Tea and Food

The Latest

2011-12-21T11:25:00.001-05:00

Howdy. I'll be posting again soon, but for now check out my daily columns as the editor of Eater Boston here.

Adios Tomatoes, and other thoughts on liminal culinary spaces

2011-10-25T12:27:00.000-04:00

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory

"no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness."

- Pablo Neruda, "Oda al Tomate"

In my last post I said goodbye to peaches, or at least to fresh ones. Now I bid farewell to the tomato, that gentle engorged Peruvian berry.

It's cold out. I wore mittens to walk the dog this morning. My dog, who is from Puerto Rico and who loves the snow but not the cold, wore a little green jacket that makes him look like Peter Pan. (I never thought I'd be the kind of person to put clothes on a dog, but I never thought about a dog needing clothes.) This kind of weather tells me that I probably won't have another fresh tomato -- or rather another real tomato -- until next summer.

But the weather has nothing to do with it: each tomato could be your last. Doesn't that make them taste better?

Here we are, a link on the chain between our ancestors and our descendants, eating tomatoes in a cradle in a brief crack of light. Fall, the cloudy, muddy tunnel between summer and winter, is the season for such reflections on the space between, and many cultures take this opportunity to do so. On Halloween the veil between the spirit world and this one is at its thinnest. On Simcha Torah the end and the beginning of the torah are read back to back. On Thanksgiving, to remind us of our mortality, we scorch the marshmallows that top our sweet potatoes

Summer and winter, those are seasons! They are clear cut: summer, hot, winter, cold. You know what to do. But Fall and Spring are transitions. Nature bats us about with freezing rain one day and glorious sunshine the next. The gloves come off, and then it gets raw out and we put them back on. These seasons are liminal spaces, full of liminal foods.

One of my fondest memories in my career as a food journalist is walking around Boston farmers markets with Jean-George Vongerichten for my story in the Globe. It was right around this time of year. Jean-Georges remarked on the liminal quality of the produce, that this is the time when tomatoes sit next to apples and peaches rub shoulders with squash. He planned his menu accordingly.

I ate my last tomato, a sweet emerald beauty from a local farm, with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of truffle salt that has lost its truffleness, so really it was just salt, which is still an incredible substance. I ate it with slices of butternut squash, walnut, leek and cumin flatbread.

Adios, tomatoes.

Adios, Peaches

2011-09-26T14:52:00.001-04:00

It's that time of year: you never know which peach is going to be your last.

Or rather that's how it usually goes. But this year E. and I have put by about forty pounds of peaches in various states: frozen, canned in light syrup and lemon juice, dried, and pie. The pie lasted the least amount of time.

We got the peaches from Umass' Cold Spring Orchard, which calls itself "the orchard with a difference." What I found to be most different about it was how cheap the fruit was: $16 for a 22lb box of seconds. At that price, we would have been fools not to have spent several hot, sticky hours of precious weekend butchering mushy stone fruit.

In the past hundred years, preserving food has gone from being what you do if you don't want scurvy to what you do if you're a hipster with a wad of cash to blow at the green market and nothing better to do. One of the best parts of our peach session was a conversation about canning and privilege. Let's just say that there's a lot to unpack there, regardless of whether you're cold packing or hot packing.

Once upon a time, before the era of horrible, unripenable Chilean winter supermarket produce, you -- or someone who worked for you -- canned, dried, jellied and so forth so that you could eat something with fructose in it that wasn't an apple in February. Some people still do it like that, and I like to think that counts us. But for others canning has become something of a folksy indulgence. Remember, people were once embarrassed to eat lobster, and now look at its status. Could humble jam go the same way?

Which isn't to say that canning is right if you live in Arkansas and wrong if you live in Brooklyn, have a shaggy beard, tight jeans and a single-speed bike. It's to say that our relationship to food is like a serious glass of wine: protean, complex, and loaded.

The changing economic and geographic demographics of canners entails more than I can go into here, so let me try to sum up my stance. My wife and I canned, froze and dried a bunch of peaches. It made me feel a little bit like a pioneer and a little bit like a toady.

I could just buy cardboard peaches all year instead, but now I at least have the option of reaching back in time when I reach into my cupboard, grabbing a cool glass jar containing a taste of place, the substance of another season, suspended in a little sugar and lemon.

Besides, there is no improving the fresh peach. Except perhaps with peanut butter.

Vermmont 2011: The Kiely Family Outdoes Themselves

2011-09-07T10:56:00.001-04:00

Foreword: this post is dedicated to the people of Vermont who are still wresting their incredible state out of the muck left by Irene. To find out how to volunteer, go to http://vtresponse.wordpress.com/. If you can't volunteer in person, you can donate to the relief efforts here.

There are many traditions at the Shakespeare camp I teach at in VT each summer; my favorite is that campers often invite the staff to their homes for dinner.

This gracious ritual has given me a window into the food lives of Vermonters, and it's a different perspective than the one you get from national press focusing on the state's upscale farm-to-table restaurants. Those places are great, I'm sure, but the impression I get is that tourists enjoy them far more often than locals.

Perhaps that's because of how good so many locals have it. Backyard salads, berries and even chickens were all on the menu this year, as was homemade ice cream, churned before our very eyes (and very thighs) and so forth. But only once did we have duck confit.

Mr. Kiely is a doctor, and thankfully the Hippocratic oath doesn't apply to poultry. Mr. and Mrs. Kiely slaughter a flock of their own ducks each year in order to make confit, and this summer I was finally the happy recipient of their carnage.

The Kiely clan is undeterred by the fact that their daughter isn't even a camper anymore. In fact, she's now on staff. Here she is eating berries at the home of current campers who led us into their prolific patch one night.

This year the Kielys made us dinner even though we weren't able to go to their house. And so, with the precision of caterers, they mobilized the confit along with gazpacho, their own roasted veggies, salad, the best quiche I've ever had, homemade peach ice cream (below), homemade ginger ice cream, and molasses-spice cookies, also homemade.

Everything was superb -- even better than the sushi feast, Greek extravaganza or shrimp risotto the Kielys have made us in the past, which is saying a lot -- but the confit was of course the star of the show. Because it was confit.

But now the Kielys have become their own worst enemy. Because where can they go from here when they make us dinner next year? I don't know, but I'm eager
to find out.

What I Ate on My Birthday, or What Didn't I Eat on My Birthday?

2011-09-01T11:23:00.001-04:00

First there was a pre-birthday gorging at Sichuan Gourmet in Brookline. I ate Sichuan style green beans, ma po tofu, fried prince mushrooms, fresh bamboo shoots with spicy wonder sauce, dan dan noodles, Sichuan wonton with spicy chili sauce, tofu with spicy chili sauce, Chinese eggplant with Yu Xiang sauce, cumin lamb, and one that I'm forgetting but that was probably described by one or all of the words "spicy," "chili," "Sichuan," and/or "sauce." And a scorpion bowl. Oh full of scorpions was my mind!

On the birthday proper I awoke to the above breakfeast. Contents: roasted potatoes, whole wheat biscuits with porch-grown rosemary, leftover blueberry compote, herbacious medium-curd, soft and slow scrambled eggs that made me go as weak in the knees as the eggs themselves, slices of a very beefy tomato sprinkled with truffle salt.

But my favorite thing about this breakfast was that E. was completely unprepared for it and bought no additional ingredients to make it. Again, because that's what we had.

The meal was accompanied by two jars of precious stuff. One contained Chole Adams' fiery green salsa, which can only be purchased at a select few farmers markets in the Northeast Kingdom. The other held Japanese knotweed honey, sent by Seth and Maggie from BC. If you can't beat it, make honey out of it. Or rather make bees make honey out of it.

For dinner, fish tacos. But first, the runny, goaty VT cheese pictured at top -- I'll have to add the name later. Atop the soft corn tortillas: tilapia that someone tried to flirt with my wife about while she was buying it, chili-lime mayo, raw corn (probably my favorite taco topping), cilantro, lime, more of Chole's salsa, avocado, diced red onion.

And we finally hit upon what it is that makes fish tacos so excellent, besides the obvious combination of fish and tacos: the perfect balance of richness and levity.

As if these meals weren't enough, I also bought 44 pounds of peaches from Cold Spring Orchard and a canoe and read the last few chapters of Anna Karenina in the bathtub.

Even if the next 364 are sh*t, I'd still call this a good year.

2011-09-01T10:37:00.000-04:00

Never do I drink pisco sours more often than when in Vermont. That's because my dear friend Gabriel flies up from Santiago to teach at the Shakespeare camp I work at each year, and when he visits, he usually brings more pisco than clothing.

Gabriel's typical cocktail is a marriage of pisco, which is essentially a South American brandy, lemon juice, egg whites, sugar, ginger, ice and cinnamon. See below for the recipe, in Spanglish. However this summer we'd run out of lemons.

As they do each year, the Dunbar family had sent us a generous donation of red currants from their prolific bushes, a selection from which is pictured here against the evening sky at their dairy farm.

It seemed obvious, really. Gabbo set to work adjusting his recipe.

The currants were just as sour as the lemons but far more astringent, which I really liked, and instead of just using their juice, Gabbo blended them whole, making a sort of alcoholic smoothie. The nadir of each glass held a reservoir of crunchy little currant seeds.

If we'd had more lemons, we wouldn't have hit on the world's first -- and hopefully not last -- batch of red currant pisco sours. And that enforces one of my absolute favorite maxims when it comes to preparing eat and drink: because that's what we had.

Gabriel's Pisco Sour Recipe:

"Es muuuuuuuuuy fácil."

Obviusly, the amounts of pisco depends on the strength of it. You can add more if you want it more "dangerous."

In a blender put una parte de limón (ojalá lime) por dos de pisco... add sugar, but not too much, because it's a sour cocktail... (if you have "azucar flor," wich is sugar made powder, it's better) If you need more sweeterness, just add more after you tried it.

Add enough ice cubes and a small spoon of the white part part of an egg. Then mix it. Try it and see if it's good for you. Remember you can add some gratined ginger.

If it's good, serve it in a long neck cup. Spread a little amount of cinnamon and just before drink, some drops of Amargo de Angostura.

Pisco Sour is very good as an aperitive... that's why you gotta be careful with sugar. Hope it'll be delicious!!!!!

Switching Over

2011-08-15T15:53:00.001-04:00

I'm in the process of switching the blog over to my new site, so for today's post, see here:

http://aaronwkagan.com/2011/08/vermmmont-2011/

Hot, Hot, Hot

2011-07-26T10:29:00.003-04:00

Every year, STUFF magazine (the Boston one, not the defunct lad mag) generates a Hot 100 list of food, drink, fashion and so forth. Last year I contributed entries on the KFC Double Down, Pretty Things Beer and Ale and Silly Bandz. The year before I covered coconut water, pimenton and puehr. And this year, I have dubbed the following things to be febrile:

Hot Sake Relative: Soju
Hot and Wild: Foraging
Hot Spice: Sichuan Peppercorns
Hot Beer Upgrade: The Michelada
Hot Mojito Successor: Coquito
Hot For Local Carnivores: The Meat CSA
Hot and Sappy: Inspira-Pop

Check out the full list here: http://stuffboston.com/hot100-2011/default.aspx

Food On Fire

2011-07-13T11:28:00.012-04:00

The summer of campfire cooking has come to its fiery climax.

Last weekend I was in the Finger Lakes for an assignment and for what passes for a bachelor party these days: hiking, dining, wine tasting and reading poetry. Well, dirty poetry.

On the first night we made dinner on the campfire using entirely local ingredients. For dessert I baked a blueberry free form tart with a rye crust on top of stones in a Dutch oven, which we nestled in the coals and covered with a smoldering log. It wasn't the best thing I've ever had, but the fact that it worked at all was kind of amazing. I had picked up the technique from my story on the Revolutionary War reenactment cook. (The skillet was for presentation -- it really did bake on rocks.)

Also delicious were some crostini we seared in fat leftover from frying ham. (The topping was the fat.)

On the second night we dined out but returned to the campsite to sit around the fire. As the flames died out, we were left with a bed of perfect cooking coals, and even though it was one in the morning and no one needed any more nutrition, we couldn't resist.

We started by searing a small block of scrapple, which accomplished two purposes. First, it made the scrapple more appetizing, warming the slightly gelatinous meat and giving it a nice crust. Second, it dried the scrapple out after it had sloshed around in the bottom of a cooler for a while. Does that kind of logic apply at bachelorette parties, too?

As the scrapple sizzled, one of our party was struck by a bolt of genius, which resulted in the scrapple being struck by a bolt of fire. I believe the phrase "flambé that sh*t" was uttered. Never before had I heard the word flambé used as a command, and never had it seemed like such a good idea.

I stuck the long stick we'd been using as a poker into the coals until it was aflame. We splashed rye whiskey into the iron skillet containing the scrapple, which sat directly atop the glowing coals. I touched the fiery stick to the alcohol, and voilà! Was it the world's first scrapple flambé? Probably not, but Google seems to think so. And it was insanely good.

But when you've been drinking tiny amounts of Riesling all day and sipping on rye by the campfire, you can't flambé just once. My mind raced as to what else we had that could be set on fire and consumed -- oatmeal, Terra chips, a watermelon? And then it hit me: bananas.

Soon a larger iron skillet was sizzling with a fat lump of local pasture butter we'd pick up earlier. In went two ripe bananas that had been warming in a hot car all day. They quickly browned, and once flipped, I doused them with a dangerous amount of Glen Thunder, a corn whiskey from the region's only distillery. The poker stick was again lit on fire. The flame was passed to the pan, and along with the alcohol, Dave's previous life as a bachelor disappeared in a pillar of fire.

We reduced the jus that had accumulated in the pan, took the skillet off the coals and drizzled the bananas with local honey. What had started as a terrible/wonderful idea turned into one of the best desserts I'd ever had a hand in. Call it corn whiskey campfire bananas foster sans a la mode. We stood around the pan with a flashlight and gobbled them up. If it wouldn't have caught my tongue on fire, I would have licked the pan.

Massachusetts Terroir

2011-07-12T12:34:00.001-04:00

So what does Massachusetts taste like in liquid form? To find out, see my story in the current issue of STUFF Magazine Boston or see here: http://stuffboston.com/stuffboston/archive/2011/07/11/mass-appeal-a-boozy-quest-to-define-our-turf-s-terroir.aspx

Ancient Grains

2011-07-06T10:22:00.003-04:00

Biodiversity, flavor and lower gluten content are just some of many reasons why Eli Rogosa's work with the Heritage Wheat Conservancy is so interesting. See here for my article in today's Globe about her farm:

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2011/07/06/heritage_grain_specialist_works_to_preserves_plant_diversity/

On Asparagus

2011-07-05T14:50:00.007-04:00

Is it me or has there been something even more special than usual about asparagus this year? Maybe it's just because sparrowgrass is the "first" vegetable of the season, though I and others have pointed out that the fixed notion of a growing season is become a thing of the past. Or maybe it's because I live right over the river from the asparagus capital of the world.

My first bite of local asparagus several weeks back was, like so many experiences with genuine food, transformative. Eating seasonally also gives us the opportunity to forget something by the time it comes around again, making us that much more grateful for a taste of tomatoes, corn, green garlic or countless other crops that lose their ephemerality on the supermarket shelf.

Sure I've had great asparagus before. But there was just something about these spears. They were so fresh, so sweet, so cool and alkaline. They tasted like Vivaldi's "Spring," only more relaxed.

Sure grilled asparagus and broiled asparagus is great, but I'd only go there if I had more asparagus than I knew what to do with, and that has never happened to me and never will. I prefer a cooking technique that showcases the fragility of the vegetable: a brief steam or blanch. Just a few seconds too long and you'll loose the crispness, a minute too long and you might consider selling your olive-drab mush to Green Giant.

Sometimes we make asparagus omelettes (a word which I prefer to spell with as many letters as the dictionary permits). We don't cook the asparagus first; the radiant warmth coming through the eggs is enough. After letting the omelette rest, slice it up. Show off that cross-section of gorgeous, green o's and you may feel inclined to express some "oh's" yourself.

Even Newer 'Ticles

2011-06-30T11:10:00.003-04:00

Excuse the lack of posts -- I'm in the process of building a website and am still deciding how best to integrate the blog. In the meantime, here's a story I just did for Splashlife about bitter melon, and here's one from the Globe about Gary Nabhan, hero of chiles and runoff everywhere.

New 'Ticles

2011-06-08T11:18:00.005-04:00

Cuban food, burrata, wild edibles and bitter melon have been the subjects of my latest stories in the Globe. See here for links and let me know if you can think up a dish that combines all four subjects:

Cuban classics that feel like home

Burrata requires a master to make it in Vermont

Berkshires’ farm and forage fete

Cultivating a fan club for bitter melon

Fig Pride, or Higo Ego

2011-06-03T10:47:00.005-04:00

I am thrilled to report that my fig tree shows signs of bearing its first fruit.

I'd wanted one ever since reading about a fig farmer in Edible Pioneer Valley, and I finally found a sapling at the North Quabbin Garlic and Arts Festival in Orange, MA last fall (the only time you want garlic in orange). My friend Ari also bought one, which he took back to Brighton. He named his Aaron, I named mine Ari. It was very confusing any time we shared updates, such as an email I received yesterday that said "Aaron has yet to fruit but he's looking healthy and more leaves are still sprouting. I gave him some ash from our fireplace as fertilizer and he seemed to like it."

Of course figs aren't native, nor are they frost hardy, so Ari and Aaron spent the winter indoors and only recently ventured outside. Apparently the farmer does the same thing on a larger scale with all of his trees, probably making his one of the world's few container orchards.

I brought Ari inside last night when the mercury threatened to dip into the low forties (just days after it had been nearly 90), and that's when I noticed the little, green immature fruits. Since that discovery it's taken all of my self control to not check on them every five minutes. Hang on... nope, not ready to be soaked in brandy yet.

Of course they may not make it to maturity, but if they do, I'll be eating fresh, locally grown Mediterranean fruit that spent most of the year in my living room. If it works I may just have to start my own container orchard.

On Kurdistan

2011-06-02T10:25:00.002-04:00

The Good Doctor Jon Dworkin, one of my best friends, just returned from Kurdistan, and is writing a three part blog series about his experience for Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones. He writes:

"'Basis of life is sleep, sex, nutrition. I am nutrition.' That’s what the cook said, and then he handed me a meatball."

For the rest, see http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/05/return-kurdistan-part-1.

Smoky Cheese, Hemlock Tea and Other Camping Tidbits

2011-05-27T15:51:00.013-04:00

E. and I were lucky enough to sneak off for a night of camping this week, and the jaunt was full of tasty, woodsy treats. I don't know which I liked better, the cheese that we (sort of) smoked by the campfire, or the Indian cucumber, a native, wild edible tuber with a texture like a water chestnut and a mild, sweet, earthy taste.

Of course one Indian cucumber isn't much to eat. For contrast, here it is compared to a cucumber cucumber.

Eating the root means ending the life of the plant, so harvest this one with care and only from places where plenty of others exist. I suppose the best time to find them would be in the fall, when the (inedible) berries can be planted in the hole you've just exhumed the root from, hopefully ensuring the survival of a new individual. Again, you can't quite live on this stuff. We mostly ate sandwiches.

I also made some hemlock tea by heating a stone in the fire to boil the water. I'm not going to lie to you: the mug I made the next day with a Jetboil was a lot better. But the hot stone technique always recalls my first such experience, and the thrill of it.

Blueberry flowers were in bloom and with their sweet smell and zaftig bell shape, they brought the fruit to mind. But I'll have to wait -- and possibly fight bears -- for that.

The prettiest view of the trip was not a mountaintop vista but a little something I noticed nearly underfoot. Isn't he/she a beaut?

Note: I didn't eat it.

Spring Foraging

2011-05-13T13:50:00.011-04:00

The onset of incredible weather has me venturing beyond my typical morning dog routine and into the woods for wild edibles.

Usually I just take Oli, the official dog of T&F, down to a ball field near our apartment, but neither of us are content to run around on manicured grass with so many exciting things to smell, chase, roll in, and eat out in the brush.

I've found all sorts of trail nibbles, like faintly sweet dandelion flowers and not faintly onion-y onion grass, but this morning I decided to assess the stinging nettle situation. I thought I'd seen them once, except they didn't sting me. I did a little research and learned that not everyone experiences the sting, however I did recall feeling a faint tingling sensation on my upper thighs as I chased the dog through a particular thicket, wearing fairly short running shorts, as it were.

This morning I went back to the same spot, snapped some pics of the plants in question, pinched off a few samples (at this time of year only the tops remain worth eating), and whacked the leaves against my bare, upper thighs. No, I was not immune everywhere. Yes, these were stinging nettles.

Note the old bottles: I always take something bad out of the woods when I take something good. Back home I compared my samples with a few guides and realized why I'd had a hard time identifying the plants. There were two varieties, slender nettles ...

...and wood nettles.

While there I also grabbed some curly dock (a nettle remedy) and Japanese knotweed.

I never eat anything I can't be sure about, and after consulting the guides and my burning thighs, I concluded that I had the right plant(s). I blanched all four of my finds separately. I felt no sting when handling the plants, though if you look carefully you'll see one of the tiny hairs sticking out above the curve of my knuckle.

I like knotweed as a rhubarb replacement (we made a nice crisp with it recently) but disagree with its reputation as an asparagus stand-in: asparagus is just too sweet, too ethereal, to be swapped with this stuff. My sense is that it would be best to cut the acidity (think sorrel -- both smack of oxalic acid) with something rich, like cheese. However, if you think of it as its own thing, you can get into knotweed as a distinctively squishy, tangy, hollow, tubular vegetable.

The dock and the two types of nettles were all fairly beefy: the texture was on the meaty side as far as greens go, the flavor quite hearty, like spinach and even more like calaloo, aka amaranth. The dock had a bit of acidity but nowhere near the knotweed, and I found the slender leaf nettles to be a little lighter and sweeter than the wood nettles. However all were superb.

Once I'd tried everything plain, I felt I could move on. I squeezed the dock and nettles dry and slipped them into the center of a chive blossom laden one-egg omelet along with schmear of ricotta. God, it was good.

Sonoran Mouthfuls, Part II: Jordan and Autumn's Yard

2011-05-11T11:31:00.013-04:00

Mesquite was perhaps the most meaningful thing I ate in AZ, but there were plenty of other terroir-laden delicacies. Like the tepary beans and chiles that my friends Jordan and Autumn grew in their garden.

I left the teparies (above) soaking and am curious to hear how they turned out. I rehydrated a few kinds of their chiles (below), which ended up in a salsa. The liquid they'd plumped in made for some piquant agua fresca.

Much as I love heirloom New England produce, it just doesn't thrill me to the core like the stuff you can grow in places like Tucson. Of course this is probably just the allure of the exotic, and if I lived in the Southwest I'd be pining for native sweet corn or fresh Duxbury oysters. Hmm, now that I write that, I'm already pining.

That's how Jim Verrier of the awesome Desert Survivors plant nursery feels (read that sign if you can). Surrounded by a sea of Sonoran-style Mexican cuisine, he sounded like he'd sell his soul for some New England tomatoes grown in our region's acidic soil. I didn't even know that we had acidic soil. When comparing New England to Arizona, I guess the grass is always more acidic, or less existent, depending on whether you're looking east or west.

In two drip-irrigated raised beds in the backyard, Jordan and Autumn also grow chard, tomatillos and native tobacco. Amaranth pops up on its own volition in the rest of the yard, and the house came with an old, established pomegranate tree and another volunteer just starting to poke up.

Though they live in a neighborhood notorious for its lawns, they ripped up the insatiable grass, mounded the earth to replicate the desert terrain, and reintroduced native plants like ocotillo and wolfberry. The ocotillo was particularly hard to squeeze into the car on the way back to from the nursery.

While sitting in the yard one morning of my recent visit, Autumn presented me with a glowing-green smoothie. I recall that it had almond milk, mango, banana, spinach and mint, and it couldn't have been a more stark yet complimentary contrast to the hot, dry, dusty surroundings. One sip and my temperature plummeted, partly from the frozen fruit, partly from the menthol.

I had entered the garden entranced by the tough, scrubby, desert crops. The beans and hot peppers. But to be perfectly honest, is was the cool, fruity smoothie that really hit the spot. I wonder if, as chili peppers are to Chengdu, the smoothie is to Tucson: a stranger from a faraway land that has found its spiritual home?

Whole Grains Galore

2011-05-04T10:24:00.004-04:00

See below for my article in today's Globe about the new book Ancient Grains for Modern Meals by Maria Speck. And definitely try the wheatberry fool recipe.

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2011/05/04/believing_in_the_grandeur_of_grains/

Sonoran Mouthfuls

2011-05-02T12:35:00.004-04:00

I just flew back from Arizona and boy are my arms tired: from shoveling delicious, place-based foods into my mouth, that is.

Thanks to great friends in the area and a couple of exciting writing assignments, I was able to scratch beneath the surface of the local cuisine, going deeper than lollipops with scorpions in them, or prickly pear candies in which actual prickly pear content is vastly outnumbered by corn syrup and colors followed by numbers.

I ate many delicious things in Arizona, like sweet potato enchiladas with tomatillo salsa (really, blogger? you don't recognize the word tomatillo?) at the heavenly, jasmine-perfumed outdoor patio of La Cocina in Tucson. I also loved LC's cocoa diablo, essentially a Mexican hot chocolate spiked with tequila, a pairing that had somehow eluded me until this late in life. So many years, wasted.

I hope to never forget the sweet and starchy plantain tamales at Cup Cafe, but true to my love of minimalist cuisine and foraging, the ultimate mouthful from my week in the Sonoran Desert was picked up off of the ground.

Mesquite, my desert communion. I crunched on a dried pod at Tumacácori after having read much about this exotic staple. It tasted like marshmallows.

I could not believe that this flavorful food was made by a plant with nothing more than sand, sun and a few drops of rain each year. Mesquite really puts the "manna" in "galactomannan."

Sadly, the taste of this tree is better known by its charcoal, which can only be obtained from a dead mesquite. Imagine if every time you saw the word "mesquite" (as in "ROCKIN' TEQULIA-LIME-MESQUITE CRAZY WINGS!!!") it referred to the aromatic flour produced from mesquite pods, a drought-resistant, mineral-rich, low-glycemic index, at-risk food.

Mesquite trees grow throughout the Southwestern U.S. and Mexico and are a source of food, shade, fuel and nitrogen-fixation for the indigenous peoples that long have lived without air conditioning or golf courses where cities like Phoenix now sprawl. Due to the massive needs of these misplaced urban centers, water tables drop, making life more difficult for wild plants like mesquite. Which is why precious mesquite flour is listed on Slow Food's Ark of Taste.

On my way out of town, I picked up a pound of it at the Native Seeds shop in Tucson. This is the fine powder you get from grinding and sifting the pods. It tastes like chocolate, it tastes like caramel, it tastes like cinnamon. Dave said it tasted like mole, then I grabbed the bag from him like Frodo snatching the ring back from Samwise. Back in Northampton, the sealed plastic bag still manages to fill the kitchen with those sweet, complex, desert smells.

I'm told it's great on pancakes, but I plan to go through the whole pound by continuing to dip my moistened pinky into the bag and having my taste buds blown one pinch at a time.

Little Bosnia, St. Louis

2011-04-12T11:47:00.003-04:00

While visiting my family in St. Louis I had the opportunity to explore the many bakeries, restaurants and cafes of Little Bosnia. I wrote about that neighborhood's culinary offerings for Smithsonian.com, and you can read the story and see the pics here:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Visiting-Bosnia-via-St-Louis.html

The Power of Omission

2011-04-08T09:50:00.012-04:00

The infamous marriage of surf and turf is best known by chewy steaks and gummy lobster tails, but recently I was struck by the magic of a lesser known amphibious union: anchovies and mushrooms.

Elise made these anchovy and 'shroom flatbreads for dinner the other night, and we were amazed at the winning combination of the salty fish and earthy fungi. But what really stood out about this meal was what we didn't put into it: sauce and cheese.

These were not pizzas, though they easily could have been, and thank goodness they were not. Even under excellent tomatoes and ideal mozzarella, the strong flavors of the chief ingredients would not have shone through.

This was one of those rare instances when I didn't want balance. I was prepared with a lemon wedge, but it went into my water instead. These were fishy and mushroomy -- in a good way -- and I wanted nothing more. As I've said before, without the cheese, there's nowhere to hide.

Improving recipes usually means adding a little more of this or that, but as MB's illustrious career as The Minimalist has shown, sometimes scissors are better than glue. This approach is known by many names, such as ingredient based cooking and common sense.

As I write this I'm reminded of a throng of other dishes that are better with fewer bells and whistles (who wants to eat bells and whistles anyway? goats?), and this is more true the better your ingredients are.

I used to make gazpacho with pretty much any supermarket vegetable I hoped to wring some flavor from: tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, chiles, scallions and red onions, along with herbs, spices, lime juice and vinegar. Then one day I whipped up a batch with juicy, sun-ripened golden tomatoes and just a bit of raw onion. I drizzled a touch of syrupy balsamic vinegar and sprinkled in a couple of Marcona almonds and that was it. It was the best gazpacho I'd ever made, or had for that matter.

What are some of your favorite omissions?

On Endangered Foods

2011-04-08T09:28:00.002-04:00

Here's a taste of my first post on the Corporate Social Responsibility Newswire blog.

"Saving endangered foods might sound like the punch line to a joke about arugula-loving bleeding heart liberals, but RAFT connects such foods with the power to reduce carbon footprints, unite communities, better our health and preserve distinct, regional cultures."

For the rest, see here:

http://csrwiretalkback.tumblr.com/post/4424367296/the-ark-of-taste-eating-well-to-save-species

Quote of the Day

2011-04-06T10:18:00.005-04:00

Reading Gathering the Desert by Gary Paul Nabhan is making me very excited for my upcoming trip to AZ. The book also reminds me of my 9th grade Environmental Studies project on the many uses of agave (food, drink, needle and thread). It was my first taste of ethnobotany, opening my mind to the relationships between people and plants. And I got an A+! (Thanks, Ms. Coyle.)

From Gathering the Desert:

"Choose a moonlit night in the summer, and hike through the scattering of agaves in bloom. Hike past them, into the canyons of the Tortolitas where little caves lie hidden. Listen for the flutter of wings, watch for the bats, their shoulders cloaked in a coat of pollen, shining in the night like a poncho made of Precolumbian golden thread. Follow them back down to the scent of agave blossoms, where plants and animals again dance to an ancient American rhythm."

Tea and Food Turns 700

2011-04-01T11:44:00.007-04:00

As the snow fell earlier this morning, I made this buckwheat pancake using MB's whole grain pancake recipe, though without the sugar and spice and with 1/3 the fat (still delicious). That's right, I minimized The Minimalist.

I was fortunate enough to have locally grown buckwheat flour from the last installment of our winter CSA, and the flecks of hull added a pleasant bit of chew to the otherwise fluffy and spongy pancakes. Gently folded-in, stiffly beaten egg whites truly are the secret weapon for lofty, whole grain pancakes.

As usual, I ended up making one enormous pancake as big as my face in addition to several smaller ones. Topped with steamed apples and savored alongside a mason jar of gunpowder green, this was a celebratory pancake. Because as soon as I click "publish post," Tea and Food will have reached its 700th post. And what better way to celebrate 700 posts on tea and food than with a little food and tea?

It all started as a pet project between myself and my good friend Dave, and by "it all started" I mean Dave started it. We were obsessively discussing everything we were eating and gabbing like a couple of (old, hairy) schoolgirls about the latest Bittman videos. We would even try out the same recipes together in real time over the phone, emailing photos as we went. Dave pointed out that we were basically food blogging without a food blog, so he created us a food blog. 700 posts later, here we are.

At the time I was a traveling sketch comic and Dave was a grad student. He is now a Doctor of Philosophy and teaches at an esteemed university, and I don't live out of a van anymore!

Which brings me to my second cause for celebration: my first article for Smithsonian, on Boston's farm to table renaissance, which you can see here. You can also check out the photo gallery for additional shots.

So congrats to everyone whose enthusiasm has propelled this blog forward over the years. Now go make yourself a pancake.

Quote of the Day

2011-03-30T12:23:00.001-04:00

From Mark Bittman's post about why he's fasting to protest "Congressional budget proposals that would make huge cuts in programs for the poor and hungry." He writes:

"This isn’t about skepticism, however; it’s about ironies and outrages. In 2010, corporate profits grew at their fastest rate since 1950, and we set records in the number of Americans on food stamps. The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all American households combined, the effective tax rate on the nation’s richest people has fallen by about half in the last 20 years, and General Electric paid zero dollars in U.S. taxes on profits of more than $14 billion. Meanwhile, roughly 45 million Americans spend a third of their posttax income on food — and still run out monthly — and one in four kids goes to bed hungry at least some of the time."

Rabbit Confit

2011-03-29T13:57:00.007-04:00

On my weekend off while teaching Shakespeare in VT last summer, my cohorts and I tooled around the Northeast Kingdom sampling its many delicacies. Before reaching Parker Pie for lunch, we saw a roadside sign whose gravitational pull had turned the wheel of my car before my brain knew what was happening. I believe it said "custom meat processing," or something along those lines.

I left with a frozen rabbit and having gotten a tour of the walk-in fridges where moose and bear sometimes hang. I don't have the name of the place with me, but my dear friend Maria Gould wrote a profile of the processor in a recent issue of Meatpaper.

The bunny hibernated in my freezer for several months until I worked up the nerve to make a confit. I had made neither rabbit nor confit before, and I was a little skeptical. Why use a technique that requires tons of fat when I know I'd be perfectly happy with a much leaner, cheaper braise?

While breaking down the bunny I was confronted with its very animal-like animalness. This is was no chicken or cow whose friendly shape has been ingrained in my food psyche since childhood. This was no animal: this was a creature. It's shape made me think of my dog, and I don't want to eat my dog. We should always experience such reflection before chowing down on something that used to walk (or hop) this earth.

I slid the bunny parts into a warm bath of olive oil along with a sliced bulb of fennel, a handful of kumquats from a recent trip to FL, rosemary, garlic, and a heaping handful of juniper berries.

Several hours later, the rabbit, and everything else for that matter, was succulent and tender. I pulled the meat and put it back into the aromatic fat along with the spices, fruit and veggies until I could decide on what to do with my rich bounty.

Our preferred method -- largely due to expediency -- was to simply pour some of the confit over slices of slightly toasted homemade bread. We also ate it tossed with steamed potatoes, and I'm sure it would have been lovely over pasta, though we didn't get to that.

The juniper berries were musky and spicy, the kumquats sweet and tangy, the fennel fennely. Was it good? Of course it was good. Who, besides a vegetarian, vegan, rabbit, or olive, wouldn't enjoy gads of golden olive oil laced with butter soft bunny flesh?

But would I ever make it again? Nope. I respect the technique of preserving meat with fat, but I'd just as soon do a braise and put the leftovers in the freezer.

-------------------------------------------

Recipe Question: Do you miss them?

I much prefer the story of a dish to its nuts and bolts, and while I used to include more recipes, I would rather give you the gist of an idea and have you experiment with it than just follow my marching orders. That said, I want to know your preference. So shoot me a comment letting me know if you a) want me to keep including recipes b) like it this way or c) are a Russian spambot trying to redirect traffic to your scam.

3... 4... 1!

2011-03-23T12:40:00.002-04:00

Yan can make mincing garlic and ginger look like a magic trick, and, as his theory goes, therefore... so can you! Though you may find yourself halving his enthusiasm.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Corn According to Onion

2011-03-14T21:30:00.000-04:00

So Long, Dubious Friend

2011-03-14T21:03:00.004-04:00

At long last, I'm bidding a bittersweet farewell to my trusty non-stick pan.

It's a sweet occasion because with the pan's passing, I'm stirred to remember all of the tractionless pancakes, slippery pasta dishes and unhindered tortillas we made in this baby. It's a bitter moment because I'm concerned that the gashes in the pan's fragile coating were starting to give us cancer.

When the non-stick coating finally wore through, my fears of being poisoned by this mysterious technology became too great, and I decided to cut my losses. So it's back to cast iron, until an omelet sticks, at which point I'll probably go crawlin' back to sweet, sweet perfluorooctanoic acid.

But hey, it's low-fat.

No-Knead Bread, Five Years Late

2011-03-08T10:22:00.008-05:00

Cast your mind back to 2006. Al Gore informed America that the planet was getting warmer as jeans grew skinnier and the Chinese River Dolphin was declared extinct. And who can forget sitting on the edge of their seat as Pope Benedict XVI issued his first encycylical?

But the number one thing I heard in '06 was "You have to see Little Miss Sunshine!!!" I never did. The number two thing I heard was "you have to try Mark Bittman's no-knead bread!" I did, five years later.

First off, you were all wrong. It wasn't Mark Bittman's no-knead bread, it was Jim Lahey's, and Bittman made that clear. But as I recently learned, Lahey is as good of a baker as Bittman is a publicist. This bread really is the best that you can make at home.

However the title of "no-knead" is somewhat misleading. No, you don't have to knead it, but you do have to fold it a few times, flour a work surface, and handle the dough, and that's kind of like kneading. There are other bread recipes where you do none of those things -- I'll be sharing one soon -- and so the fact that this bread isn't kneaded per se is not its most distinctive quality. Someone else has probably pointed this out in the past five years, but as you can tell, I'm a little behind the Times.

Instead of Mark Bittman's No-Knead Bread, as this recipe has become commonly known, a more accurate title would be Jim Lahey's Slow Rise, Low Yeast, Preheated Dutch Oven Bread. Because the technique is what sets this bread apart, and that's what gives it its perfect moisture, crumb and crust. My only problem was that our old bacon-seasoned cast iron Dutch oven (originally Elise's grandmother's) filled the kitchen with smoke as it heated. Almost makes me want to buy an enamel one. But who needs another hefty kitchen implement when you've got open windows, a damp bandanna tied like a bank robber, and an inhaler?

We made the bread as part of our new Valentine's Day tradition of having a meal at home made from whatever ingredients we want instead of eating out on what many chefs consider the worst night of the year. (In the above photo you can see Elise dramatically whisking the tinfoil off of the broccoli rabe.) Also on the menu were local oysters and defrosted chicken liver-and-Maker's Mark pâté from Christmas. Like Sylvester Stallone's character in Demolition Man, it survived the freeze quite well. In addition to baking the loaf of JLSRLYPDOB, I enacted another Bittman-influenced culinary fantasy: oven fries with pimenton aioli.

Lahey/Bittman's loaf is now available in regular, whole grain, and speedy. If you haven't tried it yet, you definitely should. Now if you'll excuse me, I have an endearing hipster dramedy to watch.

Urban Syrup

2011-03-03T16:17:00.002-05:00

See here for my piece in yesterday's Globe about a maple syrup project in Somerville, my old stompin' grounds:

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2011/03/02/somerville_maple_syrup_project_teaches_valuable_lessons/

Da Hong Pao, or Big Red Robe

2011-03-03T07:19:00.005-05:00

While in Florida my sister gave me a small bag of Da Hong Pao light roast oolong. It was a cloudless eighty degrees at the time of this transaction, but this morning here in Mass it's only four, or negative six if you go by the mysterious "feels like" scale.

My bedroom window looked like this.

The first thing I did was brew some Da Hong Pao.

My former roommate Mark once invited me to help him work his way through a mixed case of bottles of red as he tried to discover his favorite. They were all pretty good, but when he opened the Bordeaux, I thought "yes, that is red wine." It perfectly matched my preconceived notion of what red wine should taste like. (In contrast, my first taste of whiskey was a huge letdown. As a kid I concluded that it must taste like butterscotch based on the way adults talked about it, but when I tried it, it just tasted "like burning.")

This tea is to oolong what that Bordeaux was to wine: it tastes like what I think oolong should taste like. Roasted, toasted, slightly sweet and woodsy. Like licking a drop of caramel off of seasoned cordwood.

It has none of the complexity of peachy dan cong or the floral effervesence of my beloved tung ting, which could mean that it's a fake, but it's delicious either way, and for anyone unfamiliar with this kind of tea, this could be your oolong 101.

The name Big Red Robe is said to come from an incident in which a grateful emperor sent fine garments to protect bushes whose brew had healed him from an illness. I don't know if that actually happened, but I do know that when I drank the tea on this bitterly cold morning, I felt robed.

Thanks, sis.

More on Olives

2011-03-01T14:55:00.003-05:00

After reading Ian's post on harvesting olives in Ramallah, my aunt-in-law Kathy wrote the following about picking them in her California backyard:

It really is fun harvesting them . . . we have two trees in our backyard and learned how to run our fingers down the branch and hear them ping into the bucket. We've been experimenting with brine curing. ( I couldn't bear to pour lye over them. :( ). Some of them are about ready to eat by now, yay. The almond trees are almost in full blossom and the beehives are all set up in the orchards. It's a different kind of snow . . .

Root Veggie Laden Fried Rice

2011-03-01T10:25:00.008-05:00

I've been on a fried rice for breakfast kick, and I've been experimenting with how much vegetable matter one can add while still calling it fried rice. The answer: lots.

Two factors make this breakfast almost as easy as toast. The first is that I always have a big pot of rice around for the dog, whose food we cook (ground turkey, brown rice, sweet potatoes) due to his sensitive stomach. The second is the menagerie of wacky root vegetables constantly streaming in from my winter CSA.

I pour enough oil into a pan to barely create a film across its surface. I add the chopped up veggies, which vary, but often include carrot and various radishes: daikon, black, watermelon, and "mystery." Sometimes I'll add some sliced cabbage, but the point is versatility, and every vegetable I've tried thus far (celery, spinach, turnip, leeks) has worked.

When the veggies are just beginning to soften up -- I like them crunchy and sometimes don't even bother cooking them -- I add the rice and a splash of water to rehydrate it. Then I clear everything to the sides of the pan, add another wee bit of oil, turn up the heat and crack in an egg. Sometimes I quickly scramble it, sometimes I let it fry and then mix it in. Sometimes I don't use an egg. Again, versatility is the key ingredient.

Then I plop in a scoop of chili paste and a splash of soy sauce and mix it all up. I was using sesame oil too, until I ran out, and then I found that I didn't miss it.

Fried rice can be divine, especially if you use Mark Bittman/Jean-George's crispy ginger and garlic trick and get all fancy by packing it into a ramekin before plating it. But I think of this version as morning workhorse fried rice. It's quick, it's easy, and it helps me chip away at the root veggie stash.

Another benefit is less easy to describe, but I'll try. And that is the feeling I get from eating rice, chili paste and almost-raw root veggies first thing in the morning. If toast makes me feel like I'm dangling my feet off of a happy cloud, this makes me feel like I'm planted up to the shins in warm rich dirt. It's not a bad way to feel when kicking off the day.

--------------------------------------------

Recipe: Root Veggie Laden Fried Rice

about 1 1/2 cups cooked brown rice
about 3/4 cup finely chopped root veggies, such as carrots, radishes and turnips
1 egg
1/2 tbsp of chili paste
a dash of soy sauce
olive, canola or peanut oil, about 1 tbsp

1. Briefly saute the veggies on medium heat in a little of the oil, about three minutes.

2. Add the rice, add a splash of water, cover and cook for a few more minutes until the rice is moist and warm.

3. Clear a space in the center of the pan. Add a little more oil into the center of the pan, set heat to high, and crack in the egg. Once the white is cooked through, turn off the heat, add the chili paste and soy sauce and mix it all up.

4. If you want to get fancy, pack it into a ramekin or other mold and stamp it out onto your plate.

5. Have a grounded day.

What Is This Thing? A Question I Maybe Should Have Asked Before Swallowing.

2011-02-23T15:02:00.006-05:00

While in Florida this past weekend, I ate the vegetable pictured above. Or rather I should say that I choked down two bites of it, grimacing, and then guilty threw the rest away. I have no idea what it is or why anyone would want to eat it.

It seemed to be some variety of bitter melon, though the ones I've had before were more smooth and less warty. Also I've only had bitter melon cooked, though the vendor my mom bought this vegetable from said that it could be eaten raw, like a cucumber. Right.

Its similarities to a cucumber ended after being an oblong green thing that technically you could bite into. Unlike a cucumber, I didn't want to chew or swallow this, let alone turn it into a cool, creamy soup or de-crusted sandwich filling. A broccoli rabe and garlic mustard-loving nontaster, I was surprised at my lack of tolerance, but my gag reflex spoke for me.

Maybe I'm not giving it a fair shake, though if you did shake it, the little green warts fell off, which did not make it any more alluring.

Maybe if, like the bitter melon I've eaten, this was cooked with complimentary seasonings and salty bits of animal flesh, it would have been more palatable. As is, it was part vegetable, part emetic.

So what on earth was it? A snozzcumber?

Kosher Game

2011-02-23T14:57:00.002-05:00

See here for my recent post on kosher game meats for The Jew and the Carrot: http://blogs.forward.com/the-jew-and-the-carrot/135438/

Salt, pepper, smoke

2011-02-16T10:00:00.005-05:00

One day last fall I walked past a neighbor's house whose wood stove was filling the air with its toasty potpourri. The aroma always stops me in my tracks, prompting primal urges.

If I had to put words to the feeling it would be something along the lines of wanting to run down a woolly mammoth and sink my teeth into its flesh. Since I can't do that -- yet -- my brain goes to the next best thing: pimenton. When the smell of smoke hits my nostrils, the only cure for my primal longings is to indulge them by eating or drinking something that tastes like a fire.

That got me thinking about just how universal smoke is as an agent of flavor, appearing in everything from Scotch and tequila to nova and bacon. After speaking to some Boston area chefs, I wrote a story on smoky foods for the Globe, which ran yesterday and which you can see here:

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2011/02/16/smoking_with_a_smoker_or_spices_of_whatever_food_warms_and_pleases_the_brain/

There's also a recipe for a roasted pepper and eggplant dip from the chef at Sabur, which is here.

If you've got something to say about smoky foods, do share.

Picking Olives

2011-02-15T19:14:00.004-05:00

Over the weekend, just as I was about to head out for some cross-country skiing, I was shocked to get a call from halfway around the world. My good friend Ian is teaching English at a Quaker school in Ramallah, and he called to say hi. We quickly got down to the essentials: what he's eating.

Ian seems to be eating quite well, and he offered to send me something he wrote about participating in a recent olive harvest. He writes:

Today I went out to a village about forty five minutes or so away to help out with the olive harvest. It felt so good to get out of both the office and the city, and to be working with trees. We picked the olives by hand and let them drop down to tarps that were laid out below the trees.

Each tree usually has enough olives to fill a large burlap sack. I traveled from Ramallah with two friends, one American and one Palestinian, who have been instrumental in organizing the farmers market that just started three weeks ago in the big garden that surrounds my apartment house.

We joined six men in the orchard: two brothers (I think), the other four being one of their sons. The day was full of laughter and sunlight and good conversation (in a swirl of Arabic and English) and tea and Arab coffee and falafel and tahini and hummus and climbing trees to get to the higher boughs and the furthest olives. At the end of the day, we went back to the family's house and had a delicious meal of rice and chicken and string beans in a tomato soup-like dish, and bell peppers and some greens that were cooked up kind of like collards.

After dinner, we went with the family to a wedding party for a relative of theirs. The party was separated by gender, and so the party where I was ranged from shabab (young men) my age in jeans to jiddos (grandfathers) in khaffiyehs. The man who had driven the two women and I from Ramallah was one of the three men who make up the family council of elders for the largest extended family in the village, as well as being in charge of the Palestinian National Paralympic team. He told me all about the history of the village and the family.

The village is the seventh oldest in Palestine, and we saw a mosque that was seven hundred and fifty years old. Also the village is built upon the remains of an (even more) ancient village. I learned about one section of ruins now grown-over by olive trees. Nearby there were Roman and even pre-Roman ruins. On the way back to Ramallah I had a great conversation about politics and philosophy and writing and work and permaculture with my American friend, who lived and worked in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005.

Now I have a week long vacation starting after tomorrow for Eid Al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice - which happens after the Hajj - usually about seventy days after the end of Ramadan), and after I finish a couple more letters of recommendation for my students, I will get to have some good rest and relaxation, and I might go olive picking again next Friday.

Quote of the Day

2011-02-11T08:37:00.003-05:00

I miss The Minimalist -- a lot -- but I also like the more systemic focus of Bittman's new opinion pieces. For instance:

"The alternative to sausage is not vegan sausage; it’s less sausage."

My God, This Pomegranate

2011-02-09T13:48:00.002-05:00

What more is there to say?

Miso Plus Many

2011-02-07T15:41:00.005-05:00

For a while I was posting about my theory of miso + 1, which states that you can make a satisfying soup by taking miso and adding only one additional ingredient, be it mussels, daikon, or nothing.

Well, sometimes you have to travel far to find your way back home. I've added dozens of ingredients (though one at a time) to various mugs and bowls of miso throughout the past few years, and I've come back to where I started. And that's a town called Miso Plus Many, population most people who like miso.

Don't get me wrong. I still dream of a world where hot water and miso paste is the default snack for millions of people. It's quick, it's cheap, it's healthy, it's almost stupid it's so doable. And yet I've come to believe that, when it comes to the ultimate miso, of course more is better.

This most recent miso was born from a dead chicken. I was bubbling a pot of stock from all my leftover bones and veggies scraps (note the sad carrots bottom right) and was about to make something else for dinner, when I realized I might was well base the meal around my vat of delicious, hot, fresh stock. I added miso paste to the stock as well as (tons of) chopped turnip greens, black rice noodles, a smidgen of cayenne, a drizzle of sesame oil.

It was thick, it was hot, it was rich, it was salty, it was addictive.

When the turnip greens ran out we made it again with spinach and celery (going with the use whatever you have theory). Also great. The nuttiness from the noodles and sesame gave the impression of peanuts, the starch from the noodles added body, and as chefs around the world have come to appreciate, fat and miso become fast friends. We hadn't skimmed the stock and so the particles of chicken fat and fermented soy beans linked up like a double helix of deliciousness, even though I hate how common the word "deliciousness" has become and would never use it if it weren't true.

So I'm back to miso plus many. If I miss miso plus one, I can always subtract.

Spearing Northerns

2011-02-01T16:54:00.000-05:00

The Perennial Plate Episode 46: Spear Fishing! from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.

Meat (Sort of) And Farmworkers to Farmers

2011-01-31T14:32:00.003-05:00

Two recent posts on Grist caught my attention and inspired some thoughts. The first is this piece on Taco Bell's lack of meat in their... meat.

The funny thing is that people are upset about Taco Bell's not using enough meat instead of praising them for using less. Yeah it's duplicitous to say something (oats and wheat) is what it isn't (dead cows), but let's not forget that factory farmed animal flesh is one of the leading causes of climate change.

Great thinkers on food from Thomas Jefferson to Mark Bittman all advise us to use meat as a seasoning rather than the main event, so isn't Taco Bell tricking people into eating less meat just like Jessica Seinfeld duping kids into eating spinach brownies? The right deed for the wrong reason? All's well that ends well? And other literary references?

This other piece shows the success of one program in helping farmworkers become actual farmers. That four letter difference translates to a tremendous change in quality of life and could not exist without the growth of farmers markets and CSA programs. More proof that the local foods movement has teeth as a vehicle for change and isn't just an arugula cult.

Though I LOVE arugula. And if you don't, you're a monster.

Winter CSA Article

2011-01-26T14:35:00.002-05:00

Hi there. Check today's Globe for my piece on winter CSA programs around Boston, or see here. If you've experienced a winter CSA and have something to share, do tell.

A Sea of People and Produce

2011-01-19T17:41:00.011-05:00

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.

JJ Bistro and French Pastry

2011-01-12T15:52:00.003-05:00

When Elise and I had the privilege of visiting our good friends Jon and Layla in Honolulu, we also paid a visit to JJ Bistro and French Pastry. I was surprised to find that there was more than meets the eye at JJ's, and much that meets the eye too, especially in the rainbow-colored pastry case. I wrote about JJ's for the Globe, which you can see in today's paper and online here.

Tragedy, Humanity, Bread

2011-01-10T14:33:00.006-05:00

"There’s no better season than winter to have the smell of fresh baked bread in the house, to hear in a quiet clean kitchen the sound of a bread crust crackling as it cools." -- Michael Ruhlman

I can't get the awful news about representative Giffords and the other shooting victims out of my mind. Reeling from disappointment with our country, our race, and the world in general, my hands found themselves wrist-deep in flour and water.

I return to food, again and again, for countless reasons. Man and woman can't live on bread alone, but bread is not any one thing alone: it is sustenance, it is comfort, it is therapy, it is a celebration of life, and it is even exercise for all of the atrophying muscles in our modern hands.

One of the many reasons I have devoted my life to immersing myself in all things edible (not literally, unfortunately) was a growing disappointment with nearly everything else. When I first got my laptop and made the Times my homepage, I noticed a pattern. It went like this:

1. Wake up. Go on-line.
2. Get barraged by news of political strife, ecological havoc, murder and mayhem.
3. Notice the link to Dining & Wine. Flee to it.
4. Read inspiring stories of heroes of the food revolution, synthesizing their desire for food justice, environmental stewardship, gastronomic sublimity, and the art of living.
5. Think "maybe the world isn't such a terrible place."

Escapism? Quite the opposite. In my senior year of college I took a class on storytelling, mythology and oral tradition taught by the professor and poet (and baker, I'm sure) Luis Yglesias. He insisted that we immerse ourselves in lore and legend in order to live a life fulfilled. To me, it sounded like hiding from reality. I told him as much, he tucked a thumb under his rainbow suspenders, twirled his mustache, gazed out the window, and finally said something along the lines of "It's not an escape; it's a return."

I feel the same way about food, and lately bread especially. At the moment I have a loaf of Michael Ruhlman's mulitgrain boule rising. Before that I made a 100% whole wheat from Beard on Bread, a buttered slice of which is pictured at top. It took coarse, whole wheat, two tablespoons of molasses, a tablespoon of salt, a little yeast, a little water, a few minutes of my day, and nothing else.

It was dense, hearty, flavorful bread. Food bread. The pieces of chaff left in the wheat crunched between my teeth like sparkly bits of Parmigiano Reggiano. This is the kind of stuff that you can feel in your bones was what your ancestors ate. Eating it, and making it, reminds me of one of the vows from Elise and my wedding: to help each other focus on what is most essential.

My thoughts are with everyone who has suffered from the recent tragedy in Arizona. My thoughts are wary of those whose hands are not completely clean of this blood, despite their backpaddling. They might threaten some of the values that are most near and dear to me -- peace, civility, tolerance, honesty -- but they can't shake my humanity. With my hands plunged in stiff, dark dough, my faith that what is good in the world will persist is immovable.

A Whirlwind Tour of Holiday Eating

2011-01-03T14:05:00.017-05:00

Much was consumed during recent days of revelry.

Going back to Chanukah, at Amanda's Annual Hot Oil Party we made olibollen: the yeasty Dutch donuts (translation = "fat balls") for which our dog is named. And here's a picture of the canine Olibollen knocking a snowball out of Elise's hand.

Knocked out by Elise's hand was this fabulous chicken liver pâté. We used MB's recipe, substituting Maker's Mark for cognac, going with my beloved "because that's what we had" principle of cooking.

The bourbon turned out to be a welcome addition. If I ran a gastropub, I would have to serve bourbon pâté, and would be obliged to write something obnoxious about it on the menu, using the phrase "with a distinctly American bite." Later we mixed Maker's Mark with champagne, which was dubbed a Pagne-Maker or a Cha-Ma (for the Jews). Because that's what we had, and because we'd had too much.

Christmas was spent feasting with former T&F contributors Dave and Karen. Karen made cassoulet, and while she chopped the bacon, the heavens showed their approval by spilling buttery light all over the kitchen.

While the cassoulet gurgled, we warmed gingerbread cookies on the lid of the Dutch oven.

Dave made an aspic from a Chez Panisse cookbook. It was like chicken salad from space.

E. and I made D&K some edible presents. These included too-gingery apple sauce, pink kraut, currant-coconut granola and anise-black pepper cranberry-cider compote. Yeah, we're foochebags.

Perhaps the crowning achievement of holiday season eating was a breakfast of homemade bagels and lox.

Earlier in the week Karen cured gravlox, and I made scallion bagels using a foolproof Joan Nathan recipe that ran with one of my first articles. I let the dough sit in the fridge overnight, which was an improvement. I also over-greased some of the pans, which means a few bagels came out with their butts fried in olive oil. Again, an improvement.

Hope you ate well too.

Sculptured Rocks and the Indian Amphitheater

2010-12-28T15:02:00.005-05:00

See here and here for two of my writers' picks from a recent travel feature in the Globe. Apparently I like rocks and water. Next year I'll try to pick places that involve wind or fire.

Bittman on Socialism, Vegetables and Hypocrisy

2010-12-21T12:49:00.001-05:00

"So here's my question for every politician who has ever riled up an audience with the notion that liberals will 'force' people to eat their vegetables: Why is it okay to encourage people to buy junk food if it’s not okay to encourage them to eat vegetables? And if it’s not okay to encourage people to buy junk food, then why is the government still doing it?"

http://markbittman.com/socialists-tell-americans-to-eat-their-veggie

Custard in a Pumpkin

2010-12-20T09:20:00.010-05:00

I've wanted to bake custard in a pumpkin for so long that I think the urge must have originated in a previous life. Then, I assume, I was a rosy-cheeked hobbit with a fertile pumpkin patch and an overly productive flock of little hobbit-chickens (Cornish game hens?).

This year baking custard in a pumpkin (custkin? pumpkard? cumpstkin? pustard?) was actually one of my Four Fall Food Challenges, which also included crabapple jelly, acorn bread, and something else, because Four Fall Food Challenges sounds better than Three Fall Food Challenges even though I only thought of three.

Why haven't I blogged about the FFFC's? Because I didn't actually make any of them.

Until this past weekend, when I simmered lemongrass and star anise in homemade coconut milk to mix with the eggs and sugar that would fill the empty cavity formerly stuffed with seeds and bitter, stringy pumpkin pulp. I think it was definitely an improvement over a pumpkin au natural, and come to think of it, I know some people who would benefit from having their insides replaced with custard, too.

Baking a custpumptardkin is easy and fun, plus it's hard to imagine any dish that would be more at home in a fairy tale, with the exception of some sort of grim pie made from English orphans. I worked off of a recipe I found on-line, and I hesitate to share it without further tinkering. But the idea is really quite simple: make custard, scoop the guts out of pumpkin, and pretend that the pumpkin is a glass pan in a bain-marie.

If I were to do it over again, I'd use canned coconut milk, which is thicker than any homemade version I've ever concocted, less sugar, a pinch of black pepper, and not a pumpkin. Pumpkins are pretty, but I think a softer, sweeter squash, like a kabocha, kuri, or even an acorn (squash), would fare better.

And if I could really do it all over again, I'd still be that hobbit.

A Food Hero

2010-12-13T11:12:00.001-05:00

Rejected Names For A Foodie High Horse

2010-12-08T11:45:00.005-05:00

Yesterday's post included mention of my foodie high horse, which I called the Black Scallion. Here is a list of alternate names I decided not to go with:

- Feed Steed
- Epicurean Equestrian
- Appaloosa Pupusa
- Thorough Bread
- Venison Saddle
- Mark Bit-man
- Peanut Bridle
- Gallop Scallop (Or Paddock Haddock)
- Sel de Mare
- Pony of Brandy
- Idaho Stud
- Trotters
- Mane Plate
- Cote du Roan
- Port Clydesdale Fresh Catch
- Palomino Acid

What I Ate In St. Louis

2010-12-07T11:49:00.008-05:00

When I go to St. Louis for Thanksgiving I eat things that I never eat during the rest of the year.

That includes the obvious Americana served alongside the turkey, like sweet potatoes topped with toasted marshmallows and "green" bean casserole, but there are other things I eat before and after the holiday that sometimes challenge my conception of food.

Omelettes in a bag, for instance. For the past two years, my makua (Hawaiian for mother-in-law) has laid out a make-your-own omelette in a bag station for the many friends and relatives who gather for the holiday. Making an omelette in a bag is a lot like making an omelette out of a bag up until the part when you put in a bag. You fill a Ziploc with the egg mixture and float it into a simmering pot of water. When the egg and the orange cheddar pull away from the sides, it's done.

Does estrogen leak from the bag during the process? Let's just say I don't own any bras. Yet.

Then there was Lion's Choice, not to be confused with a lion's choice, though if a lion were to ever sample the "seasoned salt" that is the primary condiment at Lion's Choice, a roast beef-centric fast food restaurant native to St. Louis, it would surely enjoy it. (And then kill you.)

I have no idea what makes the seasoned salt so addictive, though I suspect that it's one of those things that make junk food as addictive as hard drugs.

Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy eating all of these things, which is to say that I do. If nothing else, eating like a suburbanite for a few days permits me to demount my high horse, which I only feed local, seasonal Asian greens and which I've named the Black Scallion.

It reminds me that although I wouldn't live as long if I ate like this all the time, I don't die when I do.

Yet.

Anniversary Uno

2010-12-01T09:49:00.009-05:00

I just returned from traveling for our first wedding anniversary and then for the anniversary of the apocryphal interracial love-fest we call Thanksgiving, though some Native Americans mark the occasion as a National Day of Mourning.

My travels included several interesting foodsperiences, which is a word that I just made up. I'll start with the anniversary.

First there was an indoor anniversary picnic of pâté (not to be confused with pâte), triple creme, baguette, sliced cucumbers, grapes, wine, and so forth. As I assembled that spread I learned something about myself: as much as I love Sichuan, when it's time to celebrate, all I want is French (or faux-French, as our meal may appear to connoisseurs, though it had the desired effect).

Breakfast the next day was Iggy's bagels and (responsibly farmed) smoked salmon, and thanks to my purchase of a champagne-saving cork, we drank dry mimosas then and throughout the day. In fact, we did little else, though we did walk up a ski run, where my elfin wife mugged for the camera.

An Indian dinner in Williamstown that night was unremarkable, but the moon looked pretty cool, and kind of like a buffalo.

Oddly, there was a John Harvard's Brew House in the hotel complex we were staying in, and on the same date for the second year in a row I found myself drinking their inoffensive, cartoonish beers: we went to the one in Harvard Square the night before our wedding.

We ordered a flight and did blind taste tests until we got them all right. And then, feeling even more celebratory, I guiltily ordered some buffalo tenders. Guess French isn't the only way I like to party.

Next time: culinary adventures in suburban St. Louis.

The Magic of Fair Trade

2010-11-18T11:20:00.003-05:00

See here for my good friend Andrew Slack's Huff-post on chocolate, fair trade, and Harry Potter. They go together better than you might think.

Also, just because this is my 666th post doesn't mean that I think Harry Potter is satanic.

Mimi and Me

2010-11-16T12:05:00.002-05:00

See here for my Q&A on the Forward's food blog with former NYT restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton, who was a pleasure to speak with.

Quote of the Day

2010-11-16T09:14:00.003-05:00

From this NYT article:

"The end of the meal caused some confusion. A sweet custard seemed to conclude the meal, but it was followed by a salty sea slug topped with green chilies."

So that's where Calvin went: Chengdu.

Neither Tea nor Food

2010-11-12T12:53:00.005-05:00

I have evolution and selective breeding on the brain as I'm finally reading Guns, Germs and Steel, which answers all those questions you never thought to ask, like "Why didn't we domesticate zebras?" (Answer: they bite and don't let go.)

And so when I last took my dog to the field across the street from our new digs in Northampton, MA, I couldn't help but think the following: after thousands of years of survival of the fittest, learned behavior and so forth, dogs have scored an extremely secure niche in the human world. For proof, consider the (shameful) existence of cupcakes for dogs.

Formerly dogs had to be good hunters and guardians to earn a spot at the campfire, as well as the bones and scraps of the kill. But today's dog earns its keep by doing goofy stuff like this.

My dog Oli, the pinnacle of canine evolution, has perfected his meal ticket by perfecting his desirability in terms of companionship. Because who could answer "no" to the question so clearly posed by the above photo: won't you be my pal?

Cinnamon-Chili Braised Brisket

2010-11-09T11:08:00.012-05:00

There is only one word to describe the cinnamon-chili braised brisket I recently made: "uf."

Though I've used a Jewish word to describe it ("uf" is as Jewish a word as "Jewish"), this one was not cooked with tomato paste, carrots and the other accoutrements that so often accompany this cut of meat when served by members of the tribe. This brisket was a little smoky, a little spicy, a little sweet, and a lot delicious.

It was a Southwestern fantasy brisket, perfect for a day of watching Southwestern fantasy movies. My friends and I holed up for a Sergio Leone movie marathon, and as we've learned before, braised meats are a movie marathon's best friend; just thinking about it makes me want another pork butt pancake.

I like to think that I did for brisket what Leone did to the Western: I took something already very good, ignored genre, added some foreign flavor and weird music. So maybe I didn't add the music, but it did come in later.

Three days before I defrosted a three pound hunk of locally raised, grass fed beef, which by the way cost as much per pound as "natural" supermarket meat (about ten bucks). I believe that we should all be cutting down on our meat intake, but I also believe that there is nothing quite like an enormous piece of raw meat to stir one's blood. Quinoa just doesn't have the same effect on me.

As I prepared the meat my dog wandered in with a dazed look on his face, like he was getting a contact high from the aroma. I made him a little dog agua fresca by pouring the juices from the bag into his bowl.

Neither he nor I could leave the kitchen while the meat was around. I tasted a piece of it raw. I tasted a piece of it seared and unseasoned: pure cow. And then it disappeared for several hours into a dutch oven inside of a non-dutch oven. I could have done it in the crockpot, but this way the radiant heat from the oven would also warm the house, killing two birds (and one cow) with one stone.

For spices I used cinnamon, whole dried chiles and black peppercorns, chipotle powder, an absurd amount of cumin that still wasn't too much -- when have you ever thought "this has too much cumin?" -- some coconut sugar and cider vinegar that was still fermenting, so somewhere between cider and cider vinegar. It simmered with all of the above plus a little water and several seriously browned onions.

After a few hours in the oven-within-the-oven, the meat had become tender and the liquid, onion and spice mixture reduced to fantasy beef candy. I pulled the meat, keeping the strands as long as possible (I love brisket for that -- meat noodles) and put it back into the pot to marinate for another two days with all of the goodies.

During one of the Leone movies we reheated it and then ate it on slices of Iggy's with sprigs of cilantro and a little smoky bean dip I'd made as well.

And then the weird music did come in. It was the squealing of our ecstatic stomachs.

Uf.

Slow Food

2010-11-05T09:28:00.001-04:00

Watch as much of this as you possibly can. If you can't handle it, skip to the three minute mark.

Sometimes you have to slow something down to realize how weird it is. For contrast, here's the original.

I've Gone Soft

2010-11-02T11:00:00.010-04:00

It's been said that life is what happens when you're making other plans, but I think that statement rings more true with a few tweaks: life is what happens only when you plan it.

When I was a touring sketch comic, life was interesting by default. A little too interesting, which is one of the many reasons I'm no longer on the road. Now most of my days are spent in front of the friendly little robot on which I'm currently typing (R.W. Apple called his "the piano"), and if I don't force myself to get up, get out and go stumbling around the woods just for kicks or for wild edibles, it doesn't happen.

Last Friday I was reflecting on how long it had been since I'd slept outside, and so Elise and I hastily factored in a camping excursion for that night. What I wanted was to scale a mountain with everything we needed on our backs, but that wasn't going to happen with only a few hours' notice, so we settled for car camping at a nearby state park. Of course campfire cooking would be part of the allure.

We arrived at dusk and barely had time to set up the tent and find firewood, so it was a good thing we didn't plan anything elaborate for dinner, else we wouldn't have eaten for hours. Instead we had burritos I bought that afternoon. We nestled them in the fire pit to warm up, protected by their aluminum second skins.

Breakfast the next day consisted of foraged tea -- hemlock, not to be confused with Plato's last beverage -- bacon cooked over the fire and eggs cooked in the bacon fat. Yeah, we went there.

Even though we had a cell phone and a car and were parked just off of a paved road that led back to civilization, the trip felt rough. It was cold, the ground was hard, and the dog kept waking up and shifting around throughout the night, and in a tent as small as ours it was impossible to not notice.

Also impossible to not notice was the howling wind and the howling coyote that got us up in the middle up of the night and made us wonder about whether the tent was a strong enough psychological barrier against predators, since it certainly wasn't much of a physical one.

In the morning I realized I'd been on edge since we got there, either because I was cold, busy coaxing flames out of damp wood, or just unused to unfamiliar surroundings. As the title of the post says, I've gone soft.

That's when I decided I had to turn things around. I took a swig of the bright, warm hemlock tea, straining the leaves out with my teeth, took off all of my clothes and jumped into the pond.

The air temp was in the 30's, and since there wasn't any ice on it I'm guessing the pond was in the 40's. I remember one instant of opening my eyes under the frigid, murky water, and it seemed that if I lingered any longer my head would implode from cold. I dried off with my pajama pants and sat on a piece of cardboard by the fire, watching my feet steam. Until then, I didn't know that feet could steam, and I wouldn't have learned that from sitting in the apartment watching Netflix.

As an 18th century Hassidic mystic once said, "Just as the hand, held before the eye, can hide the tallest mountain, so the routine of everyday life can keep us from seeing the vast radiance of and the secret wonders that fill the world. "

Just as a computer screen can hide from view the nearest state park, so can jumping into a freezing pond remind you why it's important to plan the good stuff.

Defrosted Fruit

2010-10-28T08:20:00.007-04:00

No, that's not a victim of the Ice Truck Killer: it's a persimmon.

My new home is in the Pioneer (or "Happy") Valley of Western Mass, and luckily it's a fun place to eat. There are farms, there are restaurants, there are farm to table restaurants, and so forth. But one of my favorite food destinations isn't a restaurant. In fact, it's more like a warehouse.

The crowded aisles of Tran's World Food Market in Hadley are packed with odds and ends from all corners of the earth. Need chili paste? You'll feel like a kid in a chili paste store. Need coconut vinegar? No, you don't even know what coconut vinegar is, but you buy a bottle for $1.50 anyway.

The market has assuaged any concerns I had about getting all of the ingredients I need and no longer living in an urban area. Tran's World Food Market might have as many items as all of Boston's ethnic markets crammed into one, or a least it looks that way. One day there were shrink-wrapped hunks of hacked up, spiky jackfruit at the register: an impulse buy.

I recently discovered a freezer section dedicated to whole, dirt cheap, exotic frozen fruit. I bought a mesh bag of frozen mangosteens for about six bucks and a bag of rock-hard, icy persimmons for under two bucks. Sustainable? No. Irresistible? Yes.

Unable to restrain myself, I started eating them still frozen on the drive home. A frozen persimmon is kind of a fun thing to eat, assuming you're as weird as I am, but a frozen mangosteen has as much flavor as a snowball. Disappointing considering I've been told they're the world's best fruit.

However both were stellar once thawed: the fruits had all reached peak ripeness before being John Spartan-ed. But here's the strange thing. I took a bite of a frozen persimmon then left it to thaw in the fridge overnight. In the morning, most of the persimmon had leaked out onto the plate and gelled into an irresistible glop.

I slurped it up for breakfast.

I've tried to replicate the experience by cutting others with a knife and letting them thaw, but little juice and no jelly has resulted. I'd ask if anyone has any advice, but I can't imagine that anyone does.

I think I just need to savor the freak experience of eating spontaneously occurring fruit goo for what it was.

Attack On Attack On School Gardens

2010-10-21T07:09:00.008-04:00

Earlier this month Andrew Sullivan posted Adam Ozimek's attack on schools gardens, which he (Adam and then Andrew quoting Adam) called "yuppie vanity." There's a kernel of truth in that statement, but it should be dwarfed by the rest of the ear.

I too find fault in the elitist elements of the local foods movement and in gardens whose sole purpose is to make rich people feel better about already having the world's finest food supply. And any vegetables are better than no vegetables, whether they're frozen, canned, or made into "space dinners" for astronauts.

Where Sullivan and Ozimek misfire is in their unmitigated praise of frozen veggies over school garden programs. If Sullivan/Ozimek were writing from a place of concern for the well being of poor children, they would at least acknowledge that we should emphasize frozen vegetables in addition to school gardens.

But that would make for a far less catchy post. They are playing the "I am an opinionated blogger, listen to me" card and the often-used in conjunction "and I speak for the poor, not you elitists" card, though of course they too are members of the elite.

Changing the way that people eat is not exclusively about changing what they eat. It's about changing perception. With school gardens we're often talking about kids who actually don't know that vegetables are grown in the ground: that's something that many educators report hearing. If that's where you're coming from, it doesn't matter how many frozen vegetables you're told to eat. You won't be inspired to.

School gardens a) yield incredibly valuable fresh produce in areas that often have no produce (not even frozen) and b) provide even more valuable inspirational teaching tools. Condemning them as ineffective or superfluous is just as short-sighted as condemning an inspirational work of art, like the protest songs that fueled the anti-war movement in the 1960's. Especially if you could also eat that work of art, and it was delicious.

Which is better motivation for eating more vegetables: witnessing the miraculous journey from seed to carrot, and then pulling up that piece of food that you grew from the dirt with your own two hands and taking a bite, or being handed a bag of frozen broccoli florets? Teach a man to fish, etc.

Both bloggers also ignore the new data in favor of school gardens that prompted the attack. And Ozimek falls into the trap of using the word "progressive" as a negatively charged adjective without explanation, as in the sentence "Unfortunately, it seems that these genuinely useful policies and programs are being bogged down with wasteful progressive ideas."

Ozimek describes the values of fresh food champions like Jamie Oliver and Alice Waters as "wasteful upper-class liberal obsession over local, fresh, and organic foods." Reminder: local, fresh, organic food is not exclusive to the upper class. That's just the stigma it carries in the U.S. today. Not to idealize the diet of the poor, as Rachel Laudan cautions us against doing, but local, fresh, and organic is how the whole world used to eat and how much of it still eats by default and not because it's cool. Such foods get the shaft in being branded as a departure from brand, spankin' new systems of food production labeled "conventional," though they are anything but. Of the two, "conventional" produce is the new radical.

Local for the sake of local is not a luxury, as Ozimek suggests. It is a powerful notion that keeps more money in the communities these children live in and that makes a tremendous qualitative difference in the lives of those it effects: the farmers who receive more of every dollar, patrons who experience the social benefits of having their own farmers market, and those who seek alternatives to the risks posed by industrial agriculture.

Sullivan/Ozimek are also guilty of determining what poor people should do without consulting them, making them appear at least as elitist as any goat cheese and arugula devotee. Ultimately, poor people should get to decide what poor people get to do, and the important thing is to provide them with a range of options so that they can pick the one that works best for them. Because, shockingly, poor people are actual people, and are different from one another, and some of them are able to and want to grow some of their own food. Thankfully there are several programs that help them do so.

Many of the vain yuppies being attacked are also big fans of frozen vegetables. Most of the people I know who grow their own food and shop at farmers markets also use frozen vegetables, and none of them are wealthy. In other words, it's not like people who garden are rich fools and people who eat frozen veggies are poor heroes. The lines are not as distinct as Sullivan/Ozimek make them out to be.

What we have here is a typical case of curmudgeonliness clouding vision. This is precisely the perspective that was dismissive of public interest in organic food, now one of the fastest growing sectors of agriculture, and then of local food, now being championed not only by "yuppies" but also by Walmart (for better or for worse).

There are a lot of poor, blue-collar people the world over who grow their own vegetables. It is neither ignorant nor idealistic to suggest that more people do so, and that's not to exclude frozen vegetables from the mix.

Should lower income households try to grow their own vegetables? Should lower income people try to eat more frozen vegetables? The answer to both questions is yes, though the former has the power to create a greater change, as the new data suggests, and if you can only dismiss that as a pipe dream of the privileged, then you should wipe the icy peas and carrots from your eyes.

Real Eggs, For Real

2010-10-18T10:49:00.017-04:00

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.

Knobbed Russet: A Darned Fine, Though Ugly, Apple

2010-10-14T11:08:00.004-04:00

This Knobbed Russet was one of the best -- hmm... maybe the best -- apples I've ever eaten. It is not, however, one of the best apples I've ever looked at.

"Knobbed" is not an adjective I want used to describe my fruit. "Knobbed" is an adjective I want used to describe old-timey walking sticks sold at craft shops for tourists in Asheville, NC. "Juicy" is an adjective I want used to describe my fruit.

Luckily, the k.r. was both knobbed and juicy, unlike the mealy Sheep's Nose apple (another heirloom) I once bought from Cornell Orchards in Ithaca. What impressed me most about this dingy looking fruit was its aroma: like biting into a perfume bottle, but without shards of glass piercing your tongue.

Just another reminder, as if you needed it, that heirloom produce can blow supermarket produce out of the water in terms of depth, subtlety, and mildly off-putting, quaint names.

I'm reminded of something someone recently said to me while I was helping to prepare a post-wedding brunch in Chesapeake, VA. I paraphrase:

"I've tried growing organic but it just doesn't work. At least the vegetables are never pretty."

There a lot of things I dislike about that comment, but here's the most obvious. If the most important criteria for food was the normative standard for "pretty," wouldn't someone have eaten Cindy Crawford in, like, 1991?

Yet she lives. Therefore, eat knobbed apples.

Jews and Pickles

2010-10-11T18:20:00.001-04:00

See here for my post on the Forward's food blog about pickles, Jews, and Jewish pickler Sandor Katz (author of the awesome Wild Fermentation).

The Pawtuxet Pawpaw

2010-10-05T10:41:00.003-04:00

As you may recall, I'm mad for pawpaws. I have an article about them in the current issue of Edible Rhody, which you can read here and which you can read a little bit of here:

"The pawpaw could very well become mascot for the American local foods movement, a rallying point for both growers and consumers seeking to reconstruct our forgotten national food identity. Nothing better embodies our terroir than this truly American fruit found nowhere else on earth and so deeply embedded in our national history. Certainly not the apple, which, like Borat, is from Kazakhstan.

As we pay closer attention to where our food comes from, why not look a little further back? Even hardcore farm-to-table restaurants like the flagship Chez Panisse are cooking with crops that originated on other continents. In the quest for authenticity, shouldn’t an indigenous plant that our first president grew score higher than, say, a cauliflower?"

GMO Tater Maker Totters

2010-10-05T09:55:00.005-04:00

The NYT reports that agribusiness giant Monsanto is taking a nose dive, with market shares dropping 42%. Yay for the local foods movement? Not exactly.

If like me you thought their market shares might be suffering from increased farmers markets and CSA shares, you're wrong. This is less about anti-frankenfood pressure and more about farmers buying cheaper, generic GMO products from (surprise) China.

Which is perhaps an even worse state of affairs. If you're going to use genetically modified seed that can spill into your neighbor's farm and cause them to be sued for intellectual property theft, and if you're going to grow crops with "terminator genes" that are programmed to produce sterile second generation crops so that you can no longer save your seed but have to go back to Monsanto for your annual fix, the least you could do is buy American.

Granted, Monsanto f's with more crops that potatoes, as the title of this post points out, but I'm willing to sacrifice accuracy for puns.

Weed Tea

2010-10-01T11:17:00.005-04:00

I threw together this witch's brew when I was up in Vermmmont over the summer. Rather than drink one of the dubious herbal teas (think "natural" ingredients) someone had left in our cabin, I just went out to the lawn.

There I found plenty of wild edibles just waiting to be steeped in an old coffee pot and drunk by an amateur forager/food writer. These included raspberry leaves, plantain, red clover blossoms, oxalis (aka wood sorrel) and bee balm.

It was a little minty from the bee balm, a little tangy from the oxalis, it was made richer by the plantain, and the red clover blossom and raspberry leaf did absolutely nothing except make me feel good about myself for knowing I could use them in tea. I'll have to try both on their own to understand their deal.

Was it the best tisane I've ever had? If you said "yes" you clearly haven't read my post entitled "The Best Tisane I've Ever Had." But it was great, it was free, it was wild, it connected me to the Earth and made me grateful to be somewhere where I could trust the safety of the wild edibles. (I'm not afraid of the plants, I'm afraid of the pesticide.)

But best of all, it didn't have "zinger" in the title.

Also, sorry to disappoint any stoners who were expecting a post on tea made from marijuana. In case I ruined your high, here's a picture of a Grateful Dead bear to cheer you up again:

Natural, Magical Apple Soda

2010-09-28T13:38:00.004-04:00

If I had to be stuck on a desert island with only one book, it would be a book about how to escape from a desert island. If I could bring only one record, it would be an audio recording of the book about how to escape from a desert island. And if I could bring one movie, it would be Citizen Kane. Duh! But if I could bring one foodstuff, it would be slightly fermented apple cider.

Cider that has just begun to ferment is a natural, magical tonic complete with god-given bubbles and a flavor that thoroughly trounces sweet, flat cider, or even soda for that matter. I'm not talking about hard cider, which I also love, but which I wouldn't want to drink at all hours of the day as I do this stuff, which I drink like it's going out of style.

And it is. When people buy cider and it gets a little fizzy, they usually throw it out. But that's when you should throw it in (to your mouth, that is). Cider that has begun to ferment has a tang that makes it complex and balanced, so much so that I don't even touch it until I see bubbles forming. I drink a small glass as many times a day as I think to, and doing so always reaffirms my decision to be alive. Maybe it's the probiotic content forming a power block in my brain that says "we have the majority by several billion, and we say keep truckin'."

To make it, buy cider that has no preservatives and, ideally, isn't pasteurized. It will work with pasteurized cider without preservatives, but come on. What's good for fermentation is good for you. Leave this out at room temp with a cloth tied over the neck of the container to keep out fruit flies, or dust bunnies. When you see bubbles, start quaffing. Wait too long and you'll have cider vinegar, which really isn't such a bad worst case scenario.

It may not help you escape a desert island, but it would certainly enhance your stay.

Poop Light

2010-09-23T14:45:00.003-04:00

Today's Creative Use of Energy Award (something I just made up because I wanted to talk about this) goes to the City of Cambridge. Only in Cambridge does dog poop become a beacon.

Edible Garden, Edible Fair

2010-09-23T09:49:00.002-04:00

See here for my piece in yesterday's Globe about the Edible Garden exhibit at the NY Botanical Garden, which is a garden for plants and not robots, though the sign from the highway does read "NY Bot Garden."

And see here for my write-up on the 2nd annual Urban Ag Fair in Cambridge.

Oh, and don't forget to try the braised radishes.

The Eleventh Hour of Summer Produce

2010-09-22T11:02:00.008-04:00

As I stroll my local far-mars gazing at the kaleidoscope of heirloom tomatoes and drooling like one of Pavlov's dogs, I can't help but wonder: is this the last week for a real peach?

With temperatures jutting grotesquely into the 90's tomorrow, who knows. But there is something about this moment in the season that always fills me with a mix of gratitude and anxiety. Tomatoes and peaches couldn't be more ripe, apples are certainly on the scene, and summer and fall produce share space like lions and lambs. But soon, all will be turnips.

And so at this time of year I stuff my face with as much summer produce as possible, because the best way to preserve food isn't in jars: it's to eat so much of it that you become uncomfortable.

My two favorite vessels for my two favorite fruits are crude bruschetta and peanut butter peaches. The bruschetta is straightforward: toast a slice of bread, plop as much super-ripe, gorgeous, locally grown, umami-rich heirloom tomato on top of it as you dare, drizzle with oil, sprinkle with salt, throw on some chopped herb if you've got it. It need not be basil. I've been using sage from my minuscule container garden.

The peanut butter peaches must be had to be believed. They are so simple, so unlikely, yet so divine. You need the ripest peach imaginable. Go ahead and imagine that. No, imagine even riper. Now you've got it! Halve it, toss the stone, and stuff with (real) peanut butter.

The light, juicy, sweet, tangy flesh of the peach. The thick, dry, salty earthy peanut butter. I've eaten three before I even realize I'm awake.

I love a good restaurant as much as the next guy, but it is these crude, almost embarrassing personal inventions, products of whimsy and lean larders, eaten over the sink to catch the juice, when no one's looking, then wiping your hands on your pants, then guiltily eating another. These are the foods we'll never forget.

Quote of the Day

2010-09-20T08:40:00.000-04:00

From Monbiot:

"If pigs are fed on residues and waste and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands – food for which humans don’t compete – meat becomes a very efficient means of food production."

Mark Bittman on the Food Processor

2010-09-17T10:04:00.003-04:00

Mark Bittman's latest is classic Mark Bittman. He takes a simple kitchen element, in this case a machine rather than an vegetable, and through his patented blend of debunking and innovating, he causes us to see it anew, and as a world of nearly limitless possibilities.

He's made me feel this way before about countless ingredients, from mussels to chickpea flour, and now he's turned his inspiration-ray towards the food processor. Through the eyes of the Minimalist, the food processor no longer looks like a clumsy kitchen appliance: it is a gateway to a better you.

Much more inspiring than his microwave argument.

Melon (Seed) Drink

2010-09-15T10:36:00.004-04:00

See here for my post on The Jew and the Carrot about pepitada, a drink made from steeped, ground melon seeds. Having tried it, I'll never compost the seeds again.

4 Delis, 3 Dishes, 1 Article

2010-09-14T22:37:00.003-04:00

See tomorrow's Globe or here for my article on the Boston deli scene.

Seven Courses

2010-09-13T12:04:00.009-04:00

As a wedding present to some friends, Elise and I constructed a seven course meal this past Saturday. The courses were:

1. Cheese (aged Gouda, cheddar, Parmigiano, a super-cowy local feta) and Castelvetrano olives.
2. Peter's Point oysters
3. Purple oak leaf and arugula salad with toasted almonds and avocado.
4. Mushroom puree.
5. Wax beans in butter, sherry and sage.
6. The Best Thing I've Ever Made.
7. Caribbean Red Papaya and Greek (white) yogurt.

Only the next day did we realize how little cooking we actually did, having focused on minimal presentation of high quality, mostly local ingredients. This goes along with my culinary theory of get good stuff, don't f*ck it up. For instance, for an amuse we served three still-wrapped ground cherries. They were as complexly flavorful and engaging as anything made by a human.

The mushroom soup was a clash of wilderness and civilization. I made a stock from last year's tougher bits of Chicken of the Woods, which we then pureed with the most banal of fungi, the white button mushroom, partly to prove that even a pathetic mushroom is still an incredible thing. The marriage of the wild and civil 'shrooms was a happy one, as is our friends'.

The papaya and yogurt came from a discovery we made last week in NYC. Hungry and stuck in a not very fun or affordable part of town in terms of eating, we stopped at a corner store and bought Greek yogurt and a half of a ripe papaya. We dumped the entire container of yogurt into the cavity of the papaya and slobbered over it on a city bench.

The thick, dry yogurt made for a fascinating texture contrast with the juicy, squishy papaya. The only change we made in serving it to friends was a little drizzle of honey. Another thing I like about serving this for dessert is that it it doesn't contain sugar and isn't cake.

And now for #6, The Best Thing I've Ever Made. In the Crockpot I braised two grass fed beef shanks in an improvised Sichuan liquid of soy sauce, honey, star anise, one clove, some smashed ginger, three kinds of "pepper" (whole black , dried red, toasted Sichuan peppercorns) a splash of rice cooking wine and one of cider. This simmered for about six hours, and you can imagine how it made the apartment smell.

The soft, sweet-salty, aromatic meat was pulled from the bone and served atop a single, perfectly brown, crusty, pudgy latke cooked by Elise. On top of the meat were matchsticks of tart green apple tossed with chopped, fresh red chiles, lemon juice, salt, and finely minced cilantro stems.

I'd been wanting to make it ever since having something similar at Market. The main difference, besides the latke, was that the heat in Jean-Georges' apple slaw was invisible. I'm not entirely sure how it got there (rubbing? injection?), which drew me in all the more. But, like a savage, I used actual bits of peppers in mine.

I have not yet mentioned the one thing unanimously declared the night's best. After the entree I let everyone have a spoonful of the beef's cooking liquid, a sublime nectar composed of the ingredients I've already discussed plus the now rendered marrow from the shanks. I could describe it, but I'd rather use my short time on this earth to think about it one more time.

It was a good meal and, we presume, a good gift. At least as good as a nice serving platter.

Navajo Tea Source

2010-09-13T07:25:00.004-04:00

If you'd like to try Navajo tea, and in case you missed this in the comments, Darren has stepped forward as a source for the Southwest Navajo tea that grows wild in grazing land near his home. To buy a bundle, you can email him at ddamon871@gmail.com.

Quote of the Day

2010-09-10T17:11:00.002-04:00

From the always lucid Rachel Laudan:

"If we urge the Mexican to stay at her metate, the farmer to stay at his olive press, the housewife to stay at her stove, all so that we may eat handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old."

See the full piece here.

Makaibari Silver Tips Imperial

2010-09-10T11:59:00.005-04:00

Seth and Maggie are good at bringing me edible presents from distant lands. Very good.

From their honeymoon in Scandinavia I received dried fish and aquavit. From their tea researching jaunt through India and Pakistan I obtained fermented cauliflower leaves, yeast for making the rice beer known as chang (aka "thoo-n"), coriander honey, dried cubes of yak cheese, saffron, cardamom, and of course tea.

Most of the tea they brought me, like most of the tea in India, was black. Since I haven't found an Indian black tea that I've loved, I found myself pouring most of my gift for guests; guests, as a people, generally want black tea and don't care where it's from. And so I guilty found myself ignoring my last sack of tea. It said "Darjeeling" and the bag was black, so I assumed its contents were as well.

Oops! As luck would have it, my mistake was pointed out by Dave, the one guest who doesn't
want black tea. Turned out I had a white tea, and it was not only Organic Makaibari Silver Tips but Organic Makaibari Silver Tips Imperial. The Imperial is apparently only picked when conditions are right and under "full moon beams."

I haven't toyed with temperature and brewing time enough to fully report on OMSTI, but so far it's been fun. A short brew made with not very hot water (my system: I use the extra water Elise boils for coffee once enough time has passed for me to think "maybe I'll have some tea," at which point it's somewhere between the temperature for oolong and for ice) that I'm drinking right now is predominantly tannic, also grassy, and not quite roasty but... let's call it toasty. Why I have no idea, since white tea is not roasted. This batch must have grown next to a shrub that was struck by lightning.

A longer brew of leaves on their third or fourth steep produced a viscous cup with notes of citrus peel and a sort of off-fruitiness that I can't quite place. Call it resin. Again, I need more time to figure this one out but will keep you posted.

Seth and Maggie: sorry it took so long. But look at it this way -- now you gave me an aged white tea!

Gratitude

2010-09-01T13:22:00.002-04:00

Thanks to Stella for sending me this NYT article about Rogert Ebert's food life after losing his ability to eat.

“Food for me is in the present tense,” he said. “Eating for me is now only in the past tense.”

Vermmmont 2010: Wood Stove Oyster Mushrooms

2010-08-27T09:27:00.005-04:00

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.

Local Peaches, Local Anesthetic

2010-08-20T14:38:00.007-04:00

My recent oral surgery has imposed a challenging dietary constraint: a week of nothing but liquid. And to tell the truth, it hasn't been that bad.

Maybe it's just the painkillers speaking, but boy do my hands feel heavy.

What I meant to say was that the liquid diet actually has its perks. What Pollan famously called the omnivore's dilemma (figuring out what to eat in a post-modern food culture) becomes a little easier without the use of teeth. Suddenly the question is not whether fair trade is more important than organic, but will it fit in a blender? If the answer is yes, I've probably eaten it -- or rather delicately swallowed it -- in this past week.

My meals can generally be divided into smoothies and soups, meaning they tend towards sweet or savory with a base of either soy milk or chicken stock. I made a big batch of the latter using a summer's worth of frozen bones, the last, shriveled onions from our winter CSA, a couple of carrots, herbs from the garden, and a glug of sherry. It's been my best friend this week, excusing almost everything as soup.

The challenge of course is to make mug after mug not only bearable but also appetizing. The pureed can of seafood chowder and spinach pictured at top was no such success.

My favorite creations have allowed me to enjoy liquid foods just as much as their solid counterparts. There's something molecular-gastronomic about drinking a peach, and it does cause you to reconsider and appreciate the subject in a new light.

The pureed peaches I've been slurping have been one of my favorite "foods": two extremely ripe local peaches, a thumb of super-ripe banana for added sweetness, and just enough soy milk to enable a vortex in the blender. When you remove the lid of the blender, a concentrated wave of peach aroma clobbers your nostrils. You swoon, though again, this may be the painkillers.

Another success has been liquified beans and rice. Sounds awful doesn't it? And yet the concoction is flavorful, comforting, and somewhat mysterious. If someone put a bowl of it in front of you at a restaurant, you'd find it palatable, familiar and yet impossible to place. I make mine by browning onion and garlic, using stock as the liquid and adding about a teaspoon of cumin per serving. The rice yields a particularly velvety texture.

Heck, I'm sticking to liquids from here on out. I know that's a heavy handed statement, but remember that my hands really do feel heavy. Smoothie time!

More on Sumac

2010-08-18T14:12:00.003-04:00

I just can't stop writing about sumac! See here for my short piece in the Globe on my new favorite spice/tea/wild edible.

Vermmont 2010: Mega-Brunch

2010-08-11T16:50:00.005-04:00

Food is one of the many reasons I spend two weeks each summer teaching Shakespeare in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont (see here for this weekend's show listings).

The photo at top captures a runny poached egg yolk on the precipice, just one component of a meal our staff interns whipped up that they referred to as "mega-brunch." Also on the menu were homemade popovers, eggs from friends(' chickens), hollandaise, and, at least in my case, three mimosas. These made climbing Mt. Pisgah a little difficult later in the day.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is always spirited eating to be had in VT, thanks to the ingredients, the company, or both.

Heck, the compost pile that I overlook as I type has better produce in it than most supermarkets.

When Life Gives You Herb Blossoms...

2010-08-03T16:13:00.005-04:00

.... make herb blossom water. Sounds delicious, doesn't it? No. It sounds like nothing. But an infusion of basil and mint blossoms is ethereal, cooling, and a good way to use up part of the plant that you're supposed to remove anyway.

They say that pinching the blossoms from herbs makes the plant redirect it's energy into producing more of what you want: fat, juicy, aromatic leaves. I've never tested an unpinched herb plant against a pinched one, so I can't speak from experience about the effect on your harvest, but going out and removing the blossoms every few days gives you a fun little job that makes you feel like what you do in the grand scheme of things is important: I pinch the flowers off of the basil plants, therefore I am.

But what to do with those decapitated blossoms? Keep basil flowers in your pocket and they'll make your keys smell nice, but they'll turn black. Keep them in a pitcher (or glass) of cold water and their oils will wend their way about the water molecules, imparting a fresh and slightly sweet taste to the drink.

Another interesting test would be this cold brew versus a hot steep. My guess is that, as in cold-brewed coffee, this eliminates any trace of bitterness. Unless you're a pollinator.

Hot, Hot, Hot

2010-07-28T13:29:00.002-04:00

See here for the full list or check these links for my entries in Stuff magazine's 2010 Hot 100 list:

Hot Way To Look Like a Mutant: The Vibram Five Finger
Hot Way to Ignore the Obesity Epidemic: The KFC Double Down
Hot Local Sip: Pretty Things Beer
Hot Expletive: BFD
Hot New Band: Silly Bandz
Hot Social Media Trend: Being Anti-Facebook
Hot and Headed for Mainstream: Skype

Summer Rolls

2010-07-26T09:35:00.005-04:00

Is there any food more appropriate for summer than summer rolls?

Of course not.

Besides being named for the season, summer rolls are everything you want from a warm weather edible. They require little or no cooking, which makes for a cooler kitchen as well as a cooler mouthful. They easily accommodate seasonal ingredients, and more importantly, they're something most of us have only had in restaurants.

There are many reasons to cook for yourself, but the best is vanity. Sure eating at home tends to involve less fat and salt and more community, but what you really want from a home cooked meal is to replicate something that you previously thought only came from a menu, and to gloat about it.

Lording over a plate of pudgy, translucent summer rolls as thick and nutritious as enormous grubs while in the comfort of my own kitchen makes me feel like a king. Knowing that my version costs a fraction of what I would pay at a restaurant makes me feel like a king who is also very rich.

We started making s.r.'s with raw tofu, basil, mung noodles, bok choi and peanut sauce on the side, but the current and preferred evolution involves the same noodles plus fried tofu, cilantro, cucumber and a vat of chili paste in which to schmear these pliant little wraps.

I'd write up a recipe if there were anything to it besides this: buy rice paper wrappers. Moisten them and fill with whatevs.

Quote of the Day

2010-07-22T09:27:00.002-04:00

From The New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne (1961):

"Swizzle sticks should never be served with champagne except to an invalid whose stomach cannot support the sparkle. Swizzle sticks destroy in a second what required a miracle of years to produce."

On Kale

2010-07-21T10:46:00.003-04:00

See here for my piece in today's Globe on kale, including a recipe for the brightly colored braise pictured above.

Sumac Agua Fresca

2010-07-20T15:00:00.019-04:00

If your soul screams for yet another post about a sour tea made from wild ingredients, read on. If you'd rather read about designer cupcakes, might I suggest another food blog.

To begin, let's play a little game of word association. I'm going to say a word, and I want you to think of the first word that immediately jumps into your mind. Ready?

Me: sumac.
You: POISON!

But have no fear. The only similarities between poison sumac and regular -- or "delicious" -- sumac are literary. Though they share a name, they look nothing alike.

And yet a hairy, red, seed-studded head of common sumac just doesn't look like something you'd want to eat. And it isn't. But it is something that you want to drink. Simply muddle a ripe head in cool water, let stand for about ten minutes, strain, and drink. The resulting liquid should be a shade of salmon that can only be described as "lovely." It is to pink lemonade as manna is to food.

Besides za'atar, this simple drink is my only experience ingesting sumac, though I could easily imagine a sumac syrup splashed into champagne, among other possibilities.

Though I have little desire to experiment given the quality of sumac tea and the ease with which it is made. Sumac tea is tart and fruity, part citrus, part berry. It is a dead ringer for a splash of pure cranberry juice in water, which is something I drink all summer but will never need to pay for again. Sumac-ade, as it is often called, is just as good if not better, not to mention carbon-neutral and obtainable without the exchange of currency. Nor does it come in a wasteful container; I carried mine home in a hat.

Brewing a cool, refreshing glass of tangy sumac jus doesn't even require a heating element, and the process could therefore predate the invention of fire. Forget about so-called organic food flown in from China: this stuff is the essence of sustainability.

----------------------------------

Sumac Agua Fresca (aka Rhus Juice)
serves 6

Ingredients:

1 quart of water
1 ripe sumac berry cluster (dark red, picked in mid-summer to fall)

To test a berry cluster for flavor, gently rub it and then lick your fingers. They'll taste tangy if you've got a winner.

Twist or snip off the berry head. Thoroughly muddle it in the water using a wooden spoon or your fingers. Pour through a fine strainer or cheesecloth removing all seeds and hairs, which can irritate the throat.

Sweeten if desired. Serve room temperature or cold. Connect with nature.

The Neo-Oeno's

2010-07-13T08:14:00.001-04:00

See here for my article in Stuff Magazine Boston about local neo-oenophiles, or "neo-oeno's:"

http://stuffboston.com/stuffboston/archive/2010/07/12/wine-declassified-today-s-oenophiles-are-embracing-wine-s-unstuffy-side.aspx

Backyard Iced Tea

2010-07-09T08:56:00.007-04:00

The Times' article about the Danish chef who incorporates wild edibles into haute cuisine made me feel three things: hungry, ecstatic, and irritated.

Hungry because I want to eat "pulp of air-dried sea buckthorn with pickled rose hips." Ecstatic that an international star chef is making his name by cooking with undomesticated flora. Irritated for the same reason.

As much as I loved the article, I wish we lived in a world in which it wasn't news. I wish that using the free and compelling ultra-local bounty of the natural world was the default, not a bold move that attracts the attention of the press.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: eating wild edibles is a sublime experience. A bite of your environment will shower you with oodles more terroir than wine from thousands of miles away. It will surprise and delight your palate infinitely more than, say, a potato. And perhaps most importantly, it will give you a glimpse of the interconnectedness with the natural world that used to fuel our existence as a species. Which, if you're spending your free time reading a blog, chances are you could use.

The food world is so gaga for novelty, and yet new and exciting tastes abound right under our feet. Everyone (including me) made such a big stink when black garlic hit the scene, but what about the weeds in your lawn? There you're almost guaranteed to find clover, plantain, poor man's pepper, dandelion greens (and flowers and roots and buds) and chickweed, all delicious, all compelling, all free. You'll also find the source of one of my favorite wild teas: oxalis.

This morning I started the day with an ice cold glass of oxalis tea. Oh, you've never had it? Funny, it grows everywhere, it's as easy to make as microwave popcorn, and it tastes totally crazy.

Oxalis tea is a refreshing summer drink with a surprisingly citrusy twang and just a hint of vegetable funk. Pick oxalis from anywhere that you trust. Oh, you don't trust your own lawn because you spray it with toxic chemicals? Hmm, maybe you should think about that. Boil water. Steep a handful of fresh leaves and stems in the hot water for about five minutes. Strain. Cool. Drink. Call the New York Times.

Navajo Tea

2010-07-05T11:26:00.012-04:00

While visiting friends on the Navajo Nation a few years back, Elise and I were given a gift of some Navajo tea. When we got home, I stashed it in the back of my tea cupboard where it would stay preserved in the cool and dark. Which also meant that I would forget about it for a couple of years.

Though this video shows one bundle making one cup of tea, we were told that it would yield about fifteen cups, and so we had to wait an additional few months after rediscovering the tea for a time when we had enough guests to drink it. That turned out to be Elise's birthday. Though techniques vary, we tried pouring a pot of boiling water over the single bundle in a large, ceramic mixing bowl and letting it steep for about ten minutes.

The tea was wonderful. I know it might seem fairly obvious to describe a tea that is essentially dried grass as "grassy," but it was. There was a faintly sweet flavor and an aroma like pungent hay. The liquor was thicker than with most true teas, the color a rich gold.

It is difficult to discuss this tea without hyper-romanticizing the West. So permit me the following: the tea was an expression of the land it had grown out of, and in it you could taste the bare rock, sand and sun-baked wood and herbs that struggle to lay claim to a spartan landscape. Talk about terroir.

To me, this tea is about as sacred as food can be. It was a gift, it is a traditional and culturally relevant food, it has medicinal qualities, and, being a wild crop, the tea was foraged and not cultivated, which means this species has been relatively uninfluenced by our presence on the planet. Compare that to something you might find at the supermarket. Orange juice with fish in it, for instance.

The funny thing is that when we were given the tea we were drinking instant Folger's from a big, red plastic tub. I don't want to give the illusion that most Navajo are out foraging for their food. Like any rural, low-income community, most of their food is store bought and highly processed. But when the conversation turned to traditional crops, our friend went into his pantry and brought out a Ziploc bag bearing three hand-tied bundles of the wild tea.

It was inspiring to see such a traditional food still earning a place on the shelf next to products that are engineered to be addictive and are marketed with millions of dollars. But the best part is that I still have two more bundles.

Summer Cooking Circa 1775

2010-06-30T09:38:00.001-04:00

See here for my article in today's Globe on Revolutionary War reenactment cooks:

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2010/06/30/revolutionary_war_reenactor_loyal_to_the_king_and_authentic_ingredients/

On Eating Lions

2010-06-24T10:38:00.004-04:00

The following is an e-mail exchange between myself and my good friend Andrew Slack of the HP Alliance. The subject is eating lions.

Andrew:

I've said it before and I'll say it again: eating lions is wrong:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/world-cup-2010/7848758/World-Cup-2010-US-restaurant-to-serve-World-Cup-lion-burgers.html

Soooo f*cking horrible.

Me:

If you're not opposed to eating animals in general, why is this so bad? If they're raised (and presumably slaughtered) humanely and are bred in captivity and not removed from the ecosystem that depends on them, why is eating a lion worse than eating a cow? Is it a matter of intelligence of the animal? If so, it may be that pigs are smarter than lions, but it doesn't make news when we eat them.

Andrew:

Look man, you can come at me with all of your "intellect" and burst my self-righteous bubble with "facts" and even expose my childlike hypocrisy and simplistic sense of reasoning with your "brain power" but if I've said it once, I've said it a million times: "I'm totally right in my opinions even if they sound irrational - even if I don't know what I'm saying - I know what I'm saying."

So yeah - I'm definitely overreacting to this story and I'm sure if you say so, pigs are smarter than lions. So let's then just say that when it comes to eating meat, I'm sort of a simple minded rank-in-file American. And now let's take a step back and look at me as a specimen to better understand what the issue driving the "average American meat eater" (me in this case) is with eating lions. And perhaps something valuable about either the human psyche's past, present, or future can be gained by looking at my habits and knee jerk, frozen-in-childhood reaction:

I was raised with the idea of the pastoral farm. With "Charlotte's Web" and illustrated books with happy pigs and cows and chickens. In my formative education, I don't think of cows, chickens, and pigs as being tortured and injected with hormones. I think of them as happy animals with smiley faces walking amongst happy but very serious farmers whose daughters have hearts of gold as their dogs and cats run around the barn and the corn field. Then at some point, I eat all of these animals.

But lions, tigers, and bears are another kind of creature. A creature that is to be feared and revered for their majesty and their predatory nature. As a child, I feared that these animals would come and find me and eat me. I also grew up learning that the human race drew these animals (mostly lions) on caves. (this may not be true: but this is what's in my brain). I have an unconscious understanding that there is and always has been a deep and abiding respect that humans like myself have for wild animals with the lion being the king. The lion being the king of the jungle.

The fact that a lion could tear me to shreds in a fight - it not only instills me with a sense of fear but a sense of deep respect. The idea of raising these beautiful and mysterious creatures to kill and eat in a commonplace burger feels on a visceral level like cheating. It's cheating nature. It's cheating life. It's ruining the mystery. It's using our advanced tools and weapons as people to separate ourselves from "the fact" that humans run the happy pastoral farms and those creatures are happy under our command, but we are the foreigners, we are the strangers, we are the hunted, in the dark and mysterious worlds of the jungle and the arid endless world of the desert.

Pigs may be smarter than lions but they were never cast as the king of wildlife - royalty amongst all of nature, even higher than people. In order to feel at home in the universe, I want to respect nature's chain of command and not f*ck with the king. You saw what happened in the Scottish play! Look, there really is something to that. Once you cast something as the monarch - the hunter above all others - the idea of raising it like a "commonplace" farm animal for slaughter not only feels perverse but like all of nature and all of my loved ones will come under threat. The sky will bleed red and the wind will carry locusts. Or whatever it says in Revelations.

Signed, your friend who is a terrible simple minded meat eating American consumer with an oddly introspective nature.

Me:

Can I post that on Tea and Food?

Andrew:

Sure!