Tomato Processing

         

On Friday, we received a delivery of fifty pounds of paste tomatoes, enough, when processed, to feed us for the winter. They were glossy and firm—just beautiful in their tomato-ness. I fondled them all evening. The cat climbed into the box lid for the night.

                On Saturday, I processed tomatoes. First, I sliced them thin, taking off either end, and placed them in the food dehydrator. In about seven hours, they were dry, like chips. We will eat these, broken into bits, on salads, out of hand on hikes, and tossed into soups and stews when we need a hit of intense flavor. Meanwhile, they sit on the shelf in a quart canning jar, like all of the other dried fruits.

                Then, I started a double batch of crockpot sauce, in my two old crockpots—one avocado green, the other burnt orange, both with the traditional dancing veggies around the base. I leave the lid on until the tomatoes break down and simmer, then take them off so that it cooks down.  If I stir it every hour or so, it is done in five or six hours. Then, while the sauce is still hot, I can it in pint jars, processing in the steam canner for 25 minutes.  The pings greet me as I lift off the lid. Each crockpot yields four or five pints of sauce. I usually make crockpot sauce from my own tomatoes, because they come in more slowly and it lends itself to small batch work, but this was a good chance to fill in a few gaps.

                Once the crockpots and dryer are full, and the dining room begins to smell of cooking tomatoes, I move onto roasting. Quickly, I slice the tomatoes in half or in thirds, place them cut side down on a sheet pan, and pop them into a 350 oven. In about half an hour, they have wilted down to a paste with skins that I scoop into half pint jars. Sometimes the skins char a bit, but that’s ok. The half pints are also processed in the steam canner—I give them about 15 minutes if half a batch sat out and cooled down a bit while waiting for the second tray. Roasted tomatoes are great for pizza and other spreads and I also use them in soups and pasta sauce when I don’t want the tomato to dominate. They are drier than sauce so can be used in more places. It’s nice to get a bulk box of paste tomatoes to roast, because the process is messy, with lots of sheet pans and tools, so I like to do it all at once.

                As I finish, I haul the boxes of jarred tomatoes down into the basement, where they rest with the other winter stores. Pickles, jams, dried fruits, juices on one side, beans, grains, and dry goods on the other.  Onions and potatoes under the stairs, squashes in the larder. I feel like the mid-western grandmother in Greg Brown’s old song, who puts the summer in jars against hard cold winters.

               

Summer Canning

The morning is cool and quiet, cloudy. In the dining room, the red currants are draining; the gooseberries have been tipped and tailed. After breakfast, I wander to the basement, find the steam canner, gather the jars and long loops of rings handing on Christmas cords. Half way up the stairs, the lids are tucked in amongst the cleaning supplies.  Metal changes on metal as I dump everything on the kitchen table. It is time for the summer rituals to begin.

First, I boil the currant juice. Poured into half pint jars and sealed, we can drink the juice with fizzy water in the winter. Vitamin C. It is a deep red and stains the counter. The canner, with the usual quart of honey weight on the lid, rattles and steams. In the living room, NPR explains the news. While the currants seal, I make the gooseberry jam, boiling sugar and berries together, testing the transformation of juice into jam. It finishes just before the timer buzzes for the currants. Move quickly—trade the jars. Replace the lid, the weight, start the timer once more.  Clean up. Summer work on quiet mornings, before the day grows warm.

Radicchio

    

            I am in love with radicchio this season. I bought some seed this winter, when all greens looked good in the catalog (hence my overabundance of cabbages and broccolis) and started it in February, first in six-packs, then bumped up to a barrel in the yard and some four inch pots. It has been lush for months.  That has been one of its charms; whenever I harvest a full sized plant, I have popped another, from the four inch pot stash, into the hole. It keeps on growing without missing a beat. So far, it has been one tough plant, even when it was hot and dry a few weeks ago. It even repels pill bugs and earwigs!

                It is also a beautiful plant. Deep green leaves, veined with red on the outside. A cabbage-y, swirly leaf layout in red and white inside.  Some are more red, some more green.  When it first grows the true leaves, they have an adorable little twist to them, like the piping on a cake that turns inward to create the head. Layer upon layer of leaves build up on that twist, and the biggest lay down to frame the plant. So lovely.

                Radicchio is tasty, too. We started eating the young leaves in salads in late April. Lately, I have been harvesting the heads for sautéed greens. They are bitter but not spicy as mustard greens and they mix beautifully with kales and mustards. Last night, we ate them cooked with an onion and garlic, toasted pecans and raisins. So good.  Such a nice counter point to the ricotta pie that was left over from the night before.  This one is clearly a keeper.

Cabbage Season

February is cabbage season. There are still leafy greens in the fields, but they are large leaves, not delicate salad mixes, soft and sweet. There are storage squashes, although they are beginning to rot and need to be checked every week. There are parsnips and beets in the garden bed, but, as the days grow longer, they will re-sprout the leafy tops and develop hard cores for seeding. Onions and potatoes are hanging in there. Canned tomatoes and green beans are a solid fall-back option, as are frozen peas and corn. But, really, late February and early March is cabbage time.

                We ate the last cabbage from the garden in early February. There would have been more—January Kings hold well in the ground—but Mr. Beezhold, our rabbit, discovered that he really likes cabbage and could jump up into the bed. He nibbled down two before I caught him and fenced them off.  So, we have been buying them at the Winter Farmer’s Market. Last week, I found the most beautiful cabbage I have even seen and took it home for dinner.  We ate the solid head in Rumpledethump by the fire; the rabbit got several deep purple leaves to munch on overnight.

                We like cabbage. I have at least four variations of cole slaw, with apples, with adobe chili, with lemon juice, as well as adding slivers to a mixed greens salad. It is good in soup. It adds bulk to a mound of sautéed veggies. It is good with peanut sauce and rice. It makes a nice gratin. Mashed with potatoes, butter, and milk, it’s a solid White Dinner. Last night, I mixed the cabbage, onions, and potatoes with cheddar cheese. We were pleased. Anything but an hours long, slow boil in a big pot – New England Boiled Dinner—is excellent.

                The garden season has begun again. I planted some kale and mustard starts in the greenhouse bed last week. There are quick start cabbages growing under lights in my classroom. Soon, we will be in salad season once more, all delicate leaves and greens. And I may miss the significant heft of a cabbage.

Rumpledethump

1.       Chop about two pounds of potatoes fairly small and boil them.

2.       Slice an onion and sautee in butter. Add a small head of cabbage, nicely sliced, salt and pepper,  and cook down.

3.       Grate about a cup and a half of cheddar cheese.

4.       Mix in a casserole dish and bake for about twenty minutes in the oven so that all of the cheese is melty.

5.       Eat by the fire in winter.

Winter Compote

  figs, plums, apples, pears, blueberries…the dehydrator works overtime for a few weeks every summer. We reap the benefits all winter long. There is dried fruit for munching during class, on backpacking trips, in oatmeal on Wednesday mornings, mixed in with spicy greens and pasta for dinner. Dried fruit is tastier than “ripe” fruit that has traveled thousands of miles to the grocery store, too. Occasionally, though, we miss a juicy tidbit. When that happens, I make compote. My new, lidded, bowl makes the process even easier.

One of the benefits of eating local food is foot foraged, home dried, absolutely ripe and sweet when harvested

1.       Fill the bowl with a mixture of fruits. I like the plums and figs because they are bulkier. Then I add pears and apples for a smaller bite. I also break up a cinnamon stick or crack open a cardamom pod.

2.       Pour boiling water over the fruit. I don’t quite cover it because more water just creates more juice.

3.       Cover the bowl and let it sit overnight. I used to cover my bowl with a plate, which worked fine. Now, with my new, lidded bowl, I snap the lid on.

4.       Move the bowl into the fridge. The new bowl is perfect for this step, too.

5.       Eat with yogurt, or oatmeal, or on pancakes, or on its own.

6.       You can add to the mix after it has set. If you add bananas or nuts, eat it all. If you add citrus, it can sit for several days all together.

7.       Repeat.

My Mother's Veggies

                Dinner tonight is one of my late winter, early spring favorites—a simple baked dish of fennel, parsnips, leeks, and potatoes, roughly chopped, married with olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic, and baked in the oven in an old casserole with a lid. I was struck, this evening, by the differences between my veggie drawer and my mothers.

                My mother was a good cook of her time. She knew how to use garlic and onions, salt,  and pepper.  She was ahead of her time, experimenting with  Chinese cuisine for a dinner party. But, her range of vegetables was limited.  She kept onions and potatoes in the under the sink, carrots, celery, iceburg lettuce and pink tomatoes in the fridge, broccoli, spinach, and peas in the freezer, and canned corn and lots of tomatoes in the cabinet. Occasionally she peeled and boiled a hubbard squash, which was always deemed “wet.” For Thanksgiving, she cooked creamed pearl onions to rest next to her excellent stuffing. We had the occasional—and, in my mind, disgusting—Boiled Dinner, where cabbage and turnips were boiled to death with corned beef. There were apples, oranges, and bananas.

                We still eat most of these veggies, except for the boiled cabbage and pink tomatoes,  but we have added so many more. We eat fresh greens—kales, mustards, chard, argula, cabbage—all winter long. In spring, we add asparagus and mushrooms with fresh eggs. Summer is the feasting season with tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, broccoli,  green beans, zucchini…And then fall brings in the heavy squashes and root crops of potatoes, beets, carrots, and parsnips. Our palate has expanded, mostly because of the garden. Parsnips and kale grow well here. I had to learn how to cook them.  Now, I cannot imagine my kitchen without them, in season.

                I am glad my mother fed me her full range of vegetables as a child. I was never allowed to be picky; I had to eat what she put on my plate, even if it was boiled turnips.   I remember her kitchen when I lift down her cheerful casserole dish which we used—still use—for baked mac and cheese and toss my mixture of veggies in.

May Dinner

           

    Eating locally in early May has its challenges, especially when you are also functioning on a pretty tight schedule.  There are lots of greens right now, but substantive veg is hard to come by.  Onions and potatoes are growing soft; the last squash is waiting to be chopped this weekend; carrots and zucchini are a month or so away.

                A few days ago, I was wandering home from a meeting, dreaming about flatbread cooked in the cast iron skillet. So easy. So yummy. And we could have it with that jar of dal that I had seen this morning… and maybe the salad greens from Sunbow….I had a plan. I made the flatbread dough, went outside to trim out a garden bed, came in to heat up the dal only to  discover that we had eaten it already. The jar was some rhubarb compote I had made a few days ago. Tasty, but not dinner.  I headed to the basement to recover a jar of Sweetcreek tuna, which we added to the plate of salad greens.  Fresh salad, tuna, flatbread, with rhubarb cake for desert—a save, Mark observed.  A spring feast.

                This evening, I made a pan of cornbread using the corn we had grown in the backyard last summer. It was red and gold, so the cornbread is rather pink, but so lovely and fresh corn tasting. I had dumped a couple of cups of Hutterite soup beans from Sunbow into the crockpot with three bay leaves and a local onion right after lunch, and they were soft and rich.  I Filled a bowl  with salad   from the backyard—kale, mustard, lettuce, sorrel, arugula, peppermint, garlic chives—and placed it in the middle of the table. We spread home made apple butter on the second chunks of cornbread and sighed.  We are so spoiled, I observed.

                And it is true. We eat what is in season in abundance for a few weeks or months and, just when we grow tired of it, it fades out of the rotation and something else takes its place. Right now it is tender salad greens. Soon, it will be zucchini and tomatoes right off the vine.

Flatbread

1 cup of water

1 t of yeast

1 t sugar

1T olive oil

¾ t salt

2 ¼ cups flour (1 ww)

Proof the yeast in water with the sugar. Add the flour, salt, and oil, and stir. Knead a few times on the counter if needed. Let rest for an hour or so in the bowl, then divide into 8 pieces, roll out in circles, and cook, quickly, on a cast iron skillet. I use high heat and watch them closely. The dough can sit in the fridge for a few days if you only use half of it. Serve warm with olive oil, zatar, and salt. 

2016 Harvest

2016 Harvest

Blueberries: 3 quarts dried

Peaches: 12 pints canned

                4 quarts dried

Plums: 6 quarts dried

                8 half pints of jam

Apples:  Sauce 12 pints

                6 half pints Butter

                5 quarts dried

                14 quarts of cider

Grape juice: 33 quarts

Figs: 6 quarts dried

Cucumber pickles: 8 pints

Dilly Beans: 4 pints

Tomatoes: 6o half pints roasted

                2 quarts dried

                9 pints of salsa

Pears: 5 quarts dried

Potatoes:  95 pounds, total

Honey: 11 quarts

Gooseberry jam:  5 half pints

Butternut squash: nine solid squashes

We’ve also brought in for winter 25 pounds of oatmeal, 50 pounds of hard wheat berries, five pounds of barley—and we will order onions, squash, and more beans as they come available.

Bold  indicates from our own back yard. Everything else is raised from within ten miles.

Local Eating

                There is, in Corvallis, a deeply head belief that, when the apocalypse comes, in the form of a 9.9 earthquake (we were all profoundly impacted by the New Yorker article last summer), we will be saved by eating from our neighborhood gardens. Although I am a deep believer in local food, eating from my own backyard, and supporting local farmers, I am a realist. I know that we would be VERY hungry if we tried to survive on our backyard.  Even now, in the peak of ripeness, when there are vegetables all around us, we would be hungry. I would hate to try and survive on our garden and basement storage in late March, when there is mustard and kale and little else.

                I have tracked our consumption, by volume and by calories, several times in the past  few years. We are 99% local in our vegetable consumption, year round.  We raise most of our own produce during the summer months and purchase the rest from very local farmers, directly and from the market. We also store potatoes, squashes, and onions for the winter and put up canned and dried fruit from neighborhood trees.  This is a clear positive for all of us. Our food is fresher and more alive; our local farmers benefit from the support; it requires less (if any) fuel to transport. Local produce is a clear winner.

                We eat about 90% of our dairy from within one hundred miles of home, which is also quite easy. Our milk comes from a local dairy and I make our yogurt from it. Most cheese and eggs are local as well—eggs travel about fifty feet from hen to pan. At one point, I knew where our butter came from, but the dairy is no longer selling anywhere in town.  We like having local dairy products and have adjusted some of our tastes to focus on the local cheese. Aside from eggs, the calories from dairy are not produced in the backyard or the neighborhood.

                Beans and grains form the backbone of our diet. About half of our calories come from local sources.  I but wheat berries, oatmeal, and barley from local farmers. The wheat, after being ground in the kitchen aid mill, is added to white flour from Eastern Washington to make our daily bread. We eat a great deal of bread! Oatmeal is standard breakfast fare. Our beans also come from local farmers; we can purchase garbanzos, pintos, Indian woman, and black beans from farmers and the co-op Almost all of our beans come from within ten miles of home.   We do not produce significant amount of beans and grains. It requires far more land than we have in our back yard.

 However, we also eat pasta, rice, and other grains for dinner, and none of those are locally produced—yet.  When I add in the oils, spices, and vinegars that liven up our foods, it is clear that we do not begin to produce what we would need to survive. We purchase and produce about half of our calories locally. And we are committed to the process, willing to pay more for our food to help expand the local markets. I don’t think a community garden is going to go very far towards feeding the neighborhood.

Early September Menu

Friday: oatmeal with grapes

                Potato and chard curry, rice leftovers)

                Whole wheat pasta with eggplant, tomato, zucchini, onion

Saturday: oatmeal waffles

                Pasta leftovers

                Black bean soup, coleslaw

Sunday: toast and tea

                Out for lunch

                Baked potatoes, melon and cucumber salad

Monday: yogurt and granola

                Out for lunch (very unusual to have to lunches out in a week)

                Tomato pie and apple pie

Tuesday: oatmeal and grapes

                Tomato pie leftovers

                Zucchini soup, whole wheat bread, salad

Wednesday: cereal

                Zucchini soup

                Bulgur salad with nuts, dried cherries, tomatoes on a bed of lettuce

Sources for our local foods:

Sunbow Farm-- beans and veg, best around

GreenWillow Grains-- wheat and oatmeal

Denison Farms--CSA and bulk onions

Canning Grape Juice

Finished juice

                It has been warm lately—about 100 degrees one afternoon last week—and everything is ripe. I have spent hours in the kitchen canning roasted tomatoes and grape juice. Fortunately, both projects have a come and go rhythm to them. Once you have set up your systems, I am  free to check email or read a few more chapters for the Honors American Lit Summer Reading assignment that I, like all of my students, have put off until mid-August  (if not later, to be honest).

 I spent Sunday afternoon  in an interesting vortex of Women’s Work, canning grape juice into vintage jars collected from my partner’s mother and a friend of mine, both of whom were serious canners until their children left home. The jars reach back at least to 1976; I have eight or ten that sport Bi-Centennial designs in the glass. Some are “magic mason” jars and a few are so heavy and sturdy I think they have been around since the 1950s. I think of the gallons of preserved foods these jars have held and will hold while I pour boiling water over grapes and sugar. Preserving foods in steamy kitchens has always been women’s work—as has gloating over the full jars in the basement later.

Grapes and sugar

While the canner was steaming away, I read A Midwife’s Tale, which is close reading and research work by one of my old professors looking at the life of a midwife in Augusta, Maine in the 1780s.  By looking at the records in the diary, we know that very few women died in childbirth in rural Maine. More died from diseases that swept the town periodically. There were also some  bits of scandal revealing in the journal on Sunday—out of wedlock births, people cheating on one another, and a rape case. Small towns are small towns, no matter what the century. Martha Ballad Moore, the midwife, kept her own accounts independent of her husband; they were partners, not dependents. It is an interesting read. I worked my way through three chapters, stopping every ten minutes to empty and load the steam canner or pour some more boiling water into the jars.

 Despite electricity and glass jars, I did not feel that far away from the 18^th century world I was reading about. Winter is coming. We must be ready.   

Canning

Grape Juice:

Pick a bucket of wild, deep flavored grapes—the kind that sprawl over the fence in the back alleys of older neighborhoods. Rinse them off and remove the stems. Wash a bunch of quart jars. Buy the lids before you start the project.

In each jar, tumble about a cup of grapes and a quarter cup of sugar. This is totally flexible—it started out as half a cup of each, but that was too sweet for us. A few more grapes never hurt anyone. Pour boiling water over the grapes, leaving a half inch of headroom at the top. Cap and ring. I always get a little ahead of the canner with the boiling water.

grapes

Process in boiling water or the steam canner for ten minutes. Cool, label, and put on the shelf for winter.

Lammastide-- The Early Harvest Season

                Lammastide is clearly here when, every day, I haul more food into the house from various gardens than we can eat. Even though I have designed our garden to feed us a huge variety of fresh food, not fifty pounds of tomatoes or green beans in one day, it still gets away from me in early August.  So I dry and can and pickle for an hour or so a day.

                Today I harvested a five gallon bucket of apples, a big bowl of blackberries, and a basketful of green beans, as well as a bowl of tomatoes, mostly cherry sized.  As I sliced the apples thinly and arranged them on the trays to dry, I imagined where they were going to be eaten next year. Many will go to work or school, so that we have something to chew on in the late afternoons. Some will fuel us on trail hikes. We’ll re-hydrate handfuls for oatmeal and yogurt in the mornings. I’ll carry a bag of dried fruit with me everywhere next winter. You never know when you’ll need a snack. Yesterday’s apples became seven jars of apple butter, slowly cooked down in the crockpot overnight. Tomorrow’s will be applesauce—and when that’s all done, I will roam the neighborhood scavenging wild fruit to press into cider.

                The green beans became four jars of Dilly Beans, ready to join the batch of Bread and Butters I made yesterday. Here, the steam canner comes in very handy. It is easy to haul out and can four or five jars of something, like pickles or jam, without the hour long process of heating water in the big pot. When I used the boiling water pot, I waited and collected produce, then had a mad rush of processing and canning. It was exhausting. Now, I can run a batch of something through before dinner and the shelves fill up slowly but steadily, day to day. It also saves energy!

                Blackberries are good fresh off of the vine, warm from the sun, while the chickens hope for dropped fruit. I throw some into quart jars and freeze them for muffins in the winter. I’ve made jam from the wild ones, straining out the seeds. But today, the bowl of berries is just the right size for a pie. And I am thinking of cutting little circles out of the crust so that the juice bubbles up and through. That would finish off our dinner of zucchini and tomatoes and salad nicely, especially with a little ice cream.

                I’ll be doing this work every day for the next few weeks. Roasted tomatoes and jars of salsa, more jars of dried and canned fruits and veggies, and then potatoes and longkeeper tomatoes, squashes and apples, tucked away to be eaten all winter long. A little effort now—huge benefits all winter long. It’s a fair trade. 

Apple Butter

Quarter a big pot full of apples. Don't worry about skins or seeds, but whack off the nasty bits and bugs. Toss into a large pot, add about half a cup of water, and cook quickly into mush.

Push the mush through a food mill to remove skins and seeds. I balance mine over the crockpot rather than dirtying a bowl. Add half a cup of sugar, a tablespoon of cinnamon, and a bit of allspice. 

Set the crockpot on low heat and place in  a corner with the lid off. Leave all day or over night. Stir occasionally.  The apple butter is ready when it has reduced by half. 

Can in half-pint jars. It is not as shelf stable once opened as jam, so this reduces waste. Process for ten minutes in the steam canner. 

Think Globally-- Act Locally

                It has been a little lively on Twenty First Street this June—one neighbor had THREE issues requiring police intervention this month and the police were out, investigating our neighbors, for several hours last Sunday. Add the usual people wandering around as students leave, poking through the trash (something I also engage in!), and its’ just been a little weird.  My friend who studies astrology assures me that the planets are shifting, however, and things are going to calm down by the end of the month.  We are all glad.  

                Despite the constant flux of short-term residents, Twenty First Street is a neighborhood. We watch out for one another, quietly, in a live and let live manner. We exchange gossip and tidbits of local information and the occasional knitting pattern. We roll our eyes collectively at the fraternity on the corner, who went through a phase of thinking everyone wanted to hear them all the time, every day. (They learned—we don’t.) Food moves up and down the street—eggs and plums, breads and cookies, tomato plants. We know each other’s pets; a few days ago, a ten year old boy showed up at my door. “Do you have a bunny?” he asked. I do. “Well, it’s in the neighbor’s back yard.” He told me. He was right. Bunzilla had escaped, once again. I herded her back.  His cousin feeds and waters the animals when we are gone for a few days.  We live here; Mark and I moved in 18 years ago, and most long term residents were already here. Although a few have left (several died) we are a stubborn lot. We stay. We like it here.

                I call our house a “homestead” because of what it evokes—a combination of moving into a challenging place and transforming it from barren to prolific, and the idea of a self-sustaining piece of land. I know enough American history to know that a self-sustaining farm is and always has been a myth, although it is one we, as a culture, love to embrace. But the dream of transforming a piece of land---we have done that. The back yard was a sea of false dandelions when we moved in. Now it produces much of our fruits and vegetables during the growing season and functions as the center of a complex network of community connections. Goods, ideas, and information flow in and out of our home every day. We are deeply rooted in this community and on this street.

                And this rootedness seems to me to be an essential component in our struggle against Climate Change. We all need to claim our homes, to value our spaces, even if they are not perfect, to take a stand and say—no, you are not going to destroy this street, this town, this planet.  Greed knows no boundaries— we need to recognize that the motivation which tears down affordable homes to throw up expensive student housing, destroying neighborhoods is the same motivation that is tearing off mountain tops in West Virginia, pushing for oil trains through the Pacific Northwest, and lobbying against any sort of carbon tax in Congress. Greed is greed. Extraction of resources is extraction of resources. It is all connected. We can fight this—and we need to start by protecting our own homes, streets, and communities.

                Think globally—but act locally.

Humus: The perfect summertime spread

Cook a couple of cups of garbanzo beans. I usually through three or four cups of Sunbow’s beans into the crockpot and let them cook all day. What I don’t use for humus will find their way into soups or pastas in the next few days. They need to be really soft!

Throw the garbanzos into the food processor along with three pealed cloves of garlic, about a quarter cup of olive oil, half a cup of tahini, some salt, cayenne pepper, juice from one or two lemons, and some parsley, if you have it. Process. Add some bean cooking water if you need it. Taste, adjust, and store in pint canning jars in the fridge. Humus and flat bread, along with some garden salad, make an excellent summer dinner.

               

The Rat Catcher

The Rat Catcher

                One of Mark’s most significant jobs in our household is the “inviting” of non-human visitors to the yard, not the house. Spiders are escorted out on the backs of envelopes, young, stunned possums are carried out by the tail—bare handed!—but his real specialty is the rodent. “You just have to think like a rat,” he says.

                This skill was very clear last fall. It was about ten o’clock and we were reading quietly in bed when the neighbors erupted. First, there was a crash, then a shout. “It’s by the fireplace!” someone screamed. “Now, behind the couch,” another voice chimed in. Obscenities filled the air. The front door slammed as one young man ran out into the street. “I think,” Mark observed calmly, “that they have a rat.” At that moment, something crashed to the ground and another young man ran into the street. We heard the sound of a baseball bat hitting something. There was a moment of silence while they reconnoitered.  Then the thumping started again. Finally, after another loud crash, they were done. Either the rat was dead or outside.

                A few nights later, I woke up to a familiar, but still ominous, sound. The cat door shut, followed by heavy cat feet, heading to the bedroom.  Then I heard the story of the hunt. “Lucy has a rat,” I nudged Mark awake. He sighed, turned on the light, and looked down. Yup, it had just run behind the laundry basket. I gathered up the cat while he headed out for his tools—a large mouthed canning jar with lid and ring, and a towel. “Think like a rat,” he muttered as he placed the jar along the edge of the wall near the basket and covered it with a towel, creating a dark tunnel.”They always run towards the dark.” Then he moved the basket just enough to send the rodent scurrying towards the jar. It ran in. He capped the lid on. “Yup, roof rat, but a baby,” he said, screwed the cap on tight, and moved it to the front porch. In the early morning, he’ll move it across the street to release it in the yard of the awful frat near-by.  A Master Rat Catcher at work.

March Dinner: Beans and Greens on Toast

Find a jar of home canned beans in the basement. *

Sautee the last storage onion in olive oil. Chop a big bunch of spicy mustard leaves and add. Pour the can of beans over the greens and warm it all up.

Toast four slices of home-made whole wheat bread. Place on the plates. Pour beans and greens over in a huge pile. Toss a handful of cheese over all.

Eat. Repeat the next week.

Home-Canned beans

You need a pressure canner for this one…Wash pint jars. Pour a heavy third of a cup of dried beans in each. NO salt. Cap and place in canner. Pressure can for 70 minutes. When the pressure is down, the beans are both cooked and canned, beautifully. They are much softer and richer than cooking them on the stove and they keep for years. I process large bunches of our locally grown benas this way in the fall and have them all winter.

Veg Bags

            Twenty five years ago, I wanted a salad spinner, but did not have room—or the money—to buy one. So, I made one. I took one of the cloth storage bags I had made for backpacking (why buy fancy ones when you can sew them for free from scraps?), put the washed greens in it, took it outside, and swung it around my head by the drawstring. Voila— clean, dried  lettuce with a pre-soaked storage bag for the left-overs. And it was fun.I never looked back.

            Now, I have a whole series of bags. The old ones finally died, so I broke out the sewing machine last summer and made some new ones. I made several from old—or kind of tacky—dish towels that I was not using. The thicker terry cloth material works really well for salad greens. I have a large one from an old tablecloth with a hole in the middle that holds huge leaves of mustard and kale, as well as smaller cooking greens. And then there are some scraps of cotton cloth bags that corral carrots, beets, and mushrooms from market to table. I weave shoelaces through a tube in the top of the bag for drawstrings so that I can pull the bag closed.

            I have found that these cloth bags work much better than plastic. Greens rot and grow slimy in plastic bags because they cannot breathe. They dry out—or tumble out of the refrigerator at awkward times—when left unwrapped and held together by the wire wrappers, which bruise the stems. But in a dampened cloth bag, greens last for over a week—which is all I ask from a vegetable. Even root crops are happier.  If one does dry out, or grow nasty because it was pushed to the far back corner of the shelf, I toss the bag into the wash and use it again. And then, when we go hiking and I need one more bag to hold the last day’s food—there they are, ready and waiting to hit the trail.           

Shepard's Pie

Boil and mash four or five medium sized potatoes for the crust.

Saute two portbello mushrooms, a mediums onion, carrots, cauliflower, and peas or corn. Add salt, pepper,  and dried basil. Throw in a handful of grated cheddar cheese at the end, if you feel decadent.

Put cooked veggies in a casserole, top with the mashed potatoes, and bake until bubbly. Eat with salad.

Our Daily Bread

          There are two foods that we make at home every week that are essential to our health and well- being—yogurt and bread. Both are incredibly simple to make, much tastier than any store bought version, and reduce packaging waste in ways that I did not realize until I shifted to making my own.

            I have always baked bread at home. It was my second culinary experiment, following the birthday cake with pink paprika frosting. My mother told me, over and over, that the paprika she sprinkled on my potatoes was “just for color” and had no flavor. I believed her. She was wrong, as we discovered with her Mother’s Day cake. I used the recipe in the 1958 Betty Crocker Cookbook that I adored.  I mixed, kneaded, proofed, shaped, and baked two loaves of white bread on a Winter Saturday afternoon and I was hooked. For thirty years, I followed the basic recipe I learned then. Fresh bread was a staple of my college existence and I only stopped baking  my own when I worked at Ceres Bakery—I ate Shelly’s bread then.

            Five years ago, we shifted to a slow rise method of bread baking. It is much easier, tastier, and better for our digestive track. Because the dough rises overnight, it is not rushed. It does not need extra gluten to hold firm. It does not produce extra gas. It is easy to digest. We love it. It also lends itself to dozens of variations—combinations of flours, added sweeteners and dried fruits, nuts and seeds, eggs and honey….the options are endless.

  This is our daily bread:

1. In the blue ceramic bowl, sprinkle a tablespoon and a half of yeast and cover with three cups of warm—never hot—water. Whisk. Add six and a half cups of flour—we use half hard red wheat white flour and half home ground whole wheat from Greenwillow Grains, our local wheat farmers—and a tablespoon and a half of salt. Mix with a long spoon. The dough will be wet.
2.  Cover the bowl with a re-used plastic produce bag and leave on the counter. Two hours is the goal, but it’s flexible. If it sits out for three, it’s fine. It should be about doubled.
3. Toss in the refrigerator overnight. It can sit there for up to a week without harm, although it will tasty a little more yeasty later in the week and the dough may be a little grey. No worries, however. Its still good.
4. Take out half of the dough. It may need to be sprinkled with a bit of flour if it is sticky. Work fast! Shape into a ball. Toss some cormnmeal onto your sheet pan, which has no edges so the bread can slide off.
5. Let the bread rise and relax for about half an hour. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 450 degrees.
6. Slide your loaf onto a baking stone placed on the bottom rack—mine is always in place. Bake until it sounds hollow when thumped, which is about 40 minutes.
7. Eat.

You can also use the dough for pizza, bread sticks rolled in cheese and chilies, sticky buns—anything that needs a slow raised dough.

2015 Summer Harvest

All of the produce that we preserve comes from within ten miles of home; it is transported here by bicycle. The bold entries were grown on site. This, of course, does not account for all of the fresh produce we ate during the growing season.

Blueberries: 2 quarts dried

                   3 quarts frozen

Peaches: six quarts dried

15    pints canned

Apples: apple sauce 8 pints

              Apple butter 18 half pints (it turns quickly)

               Dried 4 quarts

               Juice 19 quarts

Figs: 7 quarts dried

Plums:  butter 6 half pints

              Pickled 6 quarts

Grape juice: 36 quarts

Beets: pickled, 7 pints

Tomatoes: roasted and canned 54 half pints

                        Dried 3 quarts

                        Salsa 10 pints

                        Longkeeper storage tomatoes 10 pounds

Cucumbers: It was a very good year…

                        Quick Dill 10 quarts

                        Senfgerkin 10 pints

Gooseberry jam 4 half pints

Potatoes:

            Blue three pounds—a mystery

            Yukon Gold 13 pounds, plus some early harvest

            Desiree 21 pounds

            Kennebeck 25 pounds

            Russian fingerling 26 pounds

Pumpkins and squash; six pie pumpkins and one blue Hubbard squash

                       

Cucumber Madness

           Cucumbers are taking over the kitchen….we eat three for lunch and five more come in at dinner time. It has been a good year for cucumbers. The weather has been warm; the beehive is active so pollination is excellent. I planted a few extra plants because of slow germination. Finally, Lemon cucumbers are just prolific and the “double Yield” variety from Territorial is, literally, a double yielder. I have had a whole series of twinned fruits. For whatever reason, the vines are heading towards the fence at a rapid rate.

            Every evening, I wander out to the back garden to check for dinner. Beans? Tomatoes? Collards? Cucumbers? I harvest what is ready and plan supper around the basket. Despite the occasional run away zucchini,  the system has worked in the past. This year, however, I check the cucumber vines before dinner, moving the leaves around, picking the green fruits.  An hour later, when I run out for fresh basil, I spot yet another fruit, large and golden, lurking at the base of the trellis. How is this possible?

            My vegetable bin is full of cucumbers. I have made four varieties of pickles, all from The Joy of Pickling: bread and butter, senfgerkin, Dutch lunch spears, and quick dill. Each batch clears out the bin for a week, but then it backs up once again. Last week, I pulled all of the cookbooks off the shelf and hunted down every cucumber recipe possible. Every night, we try another, but we are not complaining. Cucumbers are summer and summer can stretch out for another month.

Cucumber Salads:

·        Cucumbers, yogurt, mint, salt and pepper.

·        Cucumbers, tomatoes, sweet onion, feta and olive oil and vinegar

·        Cucumbers, sweet onion, paprika, rice vinegar, and sugar, salt

·        Salted cucumbers with soy sauce

·        Cucumbers, dill, and vinegar

·        Chinese noodles, peanut sauce, and cucumbers

Why Dry?

            When I first began food preservation, I was very interested in applesauce and jam; they were both easy and familiar. I’d made applesauce back in high school, large pots of it, and froze it in “seal-a-meal” bags, laid in our small freezer like slabs of bacon.  There were hundreds of recipes for jam; once I figured out the slight shift in bubble structure that indicated the perfect “jamming” temperature, I was off.  Our shelves were lined with half pints of blackberry jam and pints of applesauce, followed by a foray into Dilly Beans. Life was good and I repeated the process the next year, adding home canned fruit—until we had a serious backlog of jam and pickled beans. Then I realized that we did not eat much jam and the canned fruit, except of peaches, was too sweet, unless we had an old batch of sour yogurt. And I was still buying dried fruit for work and backpacking trips. Something was off. I bought a cheap food drier and we have never looked back.

            Drying fruit makes far more sense than canning.

First, it is fast and easy. I can slice up a pile of apples (peal still on) after dinner, laid them out in the drier, turn it on, and go to bed. If I set the timer to turn off in six hours, we have dried fruit in the morning. I toss it into my vintage Magic Mason jars, check it off of the master list, and put it on the basement shelf. Italian plums and figs require a little push and spread motion to expose more surface to the air, but, overall, drying fruit is a one step process.

Second, it is healthy. I gather my fruit at the peak of the season and process it directly, with no added sugars or preservatives. Much of it is organically grown, either by design, in my backyard, or neglect, when I harvest from the abandoned alley trees around the neighborhood. Drying preserves all of the fiber, most of the nutrients, and all of the flavor. Mixed bags of dried fruit are our favorite winter snack; we both keep a stash in our desk drawers.

Dried fruit is tasty. We have all purchased pieces of fruit from the grocery store that are well traveled and know the consequences. Despite the fancy label, an apple in March often tastes dry and mealy and an orange is often a disappointment. A piece of dried fruit, however, is always good. Peaches and pears are sweet and flavorful throughout the winter when dried. Over the last few years, we have moved almost totally away from buying “fresh” fruit out of season, because of the dried fruit stash in the basement. Why bother?

Finally, dried fruit is flexible, unlike canned fruit. It travels well, so we take it backpacking and camping, as well as to work. We eat jars of dried fruit out of hand all winter long. When we long for “fleshy” fruit, I make compotes, mixing several types together with some warm juice to plump it up. I also toss handfuls into oatmeal and granola, muffins and scones, and pasta sauces.

When I first started drying, several friends asked about the carbon footprint of running the drier all day, and, it is true that our electric bill goes up in August. Wouldn’t it be more energy efficient to purchase the fruit that was dried commercially? Although I have not done any calculations, I am not convinced this is so. The fruit I dry travels less than five miles to my house, always on bike or foot. It is often raised without any summer water; it is not sprayed with chemicals. This reduces the carbon footprint considerably. Then, it is not shipped from the factory to the store, then to my home. We have also totally eliminated packaging. Finally, unlike canning, the jars and lids can be used over and over again. I have some lids with six or seven years of notes on them! When I consider all of these factors, I am not concerned about my drier. And, yes, I am interested in a solar drier, although I wonder if it would work given the dropping light levels and cool nights that come around at the peak of drying season.

 If I were beginning food preservation again, I would start with a drier, not a canner. I use my steam canner all summer long, processing pickles and roasted tomatoes, as well as canned peaches, applesauce, and grape juice. But the drier processes the most important foods we put up for the winter—all of our foraged fruits.

Lemon Icebox Pie: the perfect pie for a 98 degree day

8 oz cream cheese

1 can sweetened condensed milk

zest and juice of three lemons

Toss it all into the food processor and whirl until smooth. Pour into a graham cracker crust and set in the refrigerator overnight. Top with whipped cream.

Menu Planning

   

   Every week, I plan out the meals we will eat, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  It saves time floundering around, looking for dinner at 6:30 in the evening, reduces food waste, and supports our local produce only efforts. There are five steps to the process.

Step one: Survey. I make a detailed list of all of the available produce. Right now, we have eggs, cabbage, onions, potatoes, parsnips, leeks, squashes, and collards on site, mustard, chard, and arugula on order, canned tomatoes and green beans in the basement, and frozen peas, spinach, and corn in the freezer. Once the list is made, I consult the week’s meeting calendar, so that I know which dinners need to be quick and which ones can involve a long time in the oven.

Step Two: Recipe box. Years ago, I copied all of my found recipes onto notecards and stored them in a plastic box. It was very handy; I could pack four or five recipes for a road trip or distant Thanksgiving meal, without hauling books along. When we shifted to our local foods challenge, I sorted them all into eight sections, one for each of the six-week festivals that we celebrate. I moved them around for a few years so that, now, the recipes match the vegetables that are in season. Menu planning always begins here.

Step Three: Lay out the plan. Once I have found the recipes that match what we have on hand, I lay out the plan. Breakfast toggles between oatmeal and granola, with more complex recipes saved for the weekends. Lunch is left-overs or a large pot of soup made on Sunday and eaten all week. Quicker dinners slot into the evenings where we have other plans. Foods that need to be prepped ahead are noted for the evening before. One weeknight is often devoted to a kitchen whirl of bread dough, yogurt, soup, and dinner.

Step Four: Shop. Once the plan is made, I write the grocery list for the week. We do a large, bulk goods shop once a month, so the weekly shop can often happen on the way home from an evening walk.  We’ll need milk, cheese, and maybe some lettuce or snacking nuts for the week. Because we have such a tight plan, the shopping is limited and very little food is wasted. By Friday, the refrigerator is empty.

Step Five: Stick to the plan. This is the most difficult aspect of the system. Some weeks, things take longer than anticipated, a meeting runs over, someone has a cold or a headache, and cooking dinner feels like one more hurdle to be jumped before the day is over. Sometimes, I’ll look over the list and shift the meals around, so that a quicker, easier meal replaces a more complex one.  Sometimes we’ll just throw potatoes in the oven and go for a walk while they bake. Sometimes we break down and go out to eat—but often, just considering where to go will force me into actually cooking dinner. Because, after all, whatever we eat, at home, will be just as tasty, better for us, and cheaper, than anything we will find outside. And, to be honest, by the time we walk to the restaurant, order, and wait, faster.

Hazelnut Shortbread: The Best Valentine’s Day cookie

Cream ½ pound of butter with ½ cup of sugar. Add ½ cup of finely ground hazelnuts and 2 cups of flour. Roll out and cut in heart shapes. Bake in 350 oven until light brown, then cool and dip in melted chocolate.