Feasting before the freeze

Tags

food, gardening, Val Webb

 

The mirliton is always the first to go.

In a single night, yards and yards of the vine’s robust and sprawling greenery become woeful ribbons of mush. It’s subtropical, a native of Central America, and even a minor freeze — so slight as to be entirely ignored by the perky pea vines that share its trellis — will finish it off.

Which means, with the local forecast threatening 19-degree nights, we had merliton for lunch. Mark’s recipe is inspired by memories of meals he enjoyed at his grandmother’s house in New Orleans. He slices the merliton and lightly sautees it. Then, after being dipped in egg wash and dredged in Italian breadcrumbs, the slices are browned in hot oil. We ate them with the green tomato relish we canned during the summer garden harvest. Heavenly!

It’s always summer on the seed package

Tags

gardening, green living, illustration, sustainability, Val Webb

Out in the winter garden, it’s cold and rainy. But on my drawing table, it’s the middle of June and the homegrown tomatoes are ready for picking. I’m halfway through with the new children’s seed package design for a group of young organic farmers out in Sonoma County, California. The open-pollinated heirloom seeds inside the finished package will find their way into the hands of schoolchildren and neighborhood community gardeners.  I love being part of this process.

Design work also provides a welcome opportunity to listen to podcasts while I draw and paint. Last week I discovered City Farmer Stories, broadcast from Vancouver. And yesterday, tucked into the newest issue of Organic Gardening between an article on tracking chipmunks and another about peace trees in Hiroshima, was info on three more audio opportunities:

Heritage Radio Network features a smorgasbord of different programs hosted by chefs, farmers, artists and even — according to OG — the occasional artisanal cheesemaker.

An Organic Conversation on Green 960 AM in San Francisco, focuses on health and sustainability.

The Food Chain covers food policy with journalist and urban farmer, Michael Olson.

Happy listening, everyone. And keep warm!

Ode to kale

Tags

cooking, food, kale, organic gardening

Well, not just kale. Cabbage and broccoli, as well.

Is there anything prettier than cruciferous vegetables in the morning dew? We are awash in a rising tide of broccoli and cabbages this week, as the winter garden reaches maturity.  Neighbors and kinfolks are handed bags of tasty green stuff as they walk out our door.

But the wonder crop of the winter garden, as far as I’m concerned, is kale. I first tasted the tender little green about 20 years ago, when an elderly neighbor told me that kale was her secret for staying youthful and energetic.

“I cook a big pot of it once a week,” she confided. “Never been sick a day in my life. Never took a vitamin pill, either.” At 73, she was still tossing hay bales into the back of a farm truck like a teenager. I immediately ordered a packet of seeds.

 Each fall, we plant a small bed of Russian kale — a sweetly mild variety that grows rapidly and abundantly right through winter. We sow it thickly, and it’s up within days. At the two-week mark, we thin the bed and eat the tender baby plants in mixed salad. After that, we harvest the mature leaves weekly as new shoots continuously grow up from beneath the dense, eighteen-inch canopy of ragged tops.

Here in the deep South, most people cook kale the same way they cook collard greens: stew it into submission along with a big hunk of ham bone.  But (a) kale cooks much more quickly than the bigger, coarser greens, and (b) we’re vegetarians around here. So we simmer it briefly in vegetable stock, then use it in our favorite quiche or pasta recipes. It’s very tasty.

Or, to warm ourselves during a south Alabama cold snap, we make a pot of incavolata. It’s a hearty, rustic Italian soup made of kale and white beans. Seasoned with garlic and sage, then thickened with cornmeal, it is a wonderful winter meal. Here’s my favorite version, from my dogeared copy of the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook:

• 4 cups chopped kale
• 4 large garlic cloves, minced
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 6 cups cooked cannellini (white kidney beans) or 4 cans
• 5 cups vegetable stock, or water from cooking beans
• 2 heaping tsp tomato paste
• 6 fresh sage leaves or 1/2 tsp dried sage
• 1 tsp salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• 1/2 cup finely ground cornmeal
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Remove the stems from the kale and coarsely chop the leaves. Soak the leaves in a bowl of cold water while you prepare the soup. In a soup pot, saute’ the garlic in the olive oil for about a minute. Add half the cooked beans and part of the stock to the pot. Puree’ the rest of the beans and stock in a blender or food processor along with the tomato paste and sage. Stir the pureed beans into the soup. Add salt and pepper to taste. Drain the kale. Mix it into the soup and simmer for at least half an hour, until tender.  Mix the cornmeal with the lemon juice and enough water to make one cup. Pour this paste slowly into the simmering soup while stirring constantly to prevent lumps from forming. Simmer the soup for another 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Taste for salt and pepper and adjust the seasonings. Serve immediately, topped with freshly grated Parmesan. Enjoy!

A few more good things about kale: bugs dont like it. It’s packed with Vitamin A and antioxidants. And finally, it is a terrific “green manure” crop when you’re through eating it. It will grow happily through our cool winters, but the party’s over around late March, when daytime temperatures climb into the 80s again. That’s when we plow the remaining plants into the ground, where it rapidly breaks down… to the delight of our earthworm friends.

The herbivore vs locavore smackdown

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, gardening, sustainability, vegetarian

 

Okay, I’ll just come right out and say it: The 2008 Local Food Challenge was not the transcendent experience I anticipated. Suddenly confronted with surviving on mostly starches and dairy, I gained five pounds the first week and promptly developed chronic indigestion.  Chocolate and avocados haunted my dreams.  Was it enlightening? You bet. Was it fun? No way.

On the positive side, the Challenge provided an ideal opportunity for The Perfect Man to master his techniques for making butter and cheese.  And, in the absence of spinach or broccoli, we discovered that fresh-picked kale makes a very respectable quiche. But drawbacks included large amounts of gasoline required to round up a very limited variety of veggies… and large amounts of time required to prepare basic ingredients.

I have enormous admiration for the brave souls who shepherded their entire families through the long month of local-only menus. Ang Jordan at Gulf Coast Local Food is at the top of that list, because she’s right here in south Alabama, where sustainability is a new and exotic concept. (Ask someone in Mobile if they support CSA, and they’re likely to assume you mean the Confederate States of America.)  Then there’s Cafe Mama, who writes about her local food quest in prose as spare and sweet as poetry. And Sarah Beam makes it all sound easy at Recipes for a Postmodern Planet.

Call me a curmudgeon, but my mood soured by the middle of the second week — around the time that I ran out of innovative ways to cook sweet potatoes.  When I turned to my fellow bloggers for inspiration, their posts sounded so…so… chipper. Was it possible that I was the only cranky Challenge participant, a vegetarian doing without vegetables, grumpily counting the days until the local-only pledge would finally end?

Well, bad attitude and all, I may have actually whittled away at the old carbon footprint much more than I thought — just by being a longtime herbivore. According to a study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, raising animals for food results in more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined. Yikes.  But here’s the good news: even a modest reduction in meat consumption takes a big bite out of fossil energy use. 

 On Saturday, I accompanied The Perfect Man to a last-chance plant sale at Mobile Botanical Gardens. All the unsold plants left over from their annual autumn sale were offered at bargain prices. Fun! We brought home two big Bengal Tiger cannas, a new Louisiana iris for the water garden, a pot full of pineapple sage and a tiny container of the whimsical succulent my grandmother calls “hen and chicks.” Our loot is pictured below, but excuse the camera strap dangling in the upper right corner. It was early, and I needed some coffee.

 

How to make yogurt: The Perfect Man’s method

Tags

DIY, food, recipes, yogurt

Cheap, easy, full of calcium and protein — and it’s delicious, too. The Perfect Man makes yogurt about twice a week, using his own foolproof method. In response to several hungry-sounding email requests, I’ll pass along his recipe and some basic directions. Creamy white, mildly tart, with the texture of heavy custard…. mmmmmm. You’ll never buy commercial yogurt again.

1. Assemble the supplies pictured above:

• A half-gallon glass jar.  Just this once, resist the urge to save the planet by using a recycled pickle jar. For yogurt making, you need a heavy, heat-resistant jar that will hold up to hot liquids. The one we use is sold in the kitchen department at Target for food storage.
• A wooden spoon.
• A kitchen thermometer.  Ours is digital, with a six-inch probe.
• A large saucepan. A nice heavy one is best.
• 1 cup nonfat powdered milk. It adds nutrition and gives your yogurt a wonderful, smooth, custardy body.
• 6 ounces of plain yogurt.  This is your starter culture, the troupe of happy little beneficial microbes who do the real work of transforming milk into yogurt. After your first batch, you can simply set aside a little of your own for this purpose. But at the start of your first yogurt adventure, you will need to use yogurt from somewhere else. Buy the best-quality plain yogurt (no sugar, no flavors or fruit) you can find. Make sure the label says it contains live cultures.  We have used Dannon with good success, but other brands work, too.  Take it out of the refrigerator before you start, so it can warm to room temperature.
• Slightly less than 1/2 gallon of milk.  It’s “slightly less” because you’ll need to leave 6 ounces out, to make room for the added yogurt and yet still be able to fit the mixture into your jar.  So, what you really need is 58 ounces of milk. You can use skim, 2 percent or whole.

2.  Okay! Here we go. In the saucepan, combine the milk and the nonfat powdered milk. Suspend your thermostat probe in the milk mixture and heat slowly (stirring now and then) to 170 degrees. The Perfect Man uses a wire whisk to keep the probe in the center of the pan:

3.  When your thermometer says you’ve reached 170, pour the hot milk mixture into the heavy glass jar. (Transferring the liquid while hot will help sterilize your container.) Move the temperature probe into the jar and set it all aside for awhile, to let it gradually cool down to 100 degrees. This can take two or three hours, so go on out in the garden and pull some weeds. See you later.

4.  At 100 degrees, it’s time to stir in the 6 ounces of yogurt.  Then, put the jar in a warm place (105 to 110 degrees is ideal) so that your live cultures can get busy. The Perfect Man puts our yogurt in the oven on the “proof” setting. I have known people who used an electric heating pad for this step.  Others use the top of their water heater. Think about where you put your bread dough to rise — you need that same constant warmth for yogurt. You’ll need to leave it there for eight hours.

5.  Enjoy!  Eat it with granola. Eat it with fruit. Put peanuts on top of it. Make cucumber yogurt sauce and pour it over grilled veggies. It’s good.

Forbidden Fruit

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, food, gardening, green living, sustainability

                                               With apologies to Titian.

Last night, I dreamed about apples — tart, juicy Granny Smiths; shiny Macintoshes; Golden Delicious with the mellow taste of autumn beneath their skins. I dreamed of glistening chunks of apple piled on a plate, just waiting to be speared with my fork. They looked delicious. And then…and then…

I woke up. It was Day 6 of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, and if there are apples grown within my 200-mile range northward from the Gulf coastline, I haven’t found them. Nor bananas. Nor rice. What I HAVE found in generous abundance are sweet potatoes. I got out of bed and had a plump, baked sweet potato for breakfast.

As a longtime vegetarian with a big organic garden, I didn’t realize how dramatically my diet would change with the onset of the October challenge month. Before last week, the major part of my daily food intake consisted of fresh fruits and vegetables, grains and soy. I occasionally ate bread, and my moderate dairy consumption came mostly in the form of homemade yogurt and cheese. I drank lots of juices.

Now, under the 200-mile rule, most of those fruits and vegetables are off limits. It’s planting time in our subtropical gardening zone, so all our winter greens and cole crops are mere seedlings this month. Kale, bless its fast-growing heart, will be ready to start eating next week. But the rest — four types of lettuces, three types of cabbage, the broccoli, cauliflower, collards, field peas and butternut squash — are weeks and weeks away from harvest. So, I’m eating LOTS of whole-grain bread and LOTS of our homemade dairy, which has been an unpleasant surprise to my fruit-and-veggie-based digestive tract.

Suddenly, shopping for vegetables has taken on a treasure hunt aspect. My Saturday trek to the weekly grower’s market was disappointing (plenty of candles, flowers, handmade soaps and honey, few edibles) until we spotted a table selling eggpant. Yay! And a pint jar of blueberry preserves from a neighboring county. Yesssss! I found some leathery-looking Alabama green beans in a neighborhood market this weekend, and — hallelujah! — some fresh squash from a grower in Lucedale, Mississippi (50 miles from home). I discovered on Saturday night that tiny red potatoes, roasted in the oven, taste even better when they’re seasoned with thankfulness that the soil they were pulled from lies only a little way down US Highway 98. Like pieces in a culinary jigsaw puzzle, we fit together a half-dozen zucchini here and a handful of green tomatoes there, as we find them. I’m learning that practically every item in the average grocery store —  roughly 50,000 different items — has been hauled here from somewhere far away. I’m learning to be flexible. I’m learning a deep appreciation for simple meals.

But man, oh, man. An apple sure would taste good.

2008 Eat Local Challenge, Day 2: A peek inside the pantry

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, food, gardening, sustainability

My significant other, The Perfect Man, designs and builds homes. His houses are not large, but he uses light and form to create a comfortable sense of spaciousness. A cupboard tucked here, a window seat there, a cozy set of bookshelves… and the result is a house that quietly comforts and nourishes the people who live within its walls. When it comes to square footage, substance beats size every time.

That’s how I feel about my kitchen pantry today. My groceries are all about substance: no frozen veggie burgers, no boxed snack crackers, just a few fresh local ingredients.  At the close of the second day of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, there isn’t much in there. But there’s enough.

Breakfast was three locally grown satsuma oranges and a cup of coffee. The satsuma, familiar to most people in the form of canned mandarin oranges, is coldhardy enough to grow here along the Gulf Coast. Late in the nineteenth century, sprawling groves of the sweet little citrus covered hundreds of acres just to our east, in Baldwin County — until brutal freezes in 1894 and 1895 brought a quick and icy end to large-scale Alabama orange cultivation.  Since then, they have become a favorite of backyard grovesmen (The Perfect Man has several young trees) and small farmers. Tiny, leather-skinned and sweet as honey, they are scrumptious replacements for my usual morning glass of commercial orange juice.

I made the short trip to a family farm market across the bay in Daphne, scoring a few more provisions for the pantry shelf: Mississippi sweet potatoes; coarse grits and corn meal from a Louisiana town 20 miles inside my 200-mile limit; local peanuts still in their big, knobby shells. And wonder of wonders, on a rack near the cash register was one lone remaining loaf of walnut wheat bread just waiting for me to invite it home for lunch. (It was made by Jane Holland Smith, The Bread Lady, who works her bakery magic in a special kitchen she built next to her house. She’s always my first stop during our downtown farmer’s market season.)

Alas, the locally grown zucchini I bought never made it to the pantry at all. Atticus assumed that the green oblong was a strange new chew toy. Judging from the expression on his face, it was very tasty.

2008 Eat Local Challenge, Day 1: Little bitty circle

Tags

2008 Eat Local Challenge, food, green living, locavores, sustainability

 

I confess: I’m guilty of wanton lust. It happened in the aisle of our neighborhood Fresh Market this afternoon, when I was suddenly confronted with a display piled high with gorgeous imported chocolates. Here I was, on the very first day of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge — an entire month pledged to consuming only foods grown and produced within 200 miles of my front door — and I had wandered smack into the valley of the shadow of Godiva… my favorite luxury.

But I was headed for the produce department, and I was on a quest. The Fresh Market is a wonderful and eclectic grocery, a feast for the senses where classical music wafts overhead through air scented with exotic spices, and I knew it had the most impressive vegetables in town. Even better, every item is labeled with the area of origin. I live in a mostly rural state, in a city surrounded by agriculture: vast cotton and soybean fields lie just beyond the suburbs; I’ve seen sweet potatoes growing out there, and Silver Queen corn. So I naturally assumed that our local grocery stores would be well stocked with South Alabama produce, right?

Well, not exactly. Fresh from South America…Product of Mexico..Washington State…Carmel Valley, California. Feeling deflated, I spoke with a representative of the store’s produce section. He was kind and sympathetic, but he couldn’t help.

“Within 200 miles?” he repeated thoughtfully. “No, we don’t have a single thing. We had some local okra a while back, but we don’t have any now.” Suddenly, I felt the circle drawn on my map start to shrink.

My next stop was the organic produce counter at a spacious new health food market. I was surprised and disappointed to strike out again. The beautiful winter squash, broccoli crowns, tomatoes and onions, piled up in tantalizing pyramids, all wore cheerful stickers attesting to the fact that they had traveled more than 1,000 miles from farms in Mexico. (Amazingly, that’s still considerably less than the 1,500 miles an average food product travels in the US… a practice that gobbles up 100 billion gallons of oil every year. Check out the journey from the farm to your fridge with video artist Molly Scwartz in Watch Your Foodometer.)

“I’m so sorry,” said the young woman at the cash register in the health food market. “We’re working on getting a contract for some local produce. I don’t know if it will be this month.”

So, it’s going to be a skimpy menu at my table for a couple of days, until the first Farmer’s Market of the fall season kicks off downtown. We lost the contents of our freezer (including some of our summer garden bounty) last month when the door failed to close properly. But I won’t starve — outside, the tender baby kale is ready to be thinned. Our homemade yogurt qualifies for the Challenge, because it’s made from milk produced inside my map circle. Likewise the block of homemade mozzarella cheese, which I sliced at lunchtime and enjoyed with a big dollop of the green tomato chow-chow that The Perfect Man created from our summer harvest. Tomorrow evening, when I’m caught up on illustration work, I plan to do a little bread baking. It will be simple fare until Saturday, and then I’ll plot a course for next week.

Cute rodents and crisp romaine

                                                            Alabama Beach Mouse  (c)2008 Val Webb

 

                  Sketch: Delmarva Fox Squirrel (c)2008 Val Webb

 

A few weeks ago, Terry Burger mentioned the dwindling fox squirrel population in his beautifully written — and unfailingly relevant — blog.  I had no idea what a fox squirrel looked like, so I did a little research. Here, I quickly realized, is a furry little creature with a cuteness quotient worthy of a Disney animated feature. Big, bright eyes and chubby cheeks.  An abundantly fluffy tail.  A perpetually cheery and inquisitive facial expression.  I remembered reading that funding for species protection has been found to heavily favor cuteness. Public support is strong for penguins, pandas and koalas… but most people find it difficult to get misty-eyed about critically endangered fish, moths or worms.

Nevertheless, the fox squirrel and the equally appealing Alabama beach mouse have been added to the growing collection of little paintings on postcards I’m creating for an upcoming show. Postcards from the Edge of Extinction will open May 9 at the Mobile Arts Council galleries. 

Last night, we dined on the first salads of spring. The leaf lettuces (buttercrunch, romaine, oak leaf and red oak leaf) are sweet and crisp. They taste like sunlight and promise. We picked the tender side leaves at dusk, after a day of soft rain.  Mmmmmm… eating the first harvest of the spring garden always feels like the height of luxury.

So many snow peas, so little time…

 
Gardeners here on the subtropical Gulf Coast are extremely well acquainted with fast-growing legumes. The most infamous is kudzu, a Japanese native plant innocently promoted in the 1930s as a means of erosion control. Farmers were paid $8 an acre to plant the twisting, woody vine in their unused fields, where it rapidly swallowed up the landscape.  The plant had no natural enemies in this country and — surprise! — it thrived in heat and humidity. County extension agents, amazed and dismayed, estimated kudzu’s growth rate at 12 inches per day. Barns, vacant houses and carelessly parked pickup trucks disappeared beneath a shroud of glossy green leaves.  Urban legends sprang up, detailing the terrible fate that awaited anyone who fell asleep too close to the edge of a kudzu patch.

The snow peas in our garden are distant cousins of kudzu. (Other Leguminosae include lima beans, soybeans and peanuts.) Most years, my Sugar Pod snow peas top out at their usual 3 feet in height… but this year they seem to be in hot pursuit of Cousin Kudzu’s nickname: The Vine That Ate the South. Planted in the fall, then encouraged by an unusually mild winter, they grew. And grew. And grew.

Now we’re plucking sweet, crunchy pods from a snow pea jungle just over seven feet high. We’re steaming the tender, pale green pods. We’re stir-frying them. We’re eating them raw on salads. Visitors to the house are sent home clutching complimentary bags of snow peas. Fortunately, tender snow peas and other edible pod peas freeze beautifully.

My favorite snow pea recipe in the universe is on the sketchbook page at the beginning of this post. We cooked up a batch last night, and here’s how it looked just before being devoured by two hungry gardeners:

It comes from The Moosewood Restaurant Kitchen Garden, a book that manages to combine gardening tips, wildly delicious recipes, inspiration and elegant illustrations. (Read a few pages, and then try to resist the urge to run right out and start planting seeds. I dare you.)

I always try to keep at least 1/4 of my total garden space in legumes.  Here’s why: Peas and beans are good sources of protein for hungry vegetarians, and they are good sources of nitrogen for hungry garden soil. Hardworking bacteria living on the roots fix nitrogen from the air. When your harvest is over and it’s time to till up your plot in preparation for the next season’s crop, you can dig leguminous plants right into the soil while the vines are still green. They rot down rapidly, and all that stored nitrogen is released. (Legumes will also work their magic on your compost pile, if you prefer.)