Category: Food

Two-course breakfasts?

The French conceive of breakfasts in two categories — sweet and salty. I suppose we Americans do, too, though I don’t recall anyone ever asking, “Would you prefer a sweet breakfast or a salty breakfast?”

Usually we choose. But this morning the cool, gray weather — and the devil — led me to do both. The three-day-old sourdough bread called out for pain perdu. And the hens are laying so many eggs that I can be as lavish with eggs as I want and still have lots of home-laid organic eggs to give away (or to trade for things like the apples and the local greenhouse tomatoes that I traded for yesterday).

It also was an excuse to try out the strawberry syrup that I bought last month. It’s made by Fogwood Farms, which is located one county eastward in Rockingham County. It’s sold in the storefront operated by our county arts council in Danbury. The storefront sells local artwork and handmade items. It’s also a coffee shop and performance space. If you live in this area, look to the opposite side of the street when you pass the old courthouse in Danbury.

Grilled tomatoes, by the way, are a winter standby. The gas grill is on the deck and just a few steps from the kitchen, and I use it all the time. I’m saving the local tomatoes that I got yesterday to use raw (except for the green ones, which probably will end up in a curry). The tomato in the photo came from Whole Foods. The quality of winter tomatoes, I think, has improved. Of course winter tomatoes are never good enough for sandwiches, but they’ll usually do for salads. And they roast very well into a nice breakfast vegetable.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I couldn’t eat all this. But the chickens got the leftovers.

Foo yung to the rescue

I hadn’t made egg foo yung in many years. In fact, I hadn’t even thought about it in many years. I recall that, thirty years ago before I moved to San Francisco, egg foo yung was a popular item in Chinese restaurants in the South. And yet I don’t recall ever seeing it on menus in San Francisco, where the Chinese cookery is much more authentic.

In any case, I am covered up with eggs (each hen has been laying every day), and I can’t figure out what to do with them all. It seems as though half of my driving these days is taking eggs to friends. This afternoon, foo yung popped into my head like a vision, and I was so enthusiastic that I immediately went down to the kitchen and made myself an early supper.

No Chinese vegetables? No problem. I used shredded cabbage, onion, and thinly sliced celery.

It’s the sauce that makes the foo yung. Without the sauce, you’re just eating an omelet in which the cook forgot the cheese. The sauce needs as much zing as you can get into it. I used vegetable bouillon in the liquid in addition to the soy sauce. A teensy touch of sugar and vinegar gives it a slight sweet and sour spin. Garlic powder helps, along with lots of pepper. Cook it well. Make it foam.

By the way, someone recently told me the price of eggs at Walmart these days. If I’m not mistaken, it was something absurdly cheap like 46 cents a dozen. How can that be? Is it that they’re importing eggs from China now? What scares me about egg prices that low is what the chickens are fed and what miserable lives they must lead. In the best of all possible worlds, the animals that help provide us with food would live behind our houses. And they would have names.

Domesticated muscadines

From my years as a young’un, I have clear memories of picking strawberries by the gallon. Mama made strawberry preserves. Mama also made grape jelly, but for some reason I don’t have recollections of picking grapes wholesale for the kitchen. Wild muscadines, though, grew in lots of places at the edges of the woods, and I have climbed trees and foraged for them often enough. I rarely see wild muscadines anymore, but lots of people cultivate them.

I have never made grape jelly, maybe because I’ve never had enough grapes, and grape jelly isn’t my favorite. So what do you do when you have nice mess of grapes but not enough to preserve them? Answer: You eat them raw.

Muscadines are seedy. The only way I know to seed them is to squeeze them until the skin bursts. Unfortunately, most of the pulp comes out with the seeds. The skins are delicious, and no doubt the healthful qualities of grapes are where the color is — in the skins. If you then put the pulp in some cheesecloth and squeeze, you’ll get some juice. Lacking any method of squeezing the pulp really hard, too much of the juice is wasted.

Still, it was a nice breakfast.


The above grapes produced only a shot of juice.

Eggplant bacon?


A homegrown organic eggplant

Two days ago, a friend sent me a Facebook video on making vegan bacon from eggplant. The next day, when I took a dozen surplus eggs to friends (among the few superb gardeners in the county who can outgarden the abbey when Ken is in residence) they gave me eggplants, green peppers, and fresh-picked native muscadine grapes. I took the eggplant coincidence as a hint that, now that the weather is cooler, it’s time to get back to experimenting in the kitchen.

Eggplant bacon seems to be a vegan staple. My version of it was very tasty — smoky and nicely seasoned — but I just couldn’t get it crisp. If you’d like to try, here’s a recipe.

For this recipe, I got out the kitchen implement that I despise and fear the most — the mandolin. But, much as I hate the mandolin, it did an excellent job of making the 1/8-inch slices of eggplant. The seasoning and marinating are a snap. Baking the eggplant is no big deal. But even though I baked the eggplant 15 minutes longer than the recipe requested, the bacon was still flabby. Still, it was tasty enough that I may try it again. Next time, I’ll probably extend the drying part at 225 degrees. Then I’ll spray on some olive oil, turn up the heat in the oven, and make it sizzle. Another option might be taking the bacon to the flabby stage in the oven, then finishing it off in a skillet with some oil.

This is a short post, so I’ll digress into a lifestyle question. One of the cool things about rural agricultural counties like Stokes County is that — though most people long ago gave up gardening — some people still do it. As I’ve mentioned before in previous posts, you want to get to know the agricultural extension folks in your county. The gardener who gave me the eggplant is retired from the agricultural extension service. Once you’ve built a network of gardeners, people trade or give away their surpluses. I remember how it was when I was a child. We’d give people strawberries. They might bring us corn. It’s a nice way to live.

Now if I could only locate some wild abandoned apples to trade for some organic eggs.


Ready for the dreaded mandolin


Marinating


Ready for the oven


A vegan supper: Tofu scramble, eggplant bacon, and sourdough toast. The chardonnay is off-camera.

The kraken vine

Last year, a friend sent me a gift from his garden. He called it a squash, I called it a little pumpkin. Save the seeds, he said. Plant in early summer, he said, feed it well, give it lots of room, and it will become a kraken plant. The vine will spread like kudzu, and it will eat you alive if you don’t watch out, he said. They’re still blooming! The photo is of two baby kraken with a teacup for scale.

These little things are outrageously magical. They mature just before Hallowe’en. They’re probably winter squash. Like winter squash, they like to be cured, and they keep for ages. But in a pie they taste just like pumpkin.

Next year, I’d like to have a lot more of these things and do a better job of cultivating them. A good crop of them probably would last for most of the winter.

Update: The friend who sent me my first little pumpkin identifies these as “Long Island cheese pumpkins.” Here’s a link to some history. They’re an old variety, rescued by an heirloom seed project in the 1970s. He bought his first one at a farmer’s market, he says. Nothing could be easier than saving pumpkin seeds, by the way.

Wintertime table lighting


W.T. Kirkman No. 1 “Little Champ” oil lanterns

For many years, I have been weird about how the table is lit for supper. Electric light is not allowed. It’s not just an affectation for when there is company. It’s an everyday thing, even when I’m having supper alone. During the summer months, supper is over well before dark. But as the days get shorter, it was time to rethink table lighting yet again.

For years, my solution was ordinary tapers of the type that can be bought just about anywhere. But they’re too small. They don’t last long enough. And I don’t much like tapered candles. A year ago, I ordered a box of church candles. They’re very expensive, but they’re great candles. They’re 50 percent beeswax with a nice, straight, ecclesiastical shape. They’re 7/8 inch in diameter and 12 inches long. One box of 24 candles lasted all winter. But the price rose from $50 per box for the first box I ordered to $89 per box now. That’s just too much. All candles gutter and sometimes make a mess. Removing the drippings from the candleholders and replacing spent candles is an unpleasant chore.

My next idea was to try the little blown-glass oil candles made by Firefly. I thought about it for a long time before I ordered a pair, for safety reasons. Flammable liquid inside a glass vessel with a wick is the very definition of Molotov cocktail. What if one of them hit the floor and shattered? But eventually I ordered a pair and tried them out. I hated them. They produce a tiny little dot of light. I should have realized that before I bought them, because the wick is tiny. They are useless, except perhaps as votives, and I’m not a very votive person.

My next idea was an oil lamp, or chamber lamp, of the type that was very common in the days before electrification. They burn kerosene, and they’re easy to find today, both new and antique. But they, too, are usually made of glass. I made a new rule for myself: No glass oil lamps.

Then I admired the yacht lamps and miner’s lamps made of brass, often plated with stainless steel. But they are extremely expensive, and they’re often poorly reviewed as not being well-made enough to be worth the cost.

So then, the last option was oil lanterns.

Obviously there is still a thriving market for oil lanterns. Many people buy them, I believe, as backup lighting for power failures, which makes a lot of sense. They’re made of metal, and the larger lanterns have nice big wicks that are 1 inch wide. As I read reviews of lanterns on Amazon, I finally settled on lanterns made by W.T. Kirkman. Kirkman lanterns get the best reviews and were said to be better made. I ordered two of the Kirkman lanterns from Amazon. Here’s a link to the Kirkman web site. Kirkman sells several models and options in its lanterns, but not all of those models and options are available on Amazon.

I settled on the No. 1 “Little Champ” cold blast lantern. It’s 12 inches high with a 5/8-inch wick. So what does “cold blast” mean? It has to do with how the flame gets its air for combustion. It’s a clever bit of 19th Century technology. In a cold blast lantern, the air is taken in at the top of the lantern and travels down through the side tubes. This is said to give a whiter, brighter flame. Also, cold blast lanterns are said to self-extinguish if tipped over. I’m not going to try that out, but I’m glad to hear it.

The lanterns burn clean and aren’t affected by drafts or blasts of air. Once they’re lit and glowing, they look more domestic and less like something you’d see in a barn. They’re brighter than candles. And they give off a certain warmth (1,100 or 1,400 BTU per hour depending on the model) which should be very welcome in the wintertime.

Kirkman also makes a larger lantern, 15 inches tall with a 1-inch wick. I might just get myself one of those for outdoor use. All the lanterns are galvanized steel. Options include a black enamel finish, round shades that reflect the light downward, and globes in several colors of glass including red, yellow, green, blue, and frosted. Lantern technology is alive and well! You also can buy kits to electrify the lanterns, including with LED bulbs. But why would you want to do that?

When I was a young’un, my grandparents had an oil lantern that they had had since the days before rural electrification. I used to love to play with it. Though I suppose it’s a bit eccentric to have oil lanterns on the supper table, I’m pretty sure that will be my method hereafter. I’ll save the pricey church candles for special occasions.

My grandparents also always kept a 5-gallon tank of kerosene. These oil lanterns will, of course, burn kerosene. But these days most people use the newer lamp oils, which burn cleaner, make less odor, and are said to be safer.


A box of church candles

The new girls come on line

The easiest time of year to acquire chickens — at least in these parts — comes in the weeks before Easter. That’s when the local mills and Tractor Supply have chicks for sale. Spring chickens can be counted on to start laying in August. The new girls are right on time — maybe even a little early.

The abbey’s chickens are always beautiful and healthy, but 2017 has been a special year, I think. The rain and cooler weather have made for excellent pasturing and foraging. The chickens here have three fenced areas. During the day, when it’s hot, they have full shade in the woods. They love to spend mornings and evenings in the orchard. And when there are no young plants to damage, they have full run of the garden.

The first eggs are slightly smaller than the eggs of the mature chickens, about 52 grams vs. 62 grams. All the girls are laying superb eggs with good shells and golden yolks from all the grass and clover.

Not quite canary

For the past few months, I’ve been rereading Winston Graham’s Poldark novels. I’m now on book 8. I would rate Winston Graham as one of the best novelists of the 20th Century, but that’s a post for another day. This post is about wine — dessert wine in particular.

In the Poldark novels, the poor folk drink gin. Everybody drinks ale. The gentry drink wine. The menfolk drink brandy. The gentry also drink a lot of dessert wines, and not necessarily with dessert — port (Demelza’s favorite drink), and canary.

If I ever knew what canary is, I had forgotten, and I had to look it up. It’s a sweet white (or yellow) wine. It was popular in Elizabethan England and on into the 18th Century. The wine was imported from the Canary Islands, and presumably that’s how it got its name. I would like to think, though, that the wine was a canary yellow. That’s how I visualize it, when they drink it in the novels.

I understand that winemakers in the Canary Islands are trying to have a comeback. But if anything resembling 18th Century canary wine is available today, I wouldn’t know where to get it. But there is sweet yellow dessert wine that is pretty hard to find and that also deserves a comeback — sauternes, which is made in Bordeaux.

I was suprised to see Trader Joe’s selling little bottles of 2011 sauternes. It wasn’t cheap, but the canary color was irresistible.

Some Googling showed that wine reviewers have mentioned sauternes occasionally in the past few years. One such reviewer disparaged the idea of drinking sweet wines with desserts — too much sweet, he said. Rather, he suggested having sauternes with lobster. I’m not likely to be making any lobster dishes any time soon. Maybe banana pudding?

This sauternes is only 13 percent alcohol. It would seem the fermentation is stopped early, when there is still lots of sugar in the wine. As I understand it, the grapes for sauternes are left on the vine for a while, partly to shrivel and dry (making a very concentrated juice) and partly so that bacteria specific to sauternes can grow in the grapes.

Also from Googling, I learned that someone in Scotland makes a scotch whiskey that is aged in sauternes casks. I have to try that.

Why doesn’t it mold?


Month-old commercial bread — no sign of mold

A month ago I bought a loaf of commercial bread for my annual ritual of the year’s first garden-tomato sandwich. Today I found the leftover bread on top of the refrigerator. There is not the slightest sign of mold. The bread label boasts that the bread contains no preservatives — at least no “artificial” preservatives. What is going on?

I found that, if I Googled for “Why doesn’t bread mold?” there were a lot of conflicting and confusing answers. I changed Google’s search parameters to show links less than a year old, thinking that there must surely be something new involved, and then the answers started looking more plausible.

The bread contains an ingredient called “cultured wheat flour.” That, I believe, is the magic ingredient.

It’s not clear how long “cultured wheat flour” has been in use. I suspect that it’s for less than 10 years. Clearly it is effective at preventing bread from molding. It is made from wheat flour that has been fermented with a bacterium called Propionibacterium freudenreichii. According to an article at BakerPedia, this bacterium is found in dairy foods including Swiss cheese, so it has been around forever and can be considered safe. According to the article, it is as effective as chemical preservatives at inhibiting mold. “As a result,” said the article, “it is growing in popularity in all natural and organic products.”

This bread is from a baking company called “Nature’s Own,” which is owned by Flower’s Foods. This bread is sold not only at my nearest Whole Foods in Winston-Salem, it’s also sold into the very bottom of the market — Dollar General stores. Apparently Whole Foods is satisfied that the bread passes muster.

The calcium-containing ingredients near the end of the list, by the way, are leavening agents that fizz when combined and are probably nothing to get terribly excited about.

The question I was trying to answer was whether it would be safe to give the leftover bread to the chickens. I think that the answer is yes. It’s scary, actually, to eat a food that resists being biodegraded. But fermentation is a natural process that does exactly that, and humans have taken advantage of fermentation as a way of preserving food for thousands of years.

Dissenting views? Please comment…

Some speculations on Whole Foods


Whole Foods Winston-Salem, before the lunch rush

It’s interesting how much buzz there has been about Amazon buying Whole Foods. Even people who’ve hardly ever been inside a Whole Foods and who don’t use Amazon (people like my brother) have been talking about it. Everyone seems to suspect that this transaction may be the leading edge of big changes in how all of us shop.

At the Winston-Salem Whole Foods earlier this week, I said to the checkout guy, “What do y’all think of your new owners?”

I got a somewhat testy response that I interpreted to mean that Whole Foods employees have gotten tired of answering questions. No doubt many of the questions are hostile. He responded as though I had asked what’s going to change. Apparently that’s the question most people are asking. Anyway, his testy response was that he has no idea what it all means, that he’s not on the board, doesn’t get to sit in on the meetings, and has no idea what it’s all about. Ouch. Perhaps he also was expressing a bit of nervousness. After all, some of the stories that have been written about Amazon buying Whole Foods have speculated that checkout people will soon be replaced by machines. Note to Amazon PR types who came across this through Google Alerts: You need to communicate with Whole Foods employees and reassure them, if you can. They may be freaking out.

I’ve read a good bit of the commentary on this. Everybody is speculating. The liberal media — for example Salon, or Vox — have a strong dislike for Amazon and seem to assume that Amazon will roboticize Whole Foods stores and squeeze small organic farmers into bankruptcy, to the benefit of Big Organic.

I fear they may be right on the matter of the small organic farmers who farm with a conscience, as opposed to Big Organic, which farms with the intent of taking advantage of a market in which they can get away with charging a lot more for what they sell. On the other hand, if big players can do truly good sustainable farming and grow beautiful and exuberant produce (rather than pale and inferior stuff which just happens to have an organic sticker on it), then how much of a bad thing is that? That’s all about how organic farmers are monitored and the standards they are held to. Amazon will need to be very careful about buying only from honest, well-monitored organic operations. Luckily, Amazon has the resources to do that. They’d better get it right.

However, as for roboticizing Whole Foods stores, I just don’t think that is going to happen. Certainly Amazon has roboticized its warehouses and shipping operations. But that’s all out of sight of the customer. It’s different with Whole Foods. Amazon’s PR people will make it clear to Amazon’s management (though I feel sure that Amazon’s management already gets it) that Whole Foods will now become the brick-and-mortar public face of Amazon and that they’d better make it pretty.

If Amazon wanted impersonal brick-and-mortar operations that lend themselves to mechanization and roboticization, then they’d be competing with low-end stores such as Aldi. Why buy a top-of-the-market operation like Whole Foods just to turn it into Aldi? That would be destroying a large chunk of Whole Foods’ value, the value for which Amazon paid a lot of good money.

One of the wisest commentaries I’ve read suggests that what Amazon wants is a network of delivery centers. Whole Foods has 431 stores in upscale locations. You order online whatever you usually order from Amazon (probably not groceries). And then, the next day, or maybe even later the same day, you drive to your local Whole Foods and pick up your order. While you’re at Whole Foods, you have some ice cream, or some coffee, or a pizza, or lunch. And maybe you even shop for groceries. Whole Foods stores actually devote a considerable percentage of their floor space to food, drink, and reasonably pleasant places to sit down for a while, WIFI included. Bottom line: Amazon has new options for lower-cost and quicker delivery, plus they draw a whole bunch of new customers into Whole Foods stores. Would you want all those new Whole Foods customers to have an Aldi experience? Of course not. Whole Foods stores would now be competing with Starbucks, with every retailer at the mall, with the grocery stores, and even with the local Barnes & Noble, if you’re lucky enough to have one. You can get anything you want there, and you can still paw the lettuce and sniff the canteloupes before you buy them.

It’s devilishly clever.

Would I go there? You darn right I would, if Whole Foods will spiff up and enlarge its stores, keep them teeming with cheerful and contented employees, and sell only the best of what America’s — and here I emphasize America’s — organic farmers can produce. If the new customers that came over from Costco still want a case of canned green beans or half a ton of Pepsi, then sell it to them through the warehouse delivery system, not in the holy space of the Whole Foods store. And since the Pepsi-buyers will be Trump voters who have the manners of Walmart shoppers, please design your stores so that we old Whole Foods customers can avoid the Republicans (and they us). This may be your biggest problem, Amazon. Whole Foods customers and Walmart customers don’t mix. It’s a culture war, you know.

Whole Foods has a bad habit that I’d like to see them quit. I complain about it regularly, both on the corporate web site and at the customer service desk at my nearest store. We all should complain. That’s to stop importing so much stuff. I abhor, for example, the garlic imported from South America. It may be labeled as organic, but it’s also inferior garlic — badly cured, blemished, sometimes moldy. I’d much rather buy healthy-looking garlic from Gilroy, California, that isn’t organic, if it’s obviously better garlic (as it certainly would be if it came from Gilroy).

Maybe my view of what’s up with Amazon and Whole Foods is skewed by the fact that those two companies already get most of the money I spend. If they keep their standards up and make it fun and easy, then they’ll get 96 percent of what I spend. The rest of my spending would go to the local hardware store and to the Tractor Supply where I buy organic chicken feed. One thing that is not efficient at present for Amazon Prime are heavy items that are expensive to ship — 40 pound bags of chicken feed, for example, or even four-pound bags of cat food. Local pickup would change the economics of Amazon Prime.

Ultimately, I wonder if there isn’t something sustainable in a one-stop supply line. All those thousands of retail stores and big box stores (and the driving to and fro) suck up a huge amount of overhead and energy — and time. As long as the delivery system is efficient and sustainable (and involves far fewer cardboard boxes — the bane of Amazon Prime) then maybe it wouldn’t be an all-bad example of creative destruction.

I am cautiously optimistic.