FOOD ON THE FOOD

Pickling Cookbook Winners

Wow, I learned so much about you guys (and pickles in general) from your comments on the last post.  For example, there seem to be a lot of us in love with pickled beets. I dare say we have good taste.  Calamity Jane of Apron Strings writes of the pickled fiddleheads and wild cucumber she made in her Alaskan kitchen.  Gillis raves about the Grillo’s Pickles cart on Boston Common (2 spears for $1 all summer at the Park St. T stop).  Bobbie fondly remembers the giant pickles on a stick at the Wisconsin State Fair.  Pengwenhsd once had a man propose to her upon tasting her homemade bread and butter pickles.  And the favorite jarred brand seems to be Claussen dills (a recipe for a homemade version is here).

But where people got downright poetic was talking about Jewish deli pickles. Fellow blogger Aimee of New To Farm Life writes:

“I'm a pickle fanatic and it is hard to pick just one. But as I was thinking about it, a pure and perfect memory came back to me. I'm about seven years old, and we've gone to New York to visit my grandparents. Mom has dragged us kids around museums all day and we are ravenously hungry. We go into a real old-fashioned New York delicatessen to pick up food to eat on the train home. I've never been in a place like this (West Coast child) and am stone cold fascinated by the deli case with its bright salads, slabs of fish, a hundred kinds of cheese. Up on top of the counter, above my head, is a gigantic glass crock full of equally gigantic pickles. I point it out to brother and sister and we set up a ruckus, clamoring for pickles. The pickles, when we get them, are so big we can't close our fists around them, and they are so briny and crisp and delicious my mouth fills up with water. I can remember everything about those pickles - the snap they made when we bit into them, the warty cool skin of them, the cloudy brine in the jar swirling with garlic and spices. Most of all I remember the feeling of being small and curious, wide-eyed in a new place, with my mother beside me, teaching me, showing me, interpreting the world for me.”

What a fabulous pickle story! 

Reader Ashley writes of her grandmother’s pickles:

“My grandma made the best dill pickles. They were left in their brine on the porch of her bungalow in the Catskills, the center of summer life for Jewish New Yorkers escaping the city heat. The pickles had much of the old country in them, with a garlicky bite and ultra-satisfying crunch. The perfect refreshing summer snack, though I often ignored my mom's warnings, gorged on the salty treats, and woke up in the middle of the night parched.”

Mmmmmm.  Can anybody else use a drink right now?

There were even some requests for other readers’ pickle recipes (some of these requests are my own):

1. Millie’s carrot and daikon radish recipe;
2. The refrigerator half-sour recipe from Pickledbeets; and
3. The pickled shiitake recipe from the Momofuku cookbook that Louisa mentioned (though I just helped myself to that recipe from this fine blog).

So good work, people.  I wish I had 30 cookbooks to give out.  Do we have 30 cookbooks to give out, Storey?  Just kidding.  (Unless we do.) 

In order to be fair, and instead of writing names on pieces of paper and making Husband pull them out of a box like I’ve done in the past, I used a random number generator to pick the number of the winning commenters.  And the winners of a copy of Put 'Em Up by Sherri Brooks Vinton are:

16. Pickledbeets

26. Kate

Winners, I will be in touch.  For the rest of you, don’t worry, there will be other raffles in the future.  I won’t rest until everybody’s won something good.

Get Your Pickles On!

Okay, people, I’m feeling generous again.  Now that school is out and it’s officially summertime, I have pickling on my mind.  Even more so since I started flipping through the new book Put ‘Em Up by Sherri Brooks Vinton, a charming ode to canning, pickling, and other methods of putting food by.  An excerpt:

“…Home food preservation is a natural progression of the Real Food Revival—our increasing demand for food that is grown the way it should and used to be.  We want food that’s good for the farmer, the environment, and ourselves.  Putting up food is part of this passion.  It’s part of coveting the harvest so much that you can’t let it slip through your fingers so fleetingly.  It’s part of cherishing the work of local growers or your own toil in the backyard and wanting to hold on to some aspect of that even when fields lie fallow.”

Well, not so much my own toil.  I prefer to cherish other people’s toil, but I get her point.  Plus pickling is like tasty time travel.  Not only does it yield a healthful, homemade snack, but it also allows you to return to a moment, a place, a memory—whether it’s the sunny spot where you picked your own summer beans or the rainy morning when you finally decided to bite the bullet and boil some jars.  You get to remember those simple pleasures many months down the road while eating something delicious that you thoughtfully put aside for yourself.

This book is a great introduction to the art of freezing, drying, brining, canning, and otherwise storing your bountiful summer produce for later enjoyment.  Included are recipes for quick and fermented pickles, like dilly beans, pickled beets, and sauerkraut.  Other recipes that had me daydreaming: cherry and black pepper preserves, spicy peach salsa, sweet pepper marmalade, charred chili barbecue sauce, fennel and onion jam, rhubarb jelly, roasted pepper ketchup, and watermelon granita.  Plus it has such cute pictures of hand-labeled jars.  Adorable!

So here’s the deal.  Storey Publishing, a nice little publisher out in western Mass., will give away two cookbooks, one to each of two lucky readers.  And all you have to do is regale me with a story about the best pickle you ever had in the comment section.  That’s right, one more homework assignment before you’re off for the summer.  But if you win, you have to promise you’ll actually make something out of the book.  No entering yourself in the lottery and then letting the book sit on a shelf.  I’ll walk over there and take it back.

Okay, enough with the empty threats.  You have until sometime on Sunday.  Ready, set, go!

Are Those Mulberries on My Salad?

Why, yes.  Yes, they are.  I found some new mulberry trees in a secret location where the branches are low and the competing wildlife less voracious.  (Also, I noticed that the black raspberries are starting to come into their own, so keep your eye out for those, too.)

I love turning salad into dessert.  Because do you know how much salad I eat when it tastes like dessert?  Four times as much.  So much that having “a little salad” before my evening jog turns into “a lot of salad” before my evening jog such that I practically throw up halfway through my evening jog.  Add this to the list of totally preventable circumstances if only I could have helped myself.

The responsible salad was farmshare greens (lettuce, spinach, arugula, endive) with foraged mulberries, sliced red onion, goat cheese, and walnuts with a balsamic vinaigrette.  It was delicious next to rosemary and fennel-crusted pork chops.  (I might have eaten a little of those, too.)  (And a hunk of defrosted baguette.)

Anyway, I don’t need any lectures, Husband.  I’ve already learned my lesson about stuffing myself a half-hour before physical exertion.  And the lesson is that jogging is dumb!

Local Ingredient Sources:
Lettuce, spinach, arugula, endive: Waltham Fields, Waltham, MA
Mulberries: Waltham, MA
Goat cheese: Westfield Farm, Hubbardston, MA
Pork chops: Chestnut Farms, Hardwick, MA

The Easter Bunny Returns

I proclaimed today to be Mulberry-Picking Day.  Ready or not, here we come! 

I grabbed the 4YO, the now-traditional Easter basket, and some raincoats, and we headed back to the Charles River.  Some of the mulberries were nice and ripe, and those we picked.  Unfortunately, most of the best ones were out of arm's reach.  It seems I’m not the only one who knows about these berries (and, from what I can tell, they all have a good six inches on me).  I pulled the branches down as low as they would go, but the birds only mocked me more.  The berry-laden upper two-thirds of the trees are their domain, you see, and as much as I’d love to, I can’t be climbing trees.  I’ve spent enough time in hospitals.

Luckily, on our walk, we found the perfect grabber stick.  It was about 6 feet long, light but sturdy, with three short branch stumps sticking out like stick-figure fingers.   With that, I was able to make contact with high branches and shake them until the berries fell to the ground.  The 4YO thought that was the funniest thing—having berries rain down over our heads and shoulders.  The trick was then to try to tell which berries just fell and which ones had been down there for a while.  Most of what we collected got eaten.  The rest will be scattered over tonight’s salad.

On the walk back, we saw all kinds of different birds and a pair of turtles. 

A far-sighted great blue heron nearly knocked me over as we crossed a footbridge.  I didn’t even see him coming until we were face to face.  I could have touched him.  The 4YO, being 10 paces ahead, didn’t get to see him, which is too bad because he’s crazy about birds.  He practically has the Peterson guide memorized.  As for me, I know the obvious birds.  The ones with the most blatant colors and markings, like cardinals and goldfinches and Baltimore orioles.  I can identify the shit out of a red-winged blackbird.  It’s all the other brownish-grayish birds that are a little murky. 

We noticed a cute gray bird swooping down and catching insects in midair over the lily pads.  It was really fun to watch and the 4YO was giggling.  Then he yelled out, Eastern kingbird!  I thought he meant kingfisher, which it clearly wasn’t since I know those are blue and most likely eat fish, but I was encouraging anyway.  When we got home, we looked up the bird in the guidebook and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t an eastern kingbird! 

Back to the Farm

Our first CSA pickup of the season was this weekend, and so the summer cooking frenzy begins.  How exciting!  On Sunday, I defrosted some shrimp from my winter fish share from Cape Ann Fresh Catch and made a quick stir-fry with garlic scapes, bok choy, tatsoi, scallions, and snow peas, the latter of which we picked ourselves at Waltham Fields.  The simple sauce contained no soy.  Just two parts fish sauce to one part sugar.  Fabulous over rice. 

Then last night, I grilled chicken from Chestnut Farms and served it over salad with a lemony spinach pesto dressing (yes, the same one you made for me, Red—thanks for the inspiration).  My BFF provided the orzo pasta salad with feta and herbs.  Then came strawberry shortcake assembly.  When was the last time you had real strawberry shortcake?  Not the kind over those circular store-bought sponge cakes.  The kind over real buttermilk biscuits sliced in half so the berry juices soak in.  The kind with sweet, local strawberries not soaked in methyl iodide.  The kind with real whipped cream on top, lightly sweetened with a touch of vanilla.  If you’re not going to make my rhubarb pie, at least make my strawberry shortcake, for god’s sake.  Have you no soul? 

Sorry.  Didn’t mean to get so worked up.  It’s just that if you’re going to be eating all those delicious vegetables, I think it’s okay if you have a little dessert.

 

Spinach and Pine Nut Dressing

For those extra heads of lettuce you find yourself with at this time of year.  It's also a good use for your lemon verbena.

2 cups lightly packed baby spinach leaves (about 2 oz.)
¼ cup pine nuts
Juice from 1 lemon (about 2 Tbsp.)
Zest from 1 lemon (about 1 tsp.)
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

In a small frying pan with no oil, toast the pine nuts over medium-low heat for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until fragrant and starting to get golden-brown in spots.  Let cool.  Combine the spinach, pine nuts, lemon juice, and lemon zest in a food processor.  Pulse until well-chopped.  With the machine running, gradually add the oil, blending until the mixture reaches a creamy dressing consistency.  Add salt and pepper to taste.  Great with a grilled chicken salad.

Source: Adapted from Everyday Italian by Giada De Laurentiis.

Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush

I’m on deadline today, so this post is going to be of the 10-minute variety.  But pay attention because this may be the only time I give you more than a week’s notice about anything.  My important announcement is this: the mulberries are almost ready.  In the Boston area, that is.  Don’t miss them!

On a jog earlier this week along the Charles with my friend K, I noticed a few mulberry-looking trees.  The berries looked like elongated black raspberries on bramble-less branches that had slightly shiny, heart-shaped leaves with serrated edges.  Some leaves had a notch out of one side that made them look like children’s mittens.  Since there wasn’t any oxygen getting to my brain, I shoved a few leaves into my pocket for later identification.  Turns out, they were indeed mulberry trees. 

So today I went back for another run.  Lacking anything more appropriate, I grabbed one of the kids’ Easter baskets from the top of a closet as I left.  I know I said I would never eat anything out of the disgusting Charles River, but these trees were only near the Charles.  On the other side of the path that runs along the Charles.  Also, finders-keepers.  I jogged along with my Easter basket in hand, tailing some goldfinches, and, holy crap, there are a shit-ton of mulberry bushes along the river.  I noticed at least 10 on my little bridge-to-bridge loop.  Some of them were giant.  Unfortunately, the berries were not ripe, yet.  Most of them were still white or pinkish-red.  There were some blackish ones, but when I got up close, I realized that they were just dark purple tinged with red and not quite ready.  And the really, really black ones were just bird poop.  You only make that mistake once.

Long story short, I had to jog back empty-handed.  Well, except for the basket.  Now if you’re jogging with a big basket full of ripe, juicy berries, you might be considered a hero by a select few, like the old Russian ladies with babushkas who nod knowingly as you pass or some young person with wildish hair, but, let me tell you something.  If you’re tripping down the path with a brightly colored, plastic Easter basket that’s completely empty, accidentally humming nursery rhymes, you just look like an all-purpose moron.

Rhubarb Pie

Oh, my god, you guys, I am obsessed with rhubarb pie.  Obsessed!  Do you know how many rhubarb pies I’ve made in the past two weeks?  Three.  Three pies and nary a strawberry to be found in any of them.  Strawberries have their time and place, don’t get me wrong, but that time is when they’re raw and right out of the garden, and that place is far away from my rhubarb pies. 

This recipe comes from my friend, Cathy, whom I stalked until she gave it to me.  Yes, I’m back to my stalking ways.  Get it?  Rhubarb?  Stalks?  Shut up.  Her recipe is tart, the way I like my rhubarb, with a touch of cream, which is how I like pretty much everything.  I had to add a little more sugar to appease Husband, and double the flour because my particular rhubarb seemed to have a high water content.  I also added a lattice crust so you wouldn’t be subjected to a photo of a pie that looked like someone just vomited into a pie shell.  Now it looks like someone vomited into a pie shell and I added a decorative lattice crust!  But you know I never discriminate against ugly food on this blog.  Ugly food is the best food.

Make this pie.  Make it early and often.  And I know one of you is going to ask me if you can leave out the cream, and my answer, as always, is that you could, but why would you want to do a silly thing like that?

 

Rhubarb Pie

Yes, you can use a premade crust, but I won’t stop nagging you to make your own at least once.  Below is a recipe for a homemade butter crust.  Using half butter, half shortening will give you extra flakiness (the tradeoff is transfats).  Or you could make a lard crust.

Crust
2 cups flour
12 Tbsp. cold butter, cut into pieces
1 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
8-10 Tbsp. ice water (or more)

Filling
1 lb. rhubarb, cut into 3/4-inch pieces (3½-4 cups)
¾ cup sugar
¼ cup flour
¼ tsp. salt
½ cup heavy cream
1 Tbsp. lemon juice

For the crust, mix flour, sugar, and salt in food processor.  Add cold butter and pulse in 1-second beats until butter is the size of small peas (around 20 pulses).  Dump mixture into a large bowl and add ice water, a few tablespoons at a time, fluffing with a fork until gently absorbed.  You don’t want it wet and sticky, but if there’s too much dry flour, the dough won’t come together right.  It should just hold together when you press on it.  Don’t knead or it will become too tough.  Tear off two pieces of plastic wrap.  Dump a little over half of the dough mixture in the middle of one, and the rest in the middle of the other.  Folding over the sides of the plastic wrap, flatten the mixture into disks about an inch thick, then wrap them up, and refrigerate at least an hour or until ready to use.

Preheat oven to 450°F.  Have your 9-inch pie plate at the ready.  In a large bowl, toss rhubarb with sugar, flour, and salt.  In a small bowl, whisk together cream and lemon juice and set aside.  Retrieve your pie dough from the fridge.  Flour your counter and rolling pin well.  The dough shouldn’t stick at all.  Take the larger disk and roll it out about ¼-inch thick, about a foot in diameter.  Roll from the middle out in all directions.  Don’t grind the dough down into the counter—push it out to the sides.  If the dough sticks, sprinkle more flour.  Transfer to your pie dish by lifting the edge of the dough over the top of the rolling pin.  Gently lift and push until the dough is draped over the rolling pin (a bench scraper or even a spatula under the dough really helps).  Align dough over pie plate and gently unfurl.

Dump rhubarb mixture into pie shell.  There will be a small pile of sugar and flour in the middle.  Redistribute evenly.  Pour cream mixture over the top evenly.  Roll out the second pie crust the same way as the first, only slightly smaller.  Using a pastry wheel or sharp knife, cut thin strips for a lattice topping.  Arrange strips like so.  Fold over edges of bottom crust and crimp however you like.   Place in oven on top shelf with a baking sheet on the bottom shelf to catch any drips.  Bake 20 minutes.  Reduce heat to 350°F and bake until bubbly, puffed, and crust is richly caramelized, about 45 minutes more.  Keep an eye on the crust—if it starts to brown too much, cover with foil.

Let cool.  Serve with vanilla bean ice cream.

Local Sources:
Rhubarb: Verrill Farm, Concord, MA
Butter: Cabot, Cabot, VT
Cream: High Lawn Farm, Lee, MA

Weird Heirloom Vegetables

Today, I have a special guest blogger for you: author Novella Carpenter.  She’s an urban farmer based in Oakland, CA, where she raises vegetables, fruit, chickens, honey bees, rabbits, and dairy goats in the middle of the city.  Novella will be reading from her book, Farm City (now out in paperback), at Porter Square Books in Cambridge this coming Monday, June 7 at 7 p.m., so be sure to stop by for some funny farm stories and a seed give away.  Take it away, Novella…

I can’t help it, I like weird stuff. Like boyfriends who lie in the middle of the floor at a dinner party. Like cats with white paw pads. Like weird fruits and vegetables not available in fine stores. I’ve made it a point to collect strange fruit. I have a Seville orange tree (it’s small and I’ve still yet to get a nary a sour orange off of it). I have a sour cherry tree (we got enough cherries last year for one mind-blowing pie). Every year I graft some antique apple variety to my poor overburdened apple tree (this year it was a Winter Banana).  

Vegetables are no different; I will often wander around ethnic farmers markets with my tongue hanging out. “What is this?” I’ll ask the old ladies nearby, and they will patiently explain about taro root or chayote tendrils. A friend from Los Angeles came to visit and brought seeds for the famous giant radish of Oaxaca. I was so excited, it was as if she had brought me a suitcase full of money. This spring has been a busy one, and I’ve planted some weird vegetables that I wanted to share with you. 

Crapaudine beets (Beta vulgaris)

My sister, who lives in France, was laughing her ass off about this one when she sent me some seeds. We’re into that kind of toilet humor, and she thought maybe the etymological roots signaled that these beets were a, um, stool causer. My sister is always sending me some ancient Roman vegetable information, and these beets were apparently the original beet back in those days, before they became all rounded or striped inside.

Of course, I planted a whole bed of them. After 60 days, the leaves were looking amazing and strong so I went to harvest some for my little farm stand. This is what came out.

So that’s where the name comes from: crappy. No one bought the beets at the farm stand, and so I was left to deal with them. Being thrifty, I recognized the value of those leaves. So I made some beet chips out of them. It was easy, I just tossed the leaves in olive oil, put them in an oven at 350 degrees and cooked them for 7 minutes. They get all green and flat, perfect for tossing with salt and nutritional yeast.  

Next, I had to deal with the pathetic beetroot. I just dropped them into boiling water for a few minutes. I had very low expectations. Turned out, the thin-yucky skin slipped off to reveal a gorgeous mini-carrot-like thing.

The crapaudine beets actually tasted great! Very sweet, more like a carrot than a beet. They had a velvety texture and were lovely in a green salad tossed with boiled eggs. Thanks, Sister! I’ll never grow them for market, though.  

Bleu de Solaise leeks (Allium porrum)

Someone dumped two flats of leeks on my boyfriend. He fixed her truck, and the truck had the leeks inside—and she asked, “Does Novella want them?” Yes, Novella does. She likes free things, especially when they are heirloom leeks. These leeks, true to their name, are blue. Like that violet-y blue that is almost hallucinatory next to the dark earth. Two trays of leeks is a lot of leek. I had enough to sell at my farm stand—and enough to make leek confit.   

Confit always sounds so fancy. But in the leek confit case, it just meant that I braised the leeks in butter in a low oven for an hour. The leeks just fall apart and become gooey and caramel-y sweet. I like to use them to make leek soup (just add stock) or a leek tart (make a crust). Baby! What’s great about heirlooms like the Bleu de Solaise, is you can save the seeds and you’ll get the same beautiful blue leeks year after year.

Rampicante zucchini (Cucurbita moschata)

There’s a seed company called Baker Creek that is perfect for novelty freaks like myself. The catalog did lead me astray with a couple orders—like the Southeast Chinese cucumbers or the Thai Tigger melons that are never going to grow in foggy Northern California. Still, I love Baker Creek’s line-up. So far, I have one freak that is thriving: the rampicante zucchini.

I was drawn to it because the ad copy promised that I could eat the young squash like zucchini, and if it got older, I could eat it like winter squash. This would really solve the problem of too-far-gone zucchini, right? I also liked the name, but later heard rampicante is synonymous with the more well-known tromboncino, which I think I grew four years ago. It was just okay. Fooled again.  

Alrighty, I’m off to scan the nurseries for weird heirlooms like white tomatoes, padrone peppers, and some freaky perennial spinach.

You can read more from Novella on her blog, Ghost Town Farm. 

Lemony Asparagus Hummus

 Have you gotten your hands on any local asparagus, yet?  I did.  At Verrill Farm.  Where else have you guys found it? 

Regardless of where your asparagus came from, have I got a treat for you.  I mean, besides roasting the spears with little more than olive oil and some salt and pepper.  Lemony asparagus hummus.  I can’t stop eating this stuff.  Luckily, I don’t have to because it’s just asparagus and chickpeas and a few other little things that aren’t bad for you at all. 

Just try and stop me.  I dare you.

 

Lemony Asparagus Hummus

Serve with simple olive-oil-brushed, salt-and-peppered pita chips.  Or try the dukkah-spiced pita chips that accompanied this recipe in Yankee Magazine.

2 cups fresh asparagus, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 15-oz. can chickpeas, drained and rinsed well
2 medium cloves garlic
2 Tbsp. tahini, sesame paste
Zest of 1 lemon
Juice of same lemon
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Bring a large pot of water to a boil.  Meanwhile, fill a large bowl with ice water and set aside.  To the boiling water, add a generous pinch of salt and the asparagus.  Return water to a boil and cook about 4 minutes, until spears are tender and bright green.  Drain asparagus and submerge in the ice bath for a minute or two to stop the cooking.  Drain and set aside.

In a food processor, puree the chickpeas, garlic, tahini, lemon zest, lemon juice, and asparagus.  With the machine running, slowly pour in olive oil and process until combined.  Season with salt and pepper.  Serve with pita (bread or chips) and vegetables.

Source: Adapted from Yankee Magazine in an article by Annie Copps.