What We Need Is Here

ROASTED ROOTS with ROSEMARY

It was just delicious. Roasting is a great way of cooking a variety of vegetables. I love the texture, the bright colors, and especially the flavor. Everything was made sweeter by roasting.  And when John walked through the door, he said it smelled like barbeque - high praise from a former ommnivore. PLUS Ben's friends liked it, too.  Sorry about the blurry photo; they were hungry and it made me hurry! Here's the recipe:

ROASTED ROOTS (AND TOMATOES) WITH ROSEMARY

Beets, chopped into smallish pieces (so their cooking time will be the same as the others)

Carrots , chopped into 1-2” chunks

Tomatoes, halved or quartered depending on size

Onions, halved or quartered depending on size

Balsamic Vinegar

Olive Oil

A few tablespoons chopped, fresh rosemary

Preheat oven to 450. After washing and chopping the vegetables, place them in a large bowl.  Shake together the vinegar and oil (1 part vinegar to 2 parts oil). For a large bowl of veggies that spread out to cover two baking sheets, I used 6 tablespoons of oil and 3 tablespoons vinegar. Pour the dressing over the veggies and place on a baking sheet (or two).  Sprinkle with rosemary and lightly salt and pepper. Bake at 450 for 15 minutes. Stir veggies around with a spatula, return to oven, and bake an addditional 15 minutes - or so.  Mine took longer due to the amount cooking at the same time. I rotated the baking sheets from top to bottom rack every 15 minutes for a total of 45 minutes.

I served ours on polenta, which would be a great locavore dish if we still grew hard corn (rather than the ubiquitous sweet corn) around here these days...  It's easy too:

POLENTA FOR SIX

4 cups water

2 cups cornmeal

1 tsp (or so) of salt

Bring water to a boil.  Add cornmeal slowly, stirring with a whisk as you go to prevent lumping. Have a pot cover handy to throw over it if it starts to splatter (flying pieces of boiling sticky polenta is not only messy but painful if some lands on you).  Turn down heat and simmer, stirring often for 5-15 minutes depending on how coarse your cornmeal was.  You can add grated cheese to this for more protein and flavor.  The roasted veggies had enough zing off their own, I didn't add any. It wasn't missed at all.

Jammin' with the Farmers' Market

The Farmers’ Market at 441 was holding its Spring Festival last Saturday and we came home with all kinds of good stuff, including a flat of strawberries for jam-making.

I’ve made blueberry jam in the past, but this was my first time with the strawberries.  If I had to do it again, I think I might add the ½ teaspoon of butter the recipe called for to decrease foaming - although when I opened a jar this morning and mixed it around a bit, it was fine.  Just an aesthetic thing.   Making the jam was pretty quick and easy, following the recipe in the pectin package; I think I’ll do it again before the season is over.  I like the idea of just putting up a batch at a time regularly rather than making an all day thing of it.

 

Today is a big cooking day for me.  For the last couple years Ben has invited friends over for “Wednesday Night Dinner.”  It started out as a way to socialize when his immune system was so suppressed from his cancer treatment that he couldn’t go out.  But even now that he’s well, we have a regular little group of folks who come to eat and hang out. It’s sweet, and I’ll miss it when it’s over.  As every middle-aged parent in the world is fond of saying: “It goes by so quickly.”  And since they seem to enjoy the garden/local veggies, tonight we’ll be having roasted beets, onions, carrots, and tomatoes with rosemary served on polenta with a side of lettuce/sorrel/garbanzo salad and homemade cheese bread.  Left over strawberries on ice cream for dessert.  We still go all out on Wednesdays. (bold=local farmers, bold+italics=home garden, everything else local grocer) 

If this were going to be a totally locally-grown meal, I would have to leave out the grain (bread and polenta), garbanzos and ice cream.  I’d put boiled eggs on the salad for protein and maybe serve the strawberries with cream (we have a local dairy).  As it is, it fits the locavore guidelines at least - not to be too dogmatic about it. 

I’ll post the recipe after we see how it turns out.

Practice Resurrection

Gurney Norman and Wendell Berry, c. 1973

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" from The Country of Marriage, copyright ® 1973 by Wendell Berry, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Sweet Potato Fries

Digging around in the garden last weekend, we found another sweet potato growing just below the soil surface near the compost pile.  We have never planted sweet potatoes in our garden, but we regularly harvest them.  They are "volunteers," sprouting from discarded bits and pieces we threw into the compost a season ago.

Sharon Astyk of Causabon’s Book, suggests that super vegetables like sweet potatoes would be a mainstay of a serious garden (Sharon is a prolific writer, and I cannot find this particular post for the life of me, but you should check out her blog).  If we relied on our gardens for our family’s nutrition, we would need to be harvesting a lot more higher calorie, densely nutritious veggies like these. Sweet potatoes and certain varieties of winter squash grow so well here (more on Seminole pumpkins – a native winter squash – later).  It makes sense to plant a patch.

Things that sprout up on their own in the garden, are the things most well-suited to your particular soil and climate.  I try to leave alone at least some of what volunteers this way. And sweet potatoes are often growing when nothing else is anyway.  They thrive in the heat that melts many plants, and their ivy-like vines and purple/blue flowers (they are relatives of the morning glory) are just lovely to look at in a late summer garden that's seen better days. 

I think we'll plant some on purpose sometime in June or July, when the spring plants have about had it.  When we start harvesting the sweet potatoes  early in the fall, it will be cool enough that they should keep in the pantry for a while.  Some things we will do with them for sure:

• Sweet potato biscuits
• Roasted sweet potatoes (with other garden veg)
• Lentil Soup, borscht, and other soups that call for potatoes, carrots … or sweet potatoes
• Oven fries

One thing we probably won't be doing is boiling them. So many recipes suggest this, before adding them to a casserole for instance, but it removes so much of their flavor and a lot of the nutrients as well.  I have an ancient family recipe that calls for mashed, boiled sweet potatoes and then adds huge amounts of brown sugar and butter to enhance the flavor.  If you bake the potatoes you can do without the “fixin’s,” or at least tone them down a bit.

We had sweet potato fries with greens and beans the other day, and they were delicious.  Good on their own, with ketchup, or with aioli sauce.

Here’s the simple recipe:

SWEET POTATO OVEN FRIES

Sweet potatoes

Olive oil

Salt, pepper

Slice sweet potatoes about ¼” thick.  Place on well-oiled baking sheet .  Bake in oven preheated to 400 for about 15 minutes.  Turn with spatula, and cook till tender and just slightly browned – 10 to 15 minutes longer.  Add seasonings. 

Simple, and good for you – and they’re at the farmers’ markets now.

Local Locavore Challenge!

Hogtown Homegrown is sponsoring an Eat Local Challenge for our region!  During the month of May, participants will track the food they eat, with the very do-able goal of eating one locally produced food item at each meal.  They also offer these guidelines for eating locally, based on the famous guidelines from Locavore.com. This San-Francisco-based group of locavores actually coined the word back in 2005.  Have some fun and enjoy eating good food while supporting the local economy and our local farmers – join Hogtown’s* version of the Locavore Challenge!

*”Hogtown” was the original name of the city of Gainesville, Florida.

image from Path to Freedom

March Garden - Taming the Local Food Chain

 

We made some real progress in the garden this weekend – setting out transplants of peppers, cucumbers and corn, replanting tomatoes (see below), mulching the collards, broccoli, onions, strawberries, and lettuce, and sowing sunflower and zinnia seeds. 

We got a slow start this spring, mostly on account of an unfortunate suburban food chain taking place in our yard. In a perfect world, the corgi pup would herd the free-range chickens into their coop at night, and the chickens would peck harmful insects off the veggie plants during the day.  But, instead, the corgi is trying to eat the chickens who are, in turn, pecking to death every tender sprout in the garden or in flats.  This is partly my fault.  We introduced our birds to chicken heaven last summer when we kept them for a couple months in the front-yard garden, housed in a “chicken tractor” – a small coop that we could move around in the garden so that they would scratch at and fertilize the soil.  When we returned the chickens to the backyard, they started hopping the fence and visiting the vegetable garden regularly. Who knew that those tiny heads held such strong memories? Or how much chickens love baby tomato plants, and unripe strawberries?

So the chickens are no longer ranging freely. And the pup is no longer trusted.  But the garden is being planted at last!  While it may look like free-form hay and leaf formations right now (hay for the mulch, leaves for the path), tiny transplants are setting down their roots now, full of promise for May (provided they survive any late freezes, early heat waves, torrential downpours and/or insect invasions between now and then).

We also sowed sunflower and zinnia seeds in flats.  The zinnias are long-stemmed and some of the sunflowers will be the smaller, branching types - so they'll add color inside and out starting in about 60 days.  Once they’re transplanted in the garden, we’ll sow Seminole pumpkin and roselle seeds – two things that we like that will take the heat.  We’ll plant them in the place vacated by the collards and lettuce as the weather warms up.  We’ll also sow bean seeds around bamboo teepees.  Most things do better here in Florida when they have a chance to grow in flats for a bit rather than directly sowing them in the garden, where they are subject to the plagues mentioned above.

 

I always draw out a garden plan, trying to visualize what it will be like once everything’s up and producing, hoping to have the next thing ready to plant as the previous one begins to bite the dust. It never turns out exactly as I imagine; volunteers from years past sprout in unexpected places, some plants don’t thrive, others take over… but it’s always good - for both my mental health and our family’s table.  

Accidental Environmentalism

I met Michelle and Susan of the "Need-A-Bag?" project at the 441 Farmers' Market today. They collect cloth bags, wash and dry them (on the clothesline, of course), and redistribute them to folks who want an alternative to plastic bags at the Market.  I love little projects that do a lot of good like this - no board of directors or non-profit-filing, just get the job done.  They look like they're having a good time, too. 

Michelle has a blog - The Accidental Environmentalist - that I've enjoyed reading.  She has gone where many of us fear to tread, including shampoo-less hair care, re-useable menstrual products, and Disney World. 

Thanks, Michelle and Susan, for the inspiration. And for helping me clear my coat closet of a bunch of extra cloth bags.

Canning - Or at least thinking about it

A few years ago I made about 24 half-pint jars of blueberry jam with locally-grown blueberries.  It was a fairly simply process, and it was just delicious; it tasted a lot more like blueberries and less like sugar than commercial jam does.  It didn’t last as long as I had hoped, though, as we gave a lot of it away as gifts and tended to heap it on toast and bagels ourselves.

Jams, jellies, preserves, pickles and tomatoes are quite easy to can because they have a high acid content and can be processed with a minimum of equipment, trouble, or worry. But, except for the tomatoes, the end products aren't particularly nutritious.  I’ve always wanted to learn to can other foods we grow in abundance here during certain seasons: greens, corn, field peas, butter beans, green beans, sweet potatoes, etc. 

In order to can these low-acid vegetables, the USDA says (very adamantly) that one must use an expensive pressure canner. This is the first hurdle.  When I went to a canning workshop at the county extension office earlier this week, I learned of another: accurately calibrated pressure gauges are vital, and pressure gauges can lose their accuracy over time.  Apparently, the manufacturer’s instruction booklets advise bringing them in yearly to the local county extension office to be checked. But due to cost and liability our extension office does not provide that service. And neither does anyone else according to the extension agent. 

In addition, the instructor said that canned goods should be stored in a cool, dry place at a temperature between 60 and 70 degrees.  Obviously, this too is a problem here…  There is no place in or near my home that remains at that temperature range for more than a few weeks in the dead of winter.   

So, what to do?  Our instructor suggested that we should use the cans within one year, rather than the two-five recommended by the USDA, which seems do-able.  And there is an alternative type of pressure canner that uses weights instead of a dial gauge as a measure of pressure that I would like to look into. 

Although this part of the country does not have the ideal weather for storing preserved foods, it does offer the possibility of nearly year-round fruit and vegetable production. So preservation is not nearly as crucial as it would be if we lived further north. 

So, as appealing as the vision of rows of canned vegetables lining my pantry shelves is (I admit in a kind of Walton-esque way), it doesn't seem to make that much sense for this locale. I do plan on canning tomatoes this year – for year-round soup base and sauce. And I may, if I can get my hands on an affordable weight gauge pressure canner, try canning early-summer field peas and butter beans, since they would be a good source of year-round protein. We'll store them in our dark-ish pantry for less than a year. Other than that, we'll count ourselves lucky to live in a place where there is fresh stuff available so much of the time.    

Mess o' Greens

The other night, a college-age friend asked me if collard greens were a pain to cook. They were thriving in her community garden plot, but she didn’t know what to do with them.  She had heard that they took too long to wash, prepare, and cook.  I decided to time myself from garden to table and see if the rumor was true.

I wanted to confront the collard slander for a few reasons.  One, they grow really well here. You can pick the outside leaves, leaving the rest of the plant intact, and it will produce from October through April without bolting.  And even temperatures down in the 20s this winter didn’t faze mine. The other reason is that they’re really good for you.  Chock full of iron, calcium, and vitamins A and C, the lowly collard helped sustain the starving South during the Civil War. African slaves had long been preparing and eating the tough greens - collards, turnips and mustards - which were often fed to farm animals.  Cooked with discarded meat scraps, they provided a one-pot meal, traditional in African culture.  This inexpensive, nutritious dish became a staple for poor southern families - black and white. Today southerners feel about collards like we do about grits. They belong to us.

Now, I do remember my grandmother washing greens with a hose outside in a metal tub to get the sand off. But it has been many years since I've bitten down on a gritty green. When I grow my own, I mulch them like I do all our vegetables, and either the local farmers do that too, or they wash them well before bringing them to market. I find they only need a quick rinse.

Due to their size it's easier to rinse them after they're cut.  Here's the procedure:

   

1) Remove stem from leaves, two or three at a time,  2) Stack 5 or 6 leaves,  3. Roll leaves, and 4) slice.   

Rinse sliced greens a handful at a time by sloshing them in a bowl of water. Set aside without drying them.

Now my grandmother would have put these in a huge pot with a hambone and cooked the whole thing for hours - "cooking the dickens out of them."  I use a different recipe:

Greens and Beans

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 garlic cloves

10 cups cut and washed greens

2 tablespoons vinegar (I used rice vinegar)

2 tablespoons honey

2 cups small red beans, cooked

Sauté chopped garlic in olive oil for a few minutes until golden. Add rinsed greens without drying them first; the water on the leaves will provide the moisture for cooking. Saute for a minute or so, then put the lid on, turn down the heat, and steam for 10 minutes or until tender. Check frequently and add water if necessary to keep from sticking.  Add vinegar and honey. Then add salt and pepper to taste. Stir in red beans with a little bit of bean broth.

I admit I really like this with rice.  But tonight we just had it as is - with a little peach/pepper hot jam from Graham Farms. A fancy (and beautiful) locavore-ish meal might include oven baked sweet potatoes with garlic aioli, and cornbread. In fact, I think I might try that later this week 

It took about 30 minutes to get the greens from garden to table. I'm pretty fast, but I don’t think it would take anyone more time than driving to a nearby restaurant and ordering. And this is the kind of work that’s easy and pleasant to share. A little (southern) music, some good conversation… and before you know it - a mess o’ greens.

 

Good Times/Bad Times

Ben and Joe enjoying a gelato during Ben's "Dreams Come True" trip to London

Looking for inspiration in other blogs from folks who are trying to live more locally, I ran across a couple that expressed the difficulties of committing energy to this during difficult times. One is undergoing treatment for metastasized breast cancer and, while she is still doing her best to eat frugally and intentionally, she also made the case for celebrating regularly by dining out. Another was recently divorced and trying to juggle the challenges of co-parenting with living with more awareness of her family’s ecological footprint. And these are people with the energy still to write about it.

When my son Ben was undergoing chemotherapy, we temporarily suspended just about every guideline we’d ever had for nutritious, responsible eating. Not only had he lost 30 pounds during the first two months of treatment, his taste buds were out of whack from the chemo. That combined with his desire for “comfort” food had us hopping into the car and driving to whatever fast food restaurant he dreamed might have something he felt like eating. Truth be told, I didn’t have the wherewithal to plan, buy ingredients for, or cook a meal half the time anyway – although I went through an anti-cancer, macrobiotic phase before throwing in the towel. We went on like this for over two years.  It does something to your head and to your palate (not to mention your waistline) when you are afraid that any meal might be one of your last. Not a healthy way to live by any measure.

Having a little distance from that dark time, and wanting to make up for time lost, we are excited about this new path. But I don’t waste time regretting the free-for-all of the last couple years. And I would never begrudge Dove or Susan or anyone for giving themselves a break during hard times either. 

But I do wonder how much of my family’s crazy eating came from a desire for comfort that might have come from someplace else. When Ben was in the hospital and for some time after, a number of families brought food to us, and really there was nothing better than that. The ongoing nature of Ben’s illness made this seem like an imposition to me. But I wish now I had been more open and less ashamed about accepting gifts of food from friends, family (and sometimes people we barely knew!). At this point, I hope that we can be one of those people to someone else when the occasion arises. 

It seems so right to use food to “celebrate.” Whether the life passage is joyful or of the more difficult variety, how good it is to mark that time with special food: comfort food for the bereaved, nourishing food for the sick, extravagant food for special times in life that need commemorating. The right food, lovingly prepared and generously given to someone in need of care from someone who cares – that’s making the most of what you’ve got at hand. You can’t really get more “local” than that.