celeriac Soup

clams (about a pound)
celeriac (about 1/2 of one)

Dice the celeriac, or celery root, into bite sized pieces.

Simmer in barely salted salted water until almost tender, at which point you add the clams, cover, and continue to simmer until they've opened.

When ready, some of the clams will have slipped out of their shells and some of the celeriac will have ended up in their place, which looks very funny. Garnish with coarsely chopped black pepper.

Serves two, or one with a headache.

Poached Quince

For anyone who was ever called "fruity" in middle school, if quince was there, it would have beaten that bully up. Quince is fruit, but it's tough.

But while a fresh quince is as tough as wooden apple, with a little heat and sugar, quince can turn into a real peach. Well, not a real peach.

The fact that quince is a fruit that can't be eaten raw has always intrigued me, and some gorgeous specimens at the Union Square green market in NYC convinced me to finally give it a go. The smell alone was worth it: just from sitting out on the kitchen table, they made the whole apartment smell like perfume.

It would be wise to familiarize yourself with quince, as I'm sure we're going to see more of them as heirloom fruits and vegetables continue to reemerge from the shadows of our past. And what sounds like a better winter fruit fix: fossil fuel guzzling imported oranges or succulent, locally grown, poached quince? Unless you're a member of OPEC, I think I know which you'd prefer.

Always eager to find ways of preserving without using sugar, I poached a few in just water. These sucked. When I used sugar, the syrup turned a gorgeous, rosy color, and the fruit was fantastic.

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Recipe: Poached Quince

water
sugar
quince

Peel, seed and quarter as many quince as desired. Be prepared for them to be much tougher than you think fruit can be.

Dissolve a little less than 1/4 cup sugar per each fruit in as much water as needed to cover the quince.

Simmer until the quince becomes tender, reaching the consistency of a poached pear. Enjoy warm with toasted walnuts and a splash of the cooking liquid.

You might be able to can them at this point, but mine didn't stick around that long, so I can't say for sure.

Quote of the Day

Lionette's is Boston's only all-local meat market. These are people who are deeply concerned about the world's food supply, especially when it comes to duck fat. This hails from their always awesome monthly newsletter:

"Local and sustainable food does not cost more, the price tag on local and sustainable food is the real price for food, and there are no hidden costs."

577 Tremont Street
South End
Boston, MA 02118
ph: 617-778-0360

Repurposed Goat

Last night I made these goat shoulder chops from Codman Farm. And by made I mean "screwed up."

With a choice cut I can make a great steak, I do wonders with ground meat and sausage, and I can braise pretty much everything else with excellent results. The common thread is that all three preparations result in tender meat. It's the only way I want to eat meat, when I do. But if I'm in possession of an unfamiliar cut, as I am more and more from buying locally raised meats, and I don't want to slow cook, I'm often stumped.

I had planned to braise these goat shoulder chops for a few hours, but when I saw how tender they were, I decided to broil. If I had trimmed off everything that shouldn't have been there, it might have worked, but as is they were too much of a wrestling match to enjoy. So I got out the crutch and did some low and slow simmering, and the result was a rich, flavorful stew.



For lunch today I browned the remaining meat and bones left over from our picking at them the night before. At the same time I browned garlic cloves and red onion, then added cumin, bay leaves, a whole dried pepper, leeks, and a can of tomatoes and let it go for about an hour.

The bones, fat, and connective tissue that had made these such bad chops made for a great stew.

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Recipe: Goat Chop Stew

1 chop per person
1 can tomatoes
1 tbsp powdered cumin
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp black pepper
1 whole, dried chile
2 bay leaves
2 onions
3 garlic cloves, whole
the juice of 1/2 a lemon
resourcefulness

Note: The only essential ingredients are the goat and tomatoes, the spices are completely variable (cinnamon and clove are excellent with this or lamb).

Broil the goat chops. Try to eat them, get disappointed, and put the remaining scraps away for later.

Brown those remaining scraps in a splash of olive oil along with the onion and garlic.

Add all remaining ingredients, except the lemon juice. Stir once to combine, then let cook on high for five minutes, giving the tomatoes a chance to slightly caramelize. Stir again and reduce heat to a simmer.

When the meat is tender and the leeks are soft (45 minutes in my case), add the lemon juice. Serve over rice.

Roasted Rotating Root Veggies

If you aren't doing so already, start eating this.

This year roasted root veggies are making up a large part of my winter diet. Partly because we're getting a lot from our CSA, and partly because they seem like the most perfect cold weather food. There's something about this season that just makes me want to eat things that grow underground.

A hearty portion of veggies like these goes a long way. I'm finding that a big dose of tubers and bulbs takes the place of both the starch and vegetable in a given meal, thereby compromising about 80% of what I feel the need to eat. A plate of these plus a drumstick or a slab of tofu and you're in business. A slice of bread and some salad? Superfluous.

I used to think of this dish as a specialty item, but I recommend that everyone bump it up to staple status. The key to not getting bored with it is to keep things in rotation. Thanks to the CSA, I have turnips, sweet potatoes, unsweet potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, parsnips, and some stuff I can't identify but which looks great. Any three of those will do, so you can imagine the possibilities and varying degrees of sweetness.

My advice is to buy a bunch of different kinds of root veggies and then make them in different combinations. They'll last forever, plus you don't need much of any one of them at once. When you take a little from each root, your pan is often too full. And like the price of olives at an olive bar, the roasting temp for all of these is roughly the same, so mix and match with abandon.

Filling veggies may sound like an oxymoron to anyone who hasn't experienced them, but I could almost live on these alone.

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Recipe: Roasted Root Veggies

1 tbsp coarse salt
3/4 tbsp rosemary (more if fresh)
3 twists of a pepper grinder
oil to coat
Equal parts of any of the following: beets, potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, carrots, onion, parsnip

Pre-heat the oven to 400.

Cut the veggies into bite sized pieces - they smaller they are, the faster they cook.

Note: I only peel the parsnip and beets.

Toss well with the remaining ingredients.

Roast at 400 for 45 minutes to an hour, tossing three times to ensure equal oil coverage. Toss gently, with two metal spoons, to avoid breakdown.

They're done when a fork meets little resistance from each variety of veggie.

Dehydration Hesitation

Despite my recent rant against unnecessary kitchen gadgets, I've acquired what could be considered the ultimate in excessive, bulky appliances: a food dehydrator.

I've used it a few times with excellent results, but I'm unconvinced that the dehydrator is the way to go when it comes to preserving. On the plus side, sapping the moisture out of foods like peaches and peppers enables me to save locally grown produce from the time they're picked until the apocalypse.

The downside is that the thing needs to run for up to twelve hours to do so, which draws out not only moisture but also electricity. And as clean an energy source as electricity seems, remember that it's really just coal that comes out of your wall. People say that dehydrating doesn't use any more energy than a light bulb, but I don't leave those on for twelve hours either.

The strongest argument against the dehydrator is that it reminds me of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The dehydrator is a substitute for knowledge, proof that we've lost touch with time tested methods of preservation like like sun drying and smoking. But the fact of the matter is that I don't yet possess all of that knowledge, I love Massachusetts peaches, and I want to eat them in the winter.

That said, it was sad to see them go from this...



To this:



Why not can? It seems criminal to add sugar to a peach, and anything canned "in water" is just pathetic.

Aren't hot peppers the poster child for air drying? Yes, but not necessarily in New England. For instance, when I got these peppers it was so damp that they began to rot and attract fruit flies. In the future I hope to do more air drying, sun drying, smoking, pickling, and fermenting, but for now I'll sit back and enjoy the low hum.

Also, when I dried the peaches it was particularly chilly out, and the dehydrator made a nice foot warmer.

Edible Nation: Haley House

Boston's own Haley House, a Catholic worker house/soup kitchen/restaurant/farm/low income housing center/educational facility was written up in the most recent Edible Boston. The story then made the cover of Edible Nation. Check it out:

http://www.ediblecommunities.com/ediblenation/

My favorite quote is from Boston Police Officer Bill Baxter, aka "Donut," who teaches gang resistance through cooking:

"The way we prejudge foods (such as "I plain hate onions") is the same mental mechanism that we use to prejudge people."

Verrill Farm Barbecue

It was fire that sought to destroy Verrill Farm, and it is fire that they now tame to cook barbecue. And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

Along with smoke and spices, you can taste defiance in their recipe. Despite massive setbacks, Verrill has every intention to rebuild using events like the weekly barbecue to help get things going. Pulled pork sandwiches are available every Thursday from 3-5pm (or until it lasts) and are made from meat raised in Massachusetts.

I went last Thursday, and despite bitter cold and howling wind they stuck it out until everyone had gotten their sandwich. One patron donated a hat to the young man serving the 'cue from a chafing dish. Clearly he was eager for the opening of their temporary farmstand, which unlike their current operation will have walls.

On the eve of a new administration and with the global food crisis raging, the liminal space Verrill occupies represents the razor's edge on which our systems of food production cling. Just as the life of the pig ends to support the life of the Concordian foodies who eat it, so does community support help Verrill sprout anew from the ashes.

Unlike other forms of activism, the rewards here are pretty concrete. Support a local farm, get a great sandwich.

Mark Twain, Locavore

Was Samuel Clemens the original locavore? To read on, see here for my first guest post on the Chefs Collaborative blog.