Category: Food

Countdown to summer: 4, 3, 2, 1

The first pesto of the season may not be as exciting as the first tomato sandwich. But it’s pretty exciting.

It would have been a crime to apply heat to a perfect little squash that was growing in a cool rain only minutes ago. So I et it raw.

Speaking of summer, do we tolerate summer better as we get older? I would find it difficult to live without air conditioning here in the South. But I set the thermostat for 83 (though I make it a little cooler at night). It’s 93 that I can’t handle. Still, working in the garden in the heat of summer is hard work. My only hope for keeping a respectable garden now that Ken has headed back to Scotland is to get the gardening done early in the morning.

April 20


The photo is from 7:50 p.m. Supper is over, and the kitchen has been tidied up after the wreckage of a wok supper.

I am so lucky not to be cooking for one — or gardening or orcharding for one — during this quarantine. There is a certain reluctance, as suppertime approaches, for those who are not in the kitchen to wander into the kitchen and ask, “What’s for supper?” A better practice, I think, is to pretend you’re a bistro and put out a sign.

Spring continues to slowly unfold in the cool weather. And what a spring it is.


The spiderwort just started blooming.


First rosebud!

Spring mustard

 


Mustard greens, just washed through three waters

The neighbors’ garden is a couple of weeks ahead of the abbey’s garden. They’ve got a big mustard crop, and they invited us to come pick some. That meant that last night’s supper was pinto beans, mustard greens, corn bread, and deviled eggs.

This sharing from the garden is the old-fashioned way, and the old-fashioned way is making a comeback here on our little dirt road. There’s a saying, “A third for the neighbors, a third for the critters, and a third for you.” We’d be lucky here to hold the critters to their allocated third, especially in the orchard.

Cinnamon rolls

I wish I could say that I made these cinnamon rolls, but I didn’t. I had my share of them, though. It is my good fortune that, by pure accident, I’m not sheltering in place as a household of one, plus one cat. There are travelers sheltering here, too, and do they ever have skills.

Quorn Stroganoff

I had not thought of Stroganoff in years. If ever I had even made beef Stroganoff, I don’t remember it. But, a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times mentioned beef Stroganoff in its beautiful weekly column, “What to Cook This Week.” Once you get Stroganoff in your head, you might as well give up. You’re going to make some.

I’ve made it twice since the New York Times piece. I used the faux ground beef version of Quorn. Much of the appeal is the egg noodles. I had not had egg noodles in years. If I’ve ever even bought egg noodles, I don’t recall it. I’ve probably acquired a new bad habit. Oh well. Too bad.

You could use any good recipe for beef Stoganoff or hamburger Stroganoff, but you might need to consider some minor changes. Recipes probably will have you brown the beef first, then set it aside while you cook the mushrooms. Since Quorn doesn’t release any fat, I’d suggest changing the order. First, cook and brown your mushrooms in olive oil. Set them aside. Then gently brown your Quorn in olive oil. Then add your flour and brown that along with the Quorn. Then deglaze the pan with white wine or stock, and put the mushrooms back in. If you didn’t use stock, I suggest adding some Better Than Bouillon to give the gravy more oomph and brownness. At this point you should have browned Quorn and browned mushrooms in a thick gravy. For the final touch, you can use sour cream, crème fraîche, or even heavy cream. I used Greek yoghurt.

Most recipes will call for mustard and Worcestershire sauce. Mustard is probably more authentic. But I found that I prefer a touch of tomato sauce (or tomato paste) instead. The red improves the richness of the brown and adds some umami.

I mentioned beef Stroganoff to some neighbors a few days ago, and, like me, they had not thought of it for years. They made some the next day. Resistance is futile.

It’s the mushrooms and gravy and noodles, really, that make this dish, as far as I’m concerned. You could even double the mushrooms and not go wrong.

The end of the road for all you can eat home cookin’?


Hillbilly Hideway. See below for more.

It’s true everywhere, but here in the American South, our cuisine is (or was) an essential part of our culture and identity. Passing that culture and identity from generation to generation is very important work. But — at least here in the American South — that work is breaking down.

For decades, all-you-can-eat places serving traditional Southern cuisine, served family style, have been a meaningful (if smallish) niche in the eating-out ecology. I remember, as a child, on road trips into the Appalachian Highlands, stopping for supper at the Dan’l Boone Inn at Boone. It’s still there! And it’s still doing it, at $19.95 per person. River Forest Manor, at Belhaven on the North Carolina coast, used to serve family-style meals, but they’ve now gone to a different model that emphasizes the big house, for weddings and such, rather than the food. I could name other places, long gone. Back in the 1960s, there even were places that served all-you-can-eat seafood, including shrimp and oysters, on Fridays.

Here in the middle of nowhere, in Stokes County, North Carolina, we still have Hillbilly Hideaway. It seems they haven’t updated the prices on their web site, but lunch and dinner are now $20 per person.

A few times a year, I have Sunday breakfast with my Republican friends (no kidding!) Jess and Kitty. Here in the middle of nowhere, there aren’t many places to go, so sometimes we go to the Hillbilly Hideaway, which, even though it’s in the same county, is nevertheless 17 miles away. Hillbilly Hideway doesn’t do Sunday breakfast anymore, but they start lunch at 11 o’clock on Sundays, before the church crowd. However, there doesn’t seem to be a church crowd on Sundays at Hillbilly Hideway anymore. Jess, Kitty, and I lingered until almost 1 p.m. last Sunday, but only a few tables were occupied, and the place was quiet. Jess, Kitty and I figure that the high cost of all-you-can-eat these days — $20 — is just too high for a poor county like this. Plus I’m starting to wonder if younger people even care about traditional cooking anymore.

For people my age, traditional Southern home cooking is what we grew up on. The standard for any particular individual might have been a mother, a grandmother, or a favorite aunt. But we all idealized it. It’s what people here still do on holidays, insofar as they remember how.

But the younger generations, I now realize, know far, far less about home cooking. They may not even like it, because they’ve grown up on fast food, frozen food, and home cooking that can be put together in 30 minutes or less. Too many vegetables! It’s related, I think, to why even many country people with lots of land don’t bother with gardens anymore. They don’t like that stuff.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who can get their money’s worth at a $20 all-you-can-eat meal. Jess, Kitty, and I are not among them. I wish Hillbilly Hideaway all the best. I hope they can adapt to changing times.


Fried chicken, ham, hoe cake, and cornbread.


Hillbilly Hideaway vegetables


Potatoes


Pinto beans


Stewed apples


The dessert cart, extra cost

Update: Ten years ago, Huntington, West Virginia, was identified as the most obese city in the nation. Today, Politico reports on how citizen activists improved on that. For fun, nine years ago, Jamie Oliver went to Huntington and found that most children cannot identify basic vegetables.

Beyond Sausage vegan bratwurst


Beyond Sausage bratwurst, sweet and sour Brussels sprouts, and potato salad

Beyond Meat’s bratwurst was on sale at a grocery store in Madison, so I decided to try it.

Was it awesome? Not really. In taste and bite and texture, it was a lot like vegan cold cuts that have been on the market for a long time. Still, it was good, with a nice meaty bite. And, at the right price, it’s a good high-protein meal, with 22 grams of protein and only 190 calories per brat.

It surprises me how quickly these new meat alternatives have become available, even in provincial grocery stores. Most provincial shoppers won’t buy it, which is why it goes on sale. Their thinking is entirely reasonable, I think. Why pay more for pea protein than for animal sausage?

I would like to think that these meat substitutes will be less expensive than meat before long, as they ought to be. Then we’ll be making progress. A day will come, I think — maybe sooner than we expect — when children will be horrified to hear that people used to kill and eat animals.

Fried barley?


Good-bye garden stir fry with fried barley

For the longest time, I had been planning to see if fried barley can compete with fried rice. Yes it can.

The chewy texture of barley makes great fried rice. The grains are sturdy and are not at risk of turning to mush when thrown around in the wok. The grains love a thin coating of sauce, but they don’t drink it up the way rice does. You’ll eat less, because barley takes longer to chew.

The stir fry above contains lots of green peppers and green tomatoes given to me by a neighbor. They had picked the last remaining parts of their garden (which was a lot) before the first freeze. Green tomatoes are brilliant in a stir fry or curry.

Kefir

Kefir-lovers swear that kefir has even more probiotic virtue than yogurt. I have read that kefir culture persists in our digestive systems but that yogurt culture is transient. I have no idea if that is true. But personally I find that I like kefir better. And kefir is easier to make than yogurt.

Yogurt needs to incubate at a bit higher than room temperature. Hence we use yogurt makers to keep the culture warm. Kefir, on the other hand, works its magic at room temperature. You don’t need anything to make kefir other than a culture to start with, some glass jars, a coarse strainer, and some good milk.

Yogurt is easy to find. Kefir is not as common. Store-bought kefir, though you can buy it plain, is usually heavily sweetened and fruit flavored, increasing the calories by at least 50 percent. If you’re new to kefir, it’s something you drink rather than eat with a spoon. Kefir thickens as it cultures. It looks — and tastes — a lot like buttermilk. But if the information one Googles up can be believed, kefir is a more complex colony of bacteria than buttermilk.

I love the taste of plain kefir. It “sparkles” in the mouth like champagne. The freshly fermented flavor gets up your nose. When you drink fresh kefir, you know it’s alive.

To get started with kefir, you need a starter culture, which is called “kefir grains.” Kefir grains look to me like cottage cheese. You can order them from Amazon. It will take a week or so to re-invigorate kefir grains. They survive being mailed, but they don’t like it. After your kefir grains are healthy and happy and you start your kefir routine, you strain the grains from the finished kefir and put the grains into a new batch of fresh milk. I plan to experiment with vegan kefirs made from coconut milk (which I understand works fine) and almond milk, though I believe kefir is healthiest and happiest in cow’s milk or goat’s milk. You can put your kefir culture on hold — for a while — by putting it into the refrigerator. But like all cultures such as sourdough bread cultures, kefir needs to be periodically fed.

Those of you who were health nuts back in the 1970s will remember the nutritionist Adele Davis. In those days, the emphasis was on vitamins and minerals and protein. As a hippy who also had a copy of Jethro Kloss’ Back to Eden, I realized even then that the mystery of good health was more complicated than just vitamins, minerals, and protein. Since then, we’ve learned a great deal more about the importance of our internal flora. I don’t use a lot of milk. Too much milk causes me to gain weight. But I think that a good policy would be, when one drink’s milk, to drink only a cultured milk such as kefir.

Here’s a hat tip to one of this blog’s readers (she knows who she is) who counseled me on getting started with kefir.


Kefir grains

A fresh take on pimento cheese


Pimento cheese made from fresh roasted green peppers, served with my homemade borscht

I was reflecting today on the history of pimento cheese, which, since my earliest childhood, has been a Southern American favorite. It seemed oddly Mediterranean, because nobody around here has ever grown pimiento peppers, nor does anybody can peppers, as far as I know. Luckily, the story of the history of pimento cheese has already been written, and I came across this article from Southern Living: You Will Not Believe the History of Pimento Cheese.

It turns out that my speculation was right. According to the article, it was back in the 1870s that Spain started sending canned red peppers to the United States. America supplied the cheese. Pimento cheese was born.

When I was a young’un, there was often a little glass jar of pimento peppers in my mother’s cabinets for making pimento cheese. If you make it at home (I’m thinking that nobody ever does anymore), the ingredients would be cream cheese, some cheddar, and some mayonnaise. All groceries stores here have it, though, in plastic tubs. If you read the ingredients, you’ll faint, because store-bought pimento cheese is usually made from cheap, artificial ingredients such as “cheese food.”

Last time I was at Trader Joe’s, I bought too much Wisconsin cheddar, and I’ve been hard pressed to use it all. Pimento cheese seemed like a good idea. Cream cheese is not something I normally buy. But Greek yogurt was a good substitute. And I never run out of mayonnaise.

You could use any kind of pepper, red or green, even mildly hot ones, if you like the idea. I roasted a sweet green pepper on the grill. Let it cool, then peel it and chop it. I marinated my green pepper for an hour or so in some of the marinade from a jar of marinated artichoke hearts. Stir the chopped peppers into the grated cheddar, plus the cream cheese (or Greek yogurt) and a dollop of mayonnaise.

Update: A vintage can of tinned pimentos that was for sale on eBay.