Category Archives: food

Good gardeners actually repeatedly trim the shoots or are otherwise overwhelmed.  Might as well eat the gleanings.

During garden cleanup last weekend, I considered my sprawling hops vines, dried and new.  They sprawl because I have not yet re-erected their trellis after last year’s windstorm.  (It’s on the everlong To Do list.)  And like any curious gardener and hungry person, I plucked and took a nibble of a new shoot.

Not bad, I thought.  Bright, even.  Surprisingly not bitter like its fruit.

And hairy.

Last year I grew them on trellis netting.  Smart people grow them on wires so they can unhinge them from the top and allow the fruit to dry.  This year, I will be a smart hops farmer.

Sure enough, they’re edible, and sure enough, some previous group of hungry gardeners, Europeans mostly, have figured this out…indeed, there’s a market season for the green ones in Italy (bruscandoli), and the Belgians blanch and even pickle them (jets de houblon).  So to tame their sprawl and fill my maw, I brought some in to the kitchen.

Like asparagus, they’re best fresh.  I have seen plenty of recipes for risotto con bruscandoli,  which sounded fine…but risotto’s a dish I make annually with the first big harvest of asparagus so I didn’t wish to upstage that primary vegetable.  I blanched them in a bit of water to knock the hairs off, then sautéed them with young leeks, the first of the green garlic and some olive oil…and then tossed the lot into a waiting dish of hot fresh egg-y pasta, spring herbs and about a teacup’s worth of new ricotta. A dash of chive blossom vinegar and a bit more butter, salt, and pepper…toss…mmm.

A fine quick spring repast.  Shared with a chilled glass of white wine and a large salad, this meal might just be repeated…next year.

Actually, I did repeat an eat:  the next night I braised some with asparagus and green garlic.  We had company for dinner and it was a hit.

Dirty AND ugly

If someone hasn’t told you already, rely on me to say it:  Some, if not most, of the veg and fruit you will grow will not resemble grocery-store produce.

And what does this say about you, humble organic gardener?  Are you a failure for having cracked tomatoes, vole gnawed-upon carrots, the occasional sun-exposed greenish potato?  The scabby apple, the slug-eaten cabbage?  The (horrors) lacy flea beetle-eaten tatsoi, the wormy broccoli?  Do you SUCK at this growing thing?

You, most assuredly, do not.  You are simply the victim of inflated expectations. The stuff in the grocery store is frankenstein food, carefully chemically inflated, picked underripe, coated with wax and shipped long distances merely to fool you into thinking This is the Pinnacle of Produce.   Do not be fooled, and take heart.

Merely tasting any of your (painfully) (laboriously) (mother-hennishly) homegrown produce should assure you that you’re doing the right thing.  That you’ve befriended your vegetable peeler in ways that you never previously considered?  Consider this your new reality.  Get over it, and tell anyone else who would care to get over it, too.  It ain’t no beauty pageant.

That said:  even though I am now growing for lots of other families thanks to my small CSA, there is stuff I won’t share with them.  Harvesting my potatoes and cabbage recently kind of brought this home to me.  I have absolutely NO problem peeling a green potato or two (as long as it’s not overly green) and/or chopping away a thick-cored, tough red cabbage, but my CSA peeps might!  So, what to do with my harvest of Uglies?

Soup.  Soup equalizes all ugliness, and is in itself quite transformative.  In the big pot tonight are a dozen spotty beets, three wormy leeks, a few scabby apples, and about four slug-riddled red cabbages:  clean off all their bad spots and bugs, chop finely, place in that big pot simmering pot of caramelized onions and garlic, a handful of herbs and topped off with a decent (homegrown/canned) parsley/celery-based vegetable broth?  This is the basis for a wonderful vegan red soup.  Once fully softened, it gets put through the food mill.  Wine red, appropriate for the harvest.  It’s up to you, CSA member, on how to garnish it:  feta?  yogurt?  croutons?  chives?  Look in your share this week and find some inspiration.

And the rest of you homegrowers not in my CSA?  Do NOT let anyone tell you your veg/fruit children are ugly!!

This bowl of unripe Concords and Niagaras made three quarts of verjus:  a quart more than last year, maybe this much will see me through until next fall

Sure, it’s September, so most of us in this hemisphere are buried in big harvests.  Did you know there are probably plenty of small ones out there waiting for you too?

I swear I am not piling on, you harvest-weary souls in bloggerland.  All I mean is there might be a few more little, perhaps overlooked things growing in your back forty that could augment your winter and spring dinners.  I am, of course, talking about rounding out your pantry by looking for…condiments!

Look under the withered buds for the seedpods:  you’ll see 2-4 of them, usually.  Try to get them while they’re still small.  They’re quite peppery!

It’s now that I attend the garden armed with little bowls.  Nasturtium seed pods are slowly ripening, you see, and so it’s time to put by a store of home-grown capers.    My patch of free-sown garlic has drying tops of bulbils singing in the breeze, and the fennel and cilantro has gone to seed:  these, too, can be pickled or dried.  I see that many of the paste tomatoes are ripening well ahead of this weekend’s timed harvest.  Tomatoes can be sliced thin, placed on parchment-lined cookie sheets and sent to the oven for a 200-degree beating overnight…insta-“sun”-dried goodness, especially if sprinkled first with sea salt and fresh thyme.  These go into the freezer to be dispatched at will this winter.

Bulbils of hardneck garlic

And then there’s the ripening apples.  Ch-ch-ch-chutney…! when paired with green tomatoes, garlic, a wee bit of hot peppers and sugar/vinegar.  The pantry has yellow and brown mustard seeds.  Those few small Italian plums left from last week might make a great mustard, paired with an apple or two.

Not-quite-ready grapes yield small very precious bottles of verjus:  lip-puckery brightness if a few drops are shaken out atop a hot dish.

Over the years I have cut out all condiments from the grocery store list, and it’s only gifts from far-flung locales that stock the top shelf of the fridge.   Cranberry ketchup, garlicky barbecue sauce…these are well within your range, especially in small batches.  Small refrigerator pickles like the nasturtium pod “capers” likewise aren’t hard (just 1T salt in a near-pint of white vinegar:  add the pods as they ripen).  Look around, find that second harvest.

I think I like fennel seeds and pollen more than I like the bulb.

And:  it’s fun doing something small when all you’ve been doing is putting huge monotonous harvests away.  Trust me on this, truly.

and August marked my fifth year of blogging.

I love how lush the greenhouses look in the summer

So I took a week off to celebrate!  Hah.  Hardly.  As usual, we’re just terribly busy at this time of year.

The “other” ingredient in peach salsa:  fleshy tomatoes and fiery peppers

And of course the primary ingredient of peach salsa

I will mention one thing that was quite noteworthy and decidedly pleasant.  I met a blogging friend last week!  This marks the first time I have ever met a fellow blogger in the flesh, and it was a delight to break bread with The Slow Cook’s Ed Bruske and his wife Lane.  They’d been vacationing in Pentwater, a good two miles up the lake from us.  It was nice, after years of reading and commenting and emailing…to meet!  Hopefully it won’t be another five years before it happens again.

This should make a nice blended soup, don’tcha think?

The only bad thing I find about growing the brassica family (cabbages, kales, etc.) under row covers is what it does to the gardener.  “Out of sight, out of mind.”

Because cabbages, once planted, need no care until harvest I guess I tend to forget about them.  It’s like getting a bye as far as garden work goes: they, like the potatoes, just do their growing thing out of sight until needed.  After a week away from the garden due to the oppressive heat, so many (!) things needed care that I *should* be able to ignore those cabbages another week or more, right?  Wrong.  I am a masochist, so I took a peek under the rowcovers.

Ohmahgah, purslane city!  Time for a little Revenge, Served Cold:

PURSLANE GAZPACHO, for six (Note:  I find it best to cut the purslane by first gathering up all its sprawling arms together and cutting it off, pony-tail style, about an inch above where the branches leave the ground.  Purslane can be messy to clean if you pull it up roots and all.)

• About a gallon’s worth of purslane leaves and branches
• Two small cucumbers, peeled
• Two to four fleshy tomatoes, preferably the ones that are green when ripe, like Aunt Ruby’s German Green, or Green Zebra, but any color will do
• Four large cloves hardneck garlic (or more) to taste
• A medium red or yellow onion
• One small hot chili, stemmed, and seeded too if it’s really obnoxious
• 2 cups tomato juice or water to get the blender working correctly
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Chives or green onions for garnish; vinegar for taste

This makes a shockingly green soup:  the more red tomatoes you add, the more muddied the color so be warned.  Clean purslane in a few changes of water, and strip off smaller branches from the larger trunk branches, discarding the trunks (unless of course they’re small then use all of it).  Core but don’t skin the tomatoes, and clean and halve onions and garlic.  Reserve part of the tomatoes, cucumber, onion, and purslane, set aside.  Blend remaining ingredients (it might take a couple batches to get it all) in either a blender or a food processor, and place contents in a bowl.  Chop reserved veggies, add to chives/green onions, and add to bowl.   Test for salt (it can take a lot of salt) and add vinegar if it needs to be brighter.  Chill, serve.

WEEDER’S FRIEND PASTA SALAD  serves six depending on how much you like salad

• 1 lb dried pasta like oriecchette (or really any small-ish and salad-friendly pasta), cooked al dente and then cooled immediately; tossed with 2 T olive oil, then chilled until rest of ingredients assembled
• About a quart or more of purslane leaves and small branches:  after their cold-water bath, pull leaves, chop branches finely
• About 2-3 cups of lambs’ quarters, young leaves only
• Fresh turnips, cucumbers, kohlrabi and/or carrots, about 2 cups’ worth once cleaned and cubed
• 2-3 large red beets and their leaves: peel, cube and steam beets until crisp-tender and chop and reserve beet stems and greens
• 2-5 radishes, cleaned and slivered, or 1/2 cup or more whole radish seed pods (quite edible, and tasty!)
• 1/2 cup or more chopped fleshy herbs to taste (oregano, parsley, basil, etc.) and some thyme leaves thrown in too
• Chopped red onions or scallions to taste
• 3/4 cup or more of your favorite garlic-heavy dressing:  this works well with a garlic/buttermilk or garlic/yogurt dressing, or a lemony vinaigrette, or, hell, fresh aioli!
• 1 cup goat’s milk feta, crumbled, or to taste

Toss all veggies in a very large bowl with cooled pasta and the dressing.  The beets make it nice and pink-y red.  There should be a LOT of vegetables here:  about 2 or 3:1 as far as veg:pasta ratio goes, so you will need to jigger the dressing accordingly by adding the juice of half a lemon or enough extra dressing and/or onion to make it sing.  Crumble the nice salty feta on top, don’t spare the pepper grinder, and dig in.

The child budding grammarian stands behind her latest victim

Last week my daughter scolded me on proper gardening terms and techniques.  The conversation went like this:  “Mama, when are you going to unplant those potatoes?”  “Unplant the potatoes?  Do you mean harvest the potatoes?”  She looked at me, exasperated.  “No.  “Harvest” is what we do to peas and artichokes and asparagus.  But we “unplant” the potatoes and carrots.”

And we do.  So schooled.

I am always happy to see volunteer potato leaves poking through the soil.  Yes, they remind me that I am an inveterate potato-misser when I do “unplant” them in the fall.  But even if they disrupt my tedious seedling rows, I know that those vigorous furls of greenery mean a crop of new potatoes for us around the end of June.  There’s nothing like baby potatoes, as that’s what they are:  with skin so thin that even the stream of the hose could tear them, they need gentle treatment.  And their flesh is so crisp and creamy…oh, I love my ground apples.

Here she is with the results of the unplanting (and harvesting in the case of the last peas and garlic scapes)

And so does my family.  Serving them up last week, I reminded everyone that it had been April when the last spud was served.  They hadn’t missed them (though I sure had).

Probably the best treatment for new spuds is cooking them en papillote:  wrapped in an envelope of parchment paper and stuck on a tray in a hot oven, they get steamed AND browned.  I make sure to add a lot of fresh herbs and the fattest grains of sea salt, a twist or five of the pepper mill, and of course our good friends Butter and Olive Oil.  I wish I was a great folder of parchment paper packages.  I have had some dishes served me in restaurants where the paper looked edible all on its own, its caramelized brown-ness, its beautiful folds holding in the moisture.  But I am not, so I resort to the stapler.  Sure, office supplies have a role in the kitchen!  What doesn’t!

Happy un-planting to all of you.

A serious lack of dry wood (and dry conditions, as we haven’t finished its roof) have kept Loven out of commission most of this year.  She’s in fine form now though:  here’s the CSA portion of the WW sourdough, and a chicken, a big skillet of pilaf, a big pot of homegrown cranberry beans and some beets and onions are still cooking inside.

Even though I do my best to grow food year-round, it is in mid-June and mid-November where we experience a bit of a fresh-food desert.  Sure; there’s plenty of food to eat fresh year-round because much of it is grown year-round (salad, the onion family, root crops, cabbage family).  We’re human though and so we tire of eating the same things.

But:  new, seasonal things are ripening, whee!  Until we tire of them again, of course.

I like the pre-bounty of this time of year.  Every night means something new to eat, maybe just a few, fresh.  Last night, for example, was the first full harvest of favas.  Such a sensual pleasure, the whole fava experience.  I remember loosing the beans from their softly lined pods with my daughter when she was about three.  She put the empty pods on her fingers as “sleeping bags” and it was so apt:  I would curl up in that soft down too if I could.   The little pile of shells and the growing pile of bright creamy beans as we slip them from the beans’ inner skins:  we’re anxious to eat, and are not burdened by the task.  Earlier crops have likewise had us rubbing our hands together in greed, and we feel a happy anticipation during our pre-dinner trips to the gardens.

Year Five of seed saved from a Copra cross storage onion.  This is a good year for onions:  that cold wet spring seems to have favored them.  We knock their stems over a week before harvest to help store them later.

Despite the bounty, I try hard not to “miss” that which I normally can eat the rest of the year.  There is a shut, bolted, windowless door of the staple crops of potatoes, celery, carrots and beets: despite my efforts, potatoes will sprout; celery, carrots and beets will flower.  Unless the earth slips on its axis and we skip the frosts of early spring, these crops just try their hardest to be unappealing.  It’s a great survival technique.  Maybe I can jigger seed-starting just enough…or plant greenhouse spuds in January….

The distractions of the freshening garden though do help dull the pain.  Up tonight:  artichokes and the first squash of the season.  Oh, and strawberries.  Bon appetit.

First pickles of the year:  Leek and garlic scapes, with chive blossoms for the cute factor

SO:  I said in a previous post that I have been running a small CSA-type scheme for unloading my veggies and other farm goods onto gullible friends, for money.  Let me give you a couple of tips on how I got here.

One of the first rules of manufacture is that increased production is more economical if you don’t need to retool and resupply.  If you can add another shift on your existing machines, then whammo, you can produce more widgets.  What does this mean for me?  Not that I sleep less due to a second shift, but rather that making six loaves of bread takes only a bit more time than making two.  Likewise, canning more pints of jam, planting more garden beds, etc.:  if I have the jars, if I have the garden beds, then canning more or succession planting the garden does not take me significantly more time.  I am already making the kitchen sticky with the jam, and I have already built those garden beds, and I have the seeds waiting.

In other words, I am doing it already, whatever “It” is:  making milk products, baking, gardening, fermenting, canning.  I have added nothing new.

The other thing that is required is a shift of mind.  I needed to stop thinking everything I made or grew was precious.  I needed to change my relationship with that which I produced.  Scarcity produces value, you see, so…if there is no scarcity, one’s perceived value of all that mache or arugula is lessened.  It helps matters I suppose that my spoiled and fussy family is not in love with anything I make or grow (it’s the downside of abundance, you see) with the possible exception of asparagus or cajeta (goat-milk caramel).  I doubt I would ever be able to grow enough spears or boil off enough milk to satisfy the gang here.

The counter to the less-precious stance is that all the best goes to us.  There are tons of things I do not share!  I had read in Nina Planck’s Real Food years ago that her truck farmer parents would reserve all the best produce for their customers, and I vowed never to do that to my own family.  Who is this for?  My family, or my bank account?  Fortunately, I have a real job that takes care of my bank account’s balance, so family production remains top priority.

Likewise, all this stepping up of production takes time.  I shouldn’t be so flip with my “six loaves is as easy as two” if those to whom I am speaking have never baked a successful loaf of bread, or have brown thumbs, or find the process of canning intimidating.  Listen:  I have been at this for a while now…I am not fresh on the farm, or new at anything except maybe milking.  There’s been a lot of hours logged, in other words.  A lot of rock-hard loaves of bread, unsealed jars, and failed crops.  Learning experiences all, is all I can say.  Failure has its uses.

If there’s something you are good at producing, then you should certainly try to share it, or even sell it!  Fortunately for you Michiganders, the Cottage Industry bill is now law, and you can sell your soaps or granola, jams or baked goods…anything that can sit on a counter can be sold by you at a farmer’s market (there are requirements, of course).  You can also home-process and sell your own chickens, turkeys and other poultry, and legally sell your own honey and maple syrup.  Other states are getting wise too:  check with your state’s Department of Agriculture for more information.

Two weeks of refrigeration and then they’re edible

Spring is here.  It’s here on the calendar, anyway; March came in and went out leonine, ferocious.  The only thing that tells me it’s the end of March and not the end of February is the strength of the sun.  You feel the strength of its life-giving rays no matter how chill the air.

bed of chervil

The herbs are certainly clued in to the seasonal change.  It’s at this time of year, thanks mainly to the greenhouses, that I am a fresh-herb fool.  The tender shoots of chervil, chives, tarragon, parsley and thyme just ask for snipping.  Even the new growth on the otherwise woody herbs of rosemary and sage (greenhouse-grown) and outdoor marjoram, oregano and winter savory are fleshy.  The bunching onions (scallions) are also shooting to the sky both indoors and out.  And mint, my nemesis, gets a bit of a smile out of me before I yank it out of the ground.

This, of course, means it’s time to make about 7 months’ worth of herbed butter.

There’s nothing easier, frankly.  Chop shockingly fresh herbs and mix with unsalted (or salted, your call) softened butter.  Add lemon or orange zest if you wish.  I place the butter in ramekins, about a 1/4 cup per, and freeze them; once frozen, I remove them from the ramekins and wrap them tightly with freezer paper and refreeze.  I also make tubes of them in the freezer paper like refrigerator cookies.

The uses for herbed butter are nearly endless.  And knowing I have it saves me a lot of time:  just a couple tablespoons added (even still frozen) to the soup pot before serving, or atop fish or mild meat or with pasta or grains?  Oolala.

On Friday morning in the milkshed I heard a thought-provoking EarthSky episode.  (They’re all thought-provoking.  This one just happened to hit home because it discussed one of my main interests:  namely, growing one’s own food, and the effort and land that it takes to do so.)  Mostly, it was a discussion of simplifying the measurements so we can understand, universally, how much land can feed how many people as efficiently as possible.

By 2050, our planet might need to feed 9 billion people. How do we improve Earth’s food systems – the way food is grown, harvested, transported, and distributed – to meet that challenge? The first step is to observe and measure the way we farm now….

Sean Smukler: To improve the system we have right now, we need to know what works where, and why.

Sean Smukler is an agricultural ecologist at Columbia University and a co-author of the July 2010 article published in the journal Nature. He said creating a common system of measurements – for example, how many calories a farming region can provide per person, or how much energy is expended per unit of food – will help move the world toward farming methods that can feed 9 billion people….

Nine billion.  The mind reels.  I *know,* incidentally, that with current effort and garden space I can marginally feed nine people.  My garden and greenhouses currently make a huge dent in the caloric needs for us three…the other six or so are using my goods as supplemental fare to their own diets.  And this is with me not putting much effort into growing pure calories, pure carbohydrates.  Let’s face it:  I spend a considerable amount of time fussing with my salad stuff!  Nary a calorie there.  Fancy-pants salads:  Tell me they’d feed the starving.  They won’t.

But if you’re worried about the lights going out and your needing to feed your own, can I make a pitch to you?  Consider the humble potato.  I may not blog about them much, but…I grow more potatoes than I do any other vegetable.  They are surprisingly easy to grow, are tolerated by almost all people, store well for months and their yields will always be at a bare minimum twice what you stick in the ground!   In point of fact their yields can be crazy.  Really.  Truly.  And you don’t need to spend a minor fortune to get started.  IF you can find organic potatoes, chances are they’re not sprayed with anti-sprouting nastiness, so…plant what you can find at the grocery store.  Or go to your local feed store:  they might not have more of a choice than a red, a russet, and the rare Yukon Gold, and they won’t be organic, but…they’ll be cheap, and they’ll grow for you.  You don’t, in other words, need to spend $12/pound for seed potatoes from some seed supplier far, far away.

Not everyone can grow potatoes of course:  they hate the hot summers of the southern U.S.  Sweet potatoes, however, LOVE hot summers.  I have grown them successfully here too for years, me who hangs out on the 42nd parallel, here where it got above 90 exactly 3 days in 2010.  And like regular potatoes,  you’ll have them forever, but growing slips is a bit harder than sticking a sprouty spud in the ground.

Winter squash is also a safe bet for you if you’re looking for carbohydrates that, like potatoes, store well.  I have crazy luck with winter squash, but it’s not due to me, it’s usually due to my compost pile:  it’s from here I tend to harvest a good portion of my seedlings!!  Squash in general are nutrient pigs.  If you can plant them IN compost, they’re more than happy.  Consider well the signs of bugs but other than that, they’re fairly hardy and prolific if you have the space for them.

And then there’s beets.  Not everyone loves them, but as far as sugar goes…we do make sugar out of certain varieties of them.  Look to their sibling chard for an easily grown shot of greenery, too.

Carrots are another high-calorie root crop.  I succession plant them four times a year so that I always have them; I plant the larger storage varieties to harvest in my greenhouses in the winter.

Tomatoes.  You’re all growing tomatoes, right?  Canning them is a safe bet for long-term storage.  You can also dehydrate them, especially the small varieties.

So yeah.  Throw in dried corn, beans, and a variety of green leafies, and you’ve got a fairly well-rounded diet out in the garden.  Add a fruit tree or three, and bingo! lots of carbohydrates, home-grown!

Late fall and winter is the time of year when many CSA subscribers groan with disappointment when opening up their box shares:  what, kale AGAIN?  what am I supposed to do with all this kale?

Fear not.  I have a salad that you might like to try, oh you-with-too-much-kale.  It is eaten quite greedily and regularly by all members of the household, but my daughter in particular is terribly fond of it.  (Imagine that:  a child who asks for a raw kale salad in her lunchbox!)  And, bonus:  it’s a fun salad for a child to (help) make, too.

ZESTY RAW KALE SALAD (vegan as noted, see variations below)

• Take a good handful of kale leaves:  we prefer lacinato (also known as black (cavolo nero) or dinosaur kale), but red, white or Russian kale works too; I haven’t tried it with a Vates (scotch, crinkled) but if that’s what you’ve got then by all means use it.  Wash then stack the leaves (including stems if they’re not too tough) together like a stack of cards, and, if they are really wide, roll them together.  Julienne by cutting them the short way into fine match-sized strips; if the strips are over an inch long, cut them again.  Place the kale in a large, good-looking bowl.
• Toast in a dry skillet:  a good cup or two of fresh breadcrumbs.  The crumbs should be toothsome and not on their way back to being flour, so…avoid the food processor and mince the bread with a knife. Let cool.
• Pound to a paste in a mortar:  as much garlic as you can tolerate (for us, five big cloves) with sea salt and pepper to taste.  This is a fine task for a small person.  Add the juice and zest of half a lemon, or more, and a good glug of olive oil; mix well.
• Pour the garlic mix over the kale and toss well, then toss in the breadcrumbs.  Adjust seasonings, lemon, to taste.  This salad should be good and garlicky, enough to scare off any vampire!

It gets better as time progresses, too, so…you can macerate the chopped kale with the garlic dressing a day ahead of time and then toss in the toasted breadcrumbs right before serving.

Variations: Toast sunflower seeds or chopped walnuts right along with the breadcrumbs.  Add red pepper flakes to the garlic mix.  Add as much hard grated cheese as you would like; pecorino has a nice salty bite to it.   Feta is great crumbled on top, too.  If it’s really too zesty for you, then tame your serving with a tablespoon or two of plain yogurt or sour cream and mix well.

Beans.  Versatile thing, beans.  I grow a lot of them, both in variety and quantity.   We usually put away about 20-30 pounds of dried beans a year, and eat the green ones fresh as they come in.  And shell beans still remain my favorite thing out of the garden.  It’s fair to say I am crazy about beans.

For all I grow, there are others I do not:  lentils remain the prime example of  pantry staples NOT from my gardens.  Chickpeas too.  Everything else, though:  we eat about one dinner a week where beans are the primary part of the meal.  Chili, baked, burgers, falafel, and soupsoupsoup!  Warm lentils on cold salad, potted beans and chicken (rillettes, basically) on toast.  Pasta e fagioli.  We loves our beans.

Beans and more beans.  Might as well make a couple of pots of them.

But it’s only once during winter I make the dish that is the Queen of Beans.  And I made it this weekend for friends.

Cassoulet. This one humble bean dish (for that is what it is:  a dish of beans) has, etymologically at least, spawned the equally humble casserole, which, at least for us Americans, leaves a bit of a nostalgic tang in our mouths.  Yes, indeed:  the hot dish of Minnesota/the Dakotas and parts of Wisconsin and the casserole of all other points south have this one singular bean dish to thank for spawning the cream-of-mushroom, potato-chip-topped “casseroles” served on many dinner tables, church basement events, and potlucks.  Can I say there’s hardly anything left to compare these two dishes other than their names?  It’s true.  One is a stew, one is a baked item.  Both, though, find their origin in inexpensive, humble ingredients.  You’ll probably not find a recipe, say, for truffle casserole.

I am incorrect in calling it “one singular bean dish.”  Wars I am sure have been fought over less than the true recipe for cassoulet.  Let us just say that the ancient southwestern French dish of this name is a bean stew baked in a cassole, which is a conical ceramic bowl with a base half the diameter of its rim, and a height that is about three quarters of its rim.  (Does that description make sense?  I will simply say it’s baked in a very pretty bowl that gives it a lot of surface area to give it a nice, crisp, crumbly top.)  It is a bean dish that is normally cooked with preserved and fresh meats (typically, but again, not always, duck confit and simple fresh pork sausage).  The beans however are a constant:  they’re a very large white haricot bean called the tarbais.  I am trying to find a source in the US:  anyone?

If you’ve read me long enough or if you know me personally, you’ll know I am a cheapskate who’s prone to going to extreme lengths to make things herself.  And making this wasn’t hard, just slightly time-consuming.  I used my own goose, beans, spices and veg.  I found local pork and pork sausage.  In other words, it was peasant in spirit, as I was the land peasant who grew the goods, and my friend the potter threw the cassole.

And leftover cassoulet?  What leftover cassoulet?

Sunday night came and went without me having thought about my weekly Monday morning blog post.

It is not that I don’t think I am doing nothing blog-worthy:  quite to the contrary, my life has been chock full of topics. It has just been such that photographing them has been getting in the way.  (Photos of the child’s piano recital this weekend?  Check.  Farm/blog stuff of things like mucking out a barn?  Uncheck.)

I will leave you with a mental image instead today.  My brother came to stay this weekend and he and I sat grinning rather foolishly at each other across the table on Friday night.  The reason for our grins?  The meal we were eating.

Two weeks prior, he had come up to help with generalized farm tasks.  He doesn’t mind the mundane nature of shelling beans or corn, thankfully; I put him on dent corn detail.  You twist the dried kernels from the cob into a bowl, then you toss the kernels into the breezy air and catch them back in the bowl.  This separates the nasty bits from the kernels themselves.  It’s fun, at least for a while.

So, Friday night, I took a couple of scoops of that cleaned corn and ground it, then cooked it (polenta if you’re fancy, cornmeal mush if you’re not) and added fresh chevre at the table; we topped it with some mushrooms in broth (chanterelles and chicken-of-the-woods, sauteed with shallots and finished with kombucha vinegar; magnifique) with a steaming bowl of cooked greens on one side, a large bowl salad on the other…it was good.  Great, even.  And simple, hand-made fare.

I got a request for what I thought was a throw-away bean dish from my daughter Thursday night.  “You really need to make that shell bean toast thing again,” she said.

Can I just call this the Lazy Gardener’s Redemption Dish?  I take Deborah Madison as a cue here:  there’s a similar dish in one of her books that is quite divine.  But considering how I do know that not all of us can keep up with picking our green beans, this is a dinner that takes advantage of your distraction.  It takes a while to make, and, unlike most of my meals, comes fully plated (a la a restaurant, completely unlike the normal family-style serve-your-own dinners that I make, which is probably why my daughter liked it:  it is special somehow).

This is what you will need:

Shell beans.  Onions, garlic, dried herbs of choice; chives, fresh herbs of choice, especially parsley.  Vinegar or wine.  Bacon, or not.  Big thick cuts of bread, old (good) bread works well.  I assume you have olive oil in your house, as well as salt and pepper.  Butter.  And an hour to an hour and a half of your time, depending on both how dried-out the beans are and whatever else you’ve got going on.

Take about 3/4 of a cup of shelled green beans per person.  What are shell beans?  They’re the beans that are too overgrown to be green (mange-tout) beans but not dry enough to be dried beans.  You typically can see the beans telegraphing through their shells at this stage but the shells aren’t so dry they rattle like bones…hopefully that gives you a picture.  And because they’re in this in-between stage, the time it takes to cook them falls somewhere between dried beans and fresh ones:  your time will vary accordingly! While you’re shelling them (which does take a while), make up your mind if you’re doing a vegetarian dinner or a meaty one.

Hopefully you are chatting with someone while cooking, and enjoying a post-work glass of wine.

If meaty, then dice some bacon (“some” being relative:  I use ends, which are something I can pick up for free from the boutique local butcher:  they don’t fit in the cutter and are therefore worthless; otherwise, it’s about 2 pieces per person.  Dice with a pair of kitchen shears, it’s fastest, easiest to clean) and brown, reserving the grease.  If veg, sweat a diced onion with some dried herbs in a good glug of olive oil.   If you’re doing veg, then spend some time slicing and dicing up a good slice or two of that lovely bread you are going to use:  you will need to make some GOOD bread crumbs for this dish to toss on top.  Saute the crumbs in hot olive oil and throw two diced cloves in at the very last minute; remove, salt to taste.

Remove and dry the bacon and cook the onion in that lovely grease OR progress to the next step if veg:  you’re going to put the beans in the oil/onion, and add a whole bunch of minced garlic.  My family LIKES garlic so for us that means half a head or more.  Saute for a couple of minutes then put the same 3/4 cup of broth or water in per serving of beans, or to barely cover.  Cover, simmer, and taste:  add salt and pepper and more herbs as you think it needs it.  Add a good glug of vinegar to the beans after they’ve cooked for about 10 minutes.  For me, that means a shy tablespoon per serving if I am using my own cider vinegar; it means a half teaspoon per serving if I am using Balsamic or white wine vinegar.  Taste again after the vinegar’s  foamed up and cooked down.  Tasty broth?  Good.  Keep cooking the beans until they’re al dente, not too mushy.  You want to serve them sloppy:  they should be standing half-deep or more in their broth, so add more liquid as required.  If  you’re doing veg, add a good pat of butter in at the last minute.

Toast or cut up and then butter that bread.  Set two slices per person (one if it is a monster loaf) and scoop out a plentiful helping per slice, topping with minced chives and parsley, maybe some hot pepper flakes or a twist or two of the grinder, then either crumbled bacon or those garlicky toasted bread crumbs.

This is a humble meal, but a tasty one.  I usually serve it with a big salad, and finish with some simple sliced fresh fruit, some tea or an apertif.  It’s good to gesticulate a lot while telling stories over this meal.  I sure do.  Discussing or, better, solving world problems also helps.  Or, you can do chicken jokes:  this works for our six-year-old.

Dent corn, she sure do grow tall:  the girl is 4′-2″…these now-tasseling stalks are easily three times her height.

But the calico and blues top out at 5′ or so.

This time of year, I think having something like A.D.D. or O.C.D. is actually helpful.

I have a dear friend who’s a shrink…a good friend to have, incidentally, much like friends who make their own food or like to repair cars or computer glitches.   Our discussions of certain-things-wrong-with-brains include many “disorders” that actually serve some purpose.  And it’s at this time of the year when I have exactly eight food-processing functions going on in the kitchen right now that I think having a piece of crazy might be helpful.  (I haven’t held up a mirror to myself lately so maybe I am already a bit nuts, and it’s already working.)

Looking for another five-pound weight to throw down on top of the parmesan cheese I am pressing, I realize the half-gallon jar of fermenting beets, sitting nobly off by itself, would do the job.  So on it goes, fitting snugly into the press, and lo, those other weights set nicely on its top.

Funky smells, sticky floors, bubbling pots, a full counter of canned jars and a sink full of drying dishes:  It’s August all right.  Every morning and evening is taken up, somehow, with some form of food preparation.  There’s other preparation that is happening daily too:  the freezer birds (turkey and chicken) need twice daily care, the egg birds need love, the goat needs milking, the weeds need pulling…and then there’s the harvests.  It’s a bit maddening.

For those of you who think I somehow squeeze more in my days than most:  I don’t quite know if I do.  I know I don’t sit down much except during working hours!   And I do go to bed really early (mainly to read) wherein I am in bed by 9:00, then up by 6.

Boundless energy?  I doubt it.  Just a serious seasonal case of put-it-away-for-later-itis!

Breakfast:  5 types of potatoes and blue and white eggs

Retrieving some weeny-looking potatoes from the depths of the chilly root cellar this morning, it occurred to me how few of my spuds were grocery store- or Martha Stewart-perfect.  I usually have to peel off a spot or two from the smaller ones before eating them.  This is not terribly unusual:  our clay soils are “heavy” and not the best for potatoes.  The very same potatoes were grown in the sandy soils of the school’s garden and they achieved monster, spot-free proportions…it made me momentarily wistful for a looser growing medium.  Momentarily, that is.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere.  Not all you grow looks perfect.  This is beyond okay:  the taste is reason enough to do it.  Taste, and a small smirk of satisfaction.

The school’s potatoes went mushy and sprouty at about twice the rate as the home-grown ones did:  a lesson learned for the children (eat them quickly) and a lesson learned for me (stop whining about your clay).