Category: Food

---

Oyster soup, more or less Louisiana style. The sandwich is a winter-style BLT — lettuce from the garden, but no tomato.

---

Oysters are magical somehow. They’re also slightly creepy. Picky eater that I was as a kid, it’s surprising that I even liked them. But I did, either batter-fried or in a creamy stew. We had them fairly often, as I recall.

In these parts, in the Appalachian foothills and the North Carolina Piedmont, oysters are harder to find than they used to be. People don’t want to shuck them (or don’t know how). And though they’re available by the pint already shucked, I don’t think many people buy them. Rather, when people in these parts eat oysters, it’s almost always in the restaurants that I call fried fish houses.

A neighbor gave me these oysters. He had bought an entire bushel of fresh oysters. A grocery store at Belews Creek regularly has them shipped in by the lorry load, either from the Chesapeake Bay or Florida. As far as I could tell from looking at the box, these came from Florida. The cost was shockingly low — $30 for the bushel of oysters, shipped on ice overnight. My neighbor said that the store sold the entire lorry load an hour after opening in the morning. Somebody knows what to do with them, especially at that price.

It had been 25 years since I’d shucked oysters. That was on vacation near Point Reyes north of San Francisco, back in my moneymaking days. There are two oyster farms there — the Hog Island Oyster Company, and the Tomales Bay Oyster Company. I still have my oyster knife, unused for those 25 years. Opening oysters is rather dangerous work, though I’m sure it gets safer with practice. Today I wore glasses and heavy gloves.

I had at first planned to make a creamy oyster stew. But I decided instead to make something healthier and a bit lower in calories, inspired by a recipe in the Washington Post for a Louisiana-style oyster soup. I used fresh mustard greens from the garden, tomatoes that I grew and canned, and lots of garlic.

With hundreds of thousands of miles of earth’s coastlines to work with, oysters grow (and are eaten) all over the world, though they are not of the same species or variety. I Googled to see if I could find an oyster cookbook with recipes from all over the world. I could not find such a cookbook. On a trip to Scotland in 2018, I sampled one of Edinburgh’s famous oyster bars. It was interesting, and very pricey. It also was rather city-fied. The world, I think, is waiting for someone to make a global oyster tour and write a cookbook on provincial oyster-eating, worldwide.

The neighbor’s bushel of oysters.

---

Radish sprouts are my new favorite sprouts. They’re also one of the healthiest kinds of sprouts you can eat, very high in antioxidants. They do have a fairly strong flavor, though. Not everyone likes them. If you don’t like radish sprouts raw, they work very nicely in stir-fries. They’re almost as big as mung bean sprouts, and they have nice, pea-shaped leaves that will turn dark green if they get enough light. The radishy flavor works really well in spicy stir-fries.

---

I wish I had started experimenting with winter greens in a cold frame a long time ago. This mustard was planted in early October and is now ready to start picking. I’ve decided to make a little ritual of it, though, and have the first winter mustard on Thanksgiving.

For comparison, I’ve also got some mustard growing outside the cold frame. The mustard inside the cold frame has grown almost twice as fast. Plus, the outside mustard has started to toughen a bit and looks a little shabby and weathered. Next year, I think I’ll expand the winter garden and see what I can do. One very agreeable difference, compared with summer gardening, is that there are no bugs, no briars, and no heat and humidity.

---

My attempts during the spring of this year to get an early garden going under a cold frame were pretty much a total failure. I’m not sure why. But my guess would be that the soil was just too cold for good germination, because spring was unusually cold and dry. Now I’m using the cold frame to try to get winter crop of greens under the cold frame. So far, so good.

Ken sowed the mustard while he was here, after he cleared the summer weeds out of the garden. There’s a bit of lettuce and even some celery seed mixed in. I have no idea how the celery will do, but we figured that it would be a nice experiment. Germination was excellent, and growth has been rapid. When hard freezes arrive, I’ll have to drain the drip irrigation system. But I’ll use the drip for as long as I can.

When the garden fades, sprouting season begins for indoor sprouts. I’m using the LED grow lights that I bought last winter for basil to give the sprouts some extra light.

Speaking of light, it’s a shame that our modern lives give us little reason to be outdoors under the night sky. And, even if we were, light pollution would ruin the effect. Thought it’s a poor substitute for the primeval night sky, my bedroom windows keep me aware of the night sky. Though the projector clock shows the time, I’ve learned to estimate the time by the position of the stars outside the window. In this photo, the bright light on the window frames is the full hunter moon on October 21. The moon is still in the east, left of the windows.

These are all iPhone 12 photos. Though my my big Nikon is a better camera for most purposes, the iPhone makes a very handy camera.

Click here for high resolution version.

---

Poached pear. Click here for high-resolution version.

Though it’s mid-October, it was nice for Ken to be able to have some abbey-grown foods while he was here for a five-day visit — persimmon pudding from persimmons he picked from the wild persimmon trees that grow in the yard, a poached pear from the abbey’s orchard, pesto from basil still growing in the garden, and tomato soup and tomato sauce from tomatoes I grew and canned.

I wish I had known about poached pears a long time ago. I’ve been getting pears from the orchard for several years now, but they’re as hard as a rock. I’ve come to understand fairly late in life that pears as hard as rocks are normal, and that the fix is to poach them. I poached these pears in tawny port, with some spices. I had bought the tawny port by accident and didn’t know what to do with it, because I greatly prefer ruby port. Problem solved.

Persimmon pudding. Click here for high-resolution version.

---

Persimmon season has started. Ken picked (and shook trees) for only a little while this morning and got more than enough for the first persimmon pudding of the year. This is only about a tenth, Ken said, of what we’ll get this year just from the persimmon trees in the yard. We’ll make a video next week on the process of harvesting them, pulping them, and making persimmon pudding.

Ken is on a college speaking tour, by the way, and is here at the abbey for a few days before he returns to Scotland.

---

Tomato bisque from tomatoes I grew and canned

Nature was not kind to everyone this summer. There were terrifying fires in California and Australia, and deadly floods in the United States, Europe, and Asia. But here in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, it was like 1950 again. The temperature here in my woods never exceeded 94F. Heavy rain sometimes washed ruts in the road (which a neighbor quickly repairs with his tractor), but rainfall was good, though the spring was a bit dry and cold. It has been at least eight months since a power outage that lasted more than two seconds. With a little help from the irrigation system, the 2021 garden was great. Not every summer, I’m afraid, will be so nice.

The poplar tree that overhangs the deck seems to have had a growth spurt. All summer long, half the deck was in shade, with a deck umbrella no longer needed. I don’t think I’ve eaten indoors more than four times since early spring.

One of the many remarkable things about this planet is how the seasons change in the temperate zones. This means we get not only changes in the weather, but also changes in what we eat. After months of buying hardly any produce and relying on the garden, the perennial vegetables are back on the menu. By perennial, I mean winter vegetables and the things that can be profitably shipped from one climate zone to another. My twenty jars of canned tomatoes will extend the memory of the 2021 garden for most of the winter. Most of the tomatoes, I think, will go into soups.

Speaking of soups, I have found that the “warming zone” on my glasstop stove is a great place for simmering soups. With the warming zone set to high, my favorite copper pot will hold a soup at about 192F, a very good simmer temperature.

As for the weather, the Atlantic hurricane season is not over. So it’s not too late for nature to knock us around here, a couple of hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.