What We Need Is Here

Attack of the Tomatoes . . . and a Killer Tomato Recipe

First it was spinach, now tomatoes. What's a salad-lover to do?  Buy local! 

While there is some confusion about which tomatoes are affected by salmonella, the fewer miles they've traveled and the less processing they've undergone the safer they are.  So those of us who have been growing our own and enjoying farmers market tomatoes can carry on.  Those of us who are buying from chain grocery stores and restaurants need to beware - be aware.  Local food advocates/activists have long suggested we ask at restaurants when we order where the vegetables came from.  Even if we're pretty sure no one will have any idea, it's a good way to raise awareness of the issue and to even start a conversation about why it matters.  Now more people will probably already know why it matters.

On the homefront, we had a bumper crop of salmonella-free cherry tomatoes as did the farmers in our area. We've been making one of our favorite summer dishes - Pasta Fresca - pretty regularly.  It's easy, quick, uncooked for the most part (so almost kitchen heat-free) and uses that wonderful combination of summer garden bounty - basil and tomatoes. 

PASTA FRESCA - from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home

4 cups chopped ripe tomatoes

6-8 large fresh basil leaves

1 large garlic clove, minced or pressed

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1 pound butterfly (bow-tie) or fusilli pasta

½ pound mozzarella cheese, cut into ½-inch cubes

Grated Parmesan or Pecorino cheese (optional)

Bring a large covered pot of water to a rapid boil.

Set aside 1 cup of the chopped tomatoes and 2 of the basil leaves. In a blender or food processor, puree the remaining tomatoes and basil with the garlic and olive oil until smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste.

When the water comes to a rolling boil, stir in the pasta, re-cover the pot, and return to a boil. Uncover and cook the pasta until al dente, about 8-10 minutes. Cut the reserved basil leaves into thin strips (with scissors).

Drain the cooked pasta and toss it immediately with the mozzarella cubes. Add the sauce and mix well.  Top with the reserved tomatoes and basil, and grated cheese if desired. Serve immediately.

Early Summer Salad

What a great time of year this is for local produce!  We've got the last of the cool weather crops coming in, like salad greens and carrots, PLUS warm weather things like squash and cukes.  Then there are  precious early summer blueberries... and you can still buy shelled pecans!  I added the tender ends of the ever-present smilax vine growing outside the kitchen door.  I have to say I have a whole different attitude toward that thing now that I consider it a vegetable instead of a noxious, child-snaring, clothes-ripping WEED. It still grows like a weed, but now it's stubborness and waving tendrils seem kind of touching, like a little kid trying to get your attention, shouting "Choose me! I'm good!"  It's all in the attitude.  And, honestly, it tastes like asparagus, which does not grow here.

I dressed my salad with my old standby - equal parts rice vinegar and olive oil, shaken together with a little salt - this time in a nearly-empty strawberry jam jar.  Just the right fruity flavor. Perfect.   

Hot and Sour Green Bean Salad with Tofu

Green beans are just coming into season, and this recipe will put them to good use. In about a month, we should have our own red peppers in the garden as well - and we always have mint popping up in the flower beds.  This is delicious!  And with farmers market and garden veggies supplemented with food from Ward's it meets the Hogtown Homegrown Eat Local Challenge!

HOT AND SOUR GREEN BEAN SALAD WITH TOFU

Serves 4

7 ounces very firm tofu

Oil for frying

Dressing

1-2 tsp. chili pepper flakes

2 cloves garlic, crushed

4 tablespoons soy sauce

4 tablespoons lime or lemon juice

4 tablespoons honey

Salad

2 cups green beans, sliced lengthwise

1 red bell pepper, cored and thinly sliced

4 green onions, sliced

2 handfuls of fresh mint leaves

½ cup toasted (or roasted) peanuts – optional

1.       Drain the tofu and wrap in paper towels until ready to use.

2.       Shake or blend dressing ingredients together.

3.       Heat a shallow layer of oil in a skillet over high heat.  Cut the tofu into 3-inch slices and fry, turning once until golden all over.  Drain on paper towels.

4.       Put green beans, red pepper, onions, mint, and tofu into large bowl and cover with dressing.  Add tofu, and mix gently. 

Sprinkle peanuts on top if desired.  May be served on rice or another grain - or alone.

Sweet Potato Quesadillas

Another sweet potato recipe!  I can't help myself; they're nutritious, grow like a weed here, are constantly available at the farmers' market, volunteer in the garden, and everyone likes them.  Tonight was our last "Wednesday Night Dinner" - at least for a while, and we celebrated Ben's upcoming 20th birthday. He wanted Sweet Potato Quesadillas. And, in general, Ben gets what he wants.  John loves them, too, as did Ben's peeps. Served with sour cream, salsa, and a 100% farmers' market and garden salad, they were delicious!

The recipe is from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, the best collection of recipes I own - and I have a lot of cookbooks!  Here it is: 

SWEET POTATO QUESADILLAS

1 ½ cups finely chopped onions

2 garlic cloves, minced or pressed

3 tablespoons [olive] oil

4 cups grated, peeled sweet potato (about 3)

½ tsp. dried oregano

1 teaspoon chili powder

2 teaspoons ground cumin

Generous pinch of cayenne

Salt and ground pepper to taste

1 cup grated sharp cheddar

8 flour tortillas (8-10 inch)

Salsa

Sour cream

Sauté the onions and garlic in the oil until the onions are translucent. Add the grated sweet potatoes, oregano, chili powder, cumin and cayenne and cook, covered, for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent sticking [I sometimes add a few tablespoons of water]. When the sweet potato is tender, add salt and pepper to taste and remove the filling from the heat. Spread one-eighth of the filling and 2 tablespoons of the cheese on each tortilla. Fold in half and then cut in half for a wedged shape quesadilla.  Cook on a lightly oiled griddle or frying pan turning until both sides are lightly browned. 

Serve immediately topped with salsa and sour cream.  Serves 4.

Bread: Staff of Life? Or Stuff of Hips?

Becky asked for my cheese bread recipe and that got me thinking about the role of bread in our lives, esp. in my own. 

I started baking bread as a teenager for a number of reasons. I was coming of age at the end of the back-to-the-land/Mother Earth News era for one.  And I knew some Mormons.  Plus I really liked bread.  As a little girl, I would beg my mother to buy the frozen bread dough at the Winn Dixie to bake for our family.

When I started my own family, bread became symbolic of the kind of life I wanted. Time for it, for instance.  It was now the eighties, decade of the Super-Mom, and I was pretty sure I wanted none of it. Slowing down enough to knead bread and wait for it to rise was an important component of the life I hoped to create for my family. As was thoughtfulness about ingredients, and the happiness that came from cutting into a still-warm loaf and slathering the slice with Better Butter. Around that time, I read Laurel’s Kitchen – a classic vegetarian cookbook that elevated bread to the main ingredient of a healthy diet and a happy home.

It was also the age of the high-carbohydrate diet. We were supposed to eat less fat, less protein and more carbs, and I was all over it. Excess protein was leaching calcium from our bones, and farm animals were eating precious grain that could be feeding the hungry (and my family) much more efficiently. Again, healthy whole-grain bread was the ticket. 

And there was the attractive multicultural history - pizza in Italy, nan in India, matzo,tortillas, pita, pumpernickel, hamburger buns!  Bread was what brought us together, what we broke at the table, what nourished us and connected us to one another. Bread = World Peace.  Or at least my little part as a late cold-war era mom of four babies with missiles pointed at them - and at just about every other mother's child. I was pretty serious about this.

Fast forward a little over a decade and enter the low-carb diet.  I honestly have never given it much thought since its intent seemed to be weight-loss over health, environmental concerns, animal welfare, or family (and world) unity.  But as my aging hips spread along with those of nearly everyone else in our country, I have to wonder how much can be attributed to my fixation with bread.

In my little world, I am kind of famous for bread (in a fifteen minutes of fame spread over 30 years way).  I have saved many a boring or unfamiliar or disappointingly vegetarian meal with homemade bread (because homemade bread is miraculous that way). And I have often baked and served bread sort of publicly – at various functions, etc.  Most recently, I have taught bread-baking and used one of my family’s favorite recipes at the “Breakfast Brigade” and for “Dorothy’s Café.”  People really appreciate the delicious soup, the local fruit, the warm, boiled eggs, but they adore the bread. This hyper-driven bread baking has given me the undeserved reputation of being a good cook, and I’ve enjoyed that quite a bit.

But there are the hips, augmented by my recent need for comfort and my vegetarian tendency to equate bread with Grandma’s chicken soup.  I eat a lot of it, especially when under stress. I am thinking it is time to take Michael Pollan’s advice and “eat food, not too much, mostly plants."  In other words, moderation.  So for now, one piece of bread each day.  It’s not locavorian anyway, being made of wheat.  But if it's going to be just one slice, it’s going to be homemade – or bakery-baked at least.

Becky, here is the bread recipe. Let me know how it turns out:

Basic Wheat Bread (aka Breakfast Brigade Bread)

The recipe below will yield four 9x5 loaves.   If you want to be fancy – and possibly famous (locally anyway) - roll out the dough after you divide it and sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar and raisins, or chives, or rosemary, or garlic butter, or jam, or grated cheese.  Roll it like a jelly roll into a loaf.  You’ll get the familiar raisin-bread-swirl in the middle.  It’s good. 

Ingredients:

5 cups whole wheat flour

4-5 cups white flour

4 Tbsp. fast-acting yeast

¼ cup honey

2 Tbsp. salt

1 qt. warm tap water

In a large bowl, combine the wheat flour with yeast and salt.  In a second bowl, combine water with honey. Add liquid to flour mixture and stir with whisk. Add white flour, a cup at a time, stirring well after each addition until dough is soft but leaves the sides of the bowl clean. Turn onto floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic (about 10 minutes).  Divide into fourths, shape into loaves (see additions above) and place in well-greased loaf pans. Let rise until double (in my preheated oven, heated to 170 then turned off, this takes only about a half hour).  When risen, pre-heat oven to 350 and bake for about 30 minutes till bottoms are light brown. Let cool slightly before slicing.

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.

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.

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.

 

North Florida February Borscht

I don't love beets.  But when I saw them at the farmers’ market this week, I bought some anyway. Maybe it was smiling Mr. Graham from Graham farms.  Or maybe because they were so pretty…

Then, strangely, while I was out walking the dog later that afternoon, my neighbor Harold handed me a cabbage.  This doesn't happen normally either. His wife works for the agriculture department at UF, and they had produced some extra ones that needed homes.

That’s when the thought of “borscht” popped into my head – even though I’ve never made it or eaten it.  I thought I might have some of the key ingredients.  And I did!

After searching for borscht recipes in my own cookbooks and on the web, I realized they were going to need some tinkering if I were going to use only local veggies. So, I tinkered – trying to keep the main idea.  And it was good.  It was also beautiful.

I substituted sweet potatoes for the white potatoes (not in season), the celery (never in season here) and the carrots (rare).  I also substituted local honey for the sugar.  And I had just planted dill, which was a very good addition.  

Here’s the recipe:

NORTH FLORIDA FEBRUARY BORSCHT

2 T vegetable oil*
1 large (or several small) onion(s), chopped
8 medium beets, peeled and diced
Chopped beet greens if they look good

4 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped

½  cabbage, shredded
3 large cloves garlic, smashed, peeled and very finely chopped
1 medium bunch dill, coarsley chopped
4 T honey

½ cup cider vinegar*

2 T salt*

Boiled eggs

Heat oil in a soup pot and sauté onions and garlic till onions are clear.  Add beets, greens, cabbage, and sweet potatoes along with approximately 8 cups of water and salt.  Bring to a boil, lower heat, cover, and cook till veggies are tender but are not falling apart (15-20 minutes).  Add honey and vinegar. Top with dill and sliced or chopped boiled eggs. 

*the oil, vinegar and salt are not produced locally. I could have substituted local butter for the oil (if I had bought local un-homogenized  milk at the market and whipped up the milk fat).  But I don’t think we’re going to be processing vinegar and salt in these parts soon.

Sour cream is traditionally used as a topping for this soup, and I think it would have been a good foil for the soup’s tartness. The boiled eggs did nicely, too, though.  And – to be perfectly honest – I enjoyed this soup more cold the following day.  “Tart” just goes better with cold to me.

Beets are still not my favorite vegetables, but this was really good. The thought of the beets growing out on the Graham’s farm and Harold gifting me with the cabbage – not to mention the jewel-like beauty of the red beets, orange potatoes, and vivid greens  - helped a lot.  I’ll make it again. 

This week's locavore meal: farmers' market borscht with backyard eggs, and a variation of the best salad ever (balsamic vinegar in the dressing, and red and green leaf lettuce instead of cabbage and arugula).

Locavore-ish Lentil Soup

We've been using this recipe for years, for several reasons.  It's quick, it's healthy, and just about everyone likes it (including kids) - despite its unglamorous appearance. 

White potatoes are not in season yet, so we substituted sweet potatoes, which are, for both the carrots and white potatoes.  I think this is a big difference in how most of us cook now, as opposed to how our grandparents or great-grandparents cooked back when people relied primarily on things produced locally:  Now, folks who like to cook usually start out with a recipe and go get whatever ingredients are called for. But less than a century ago, diets were much less diverse. Good cooks then would use mostly what was growing, hunted or raised nearby, and create (or tweak) a recipe themselves.  My own grandparents were much more representative of this type of cooking - and thinking. Their meal plans were pretty consistent and consistently southern, what many of us now think of as "soul food."   They made the best (really, the best) of what was close at hand.   

Back to the soup: We doubled the recipe, and used green onions from the farmers' market supplemented with an organic sweet onion grown in Georgia (sold at Ward's).  Unfortunately, the closest location it seems lentils are grown (they need cool weather) is the upper midwest and Pacific northwest. So they have traveled quite a distance.  The tomatoes were grown within a couple miles though.  So, again, this meal was "locavore-ish."  We're working on it.

LENTIL SOUP            

2 cups dried lentils         

2-3 chopped carrots

4 chopped potatoes

Salt to taste

Rinse the lentils and pour into large pot. Add carrots, potatoes and salt, and cover with water – at least two inches over top of lentils.  Bring to a boil, then cover, turn to low and cook for 30-40 minutes. Turn off heat and let steam until sauce is ready.

Sauce:

1 large onion

¼ cup olive oil

½ tsp each ginger, turmeric, and black pepper (or just curry powder and black pepper)

Sauté onion in olive oil and add spices.  Mix well and cook until onions are clear.  Add salt to taste.  Combine with lentils. Place raw chopped tomatoes on top.  Best if allowed to sit an hour before serving. Serves 6.