Category: Food

Sprouting season has arrived

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When the garden is kaput and stuff in the grocery store starts looking like it’s traveled a long way, it’s time to start sprouting. It’s an old hippy skill that I’ve never abandoned, though often I just forget about the possibility of sprouts.

The best place I know to get sprouting seeds is from the Sprout People in San Francisco. What out for their high shipping costs, though. If you order $60 worth of stuff, shipping is free.

And, of course, don’t forget to add lots of garlic to the dressing. With garlic, sprouts, and lots of tangerine and orange juice, you’ll survive the winter just fine.

P.S. I haven’t yet ordered sprouting seeds or sprouting supplies from Amazon, but they seem to have good stuff and good prices, and much of it is available for free shipping with Prime. I still feel a little guilty ordering stuff from Amazon, but, especially when one lives in the sticks, low prices and fast, free shipping are hard to resist.

Real apples, and the sorrows of orcharding

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November apples at Century Farm Orchards

Fatalities in the orchard during the last year include fig trees killed (above ground, at least) by brutally cold weather last winter, and another pear tree lost to the Black Death. Ken also found room for a couple more apple trees. Today I picked up some replacement trees.

I know I’ve harped on this theme before, but happy is the household with an established orchard. Rearing young apple trees is like rearing children in the Dark Ages — lots of them die, plagued with all sorts of pests, hazards, and diseases. The abbey’s orchard is six years old now, and it’s coming along. There was almost no apple yield this year, though, because last winter all the trees got a major pruning. This was probably the most important pruning of the trees’ lives, because it will pretty much determine the shape of the adult apple trees. Pruners say you should prune so that a bird can fly through the tree. That doesn’t leave a lot of buds for producing fruit the following season. But, during the 2015 season, with luck, the abbey should get its first serious apple harvest. That will be the orchard’s seventh year.

One thing I got right: Avoiding low-quality trees from mass-production nurseries, the kind of trees that are sold at box-store garden departments. I had bought a few such trees as replacements, and they just didn’t do well. Almost all the abbey’s trees came from Century Farm Orchards in Caswell County, North Carolina. They specialize in old Southern varieties of apple trees. These trees are very hardy and well-suited to the local climate, though like all young fruit trees they need a lot of care and attention to reach adulthood. Century Farm Orchards is not really a storefront operation. One orders trees early in the year. You get an invoice in October, and you pick up the trees at open house events in November.

Today’s new trees included two mammoth blacktwig apple trees, two kieffer pear trees, a brown turkey fig, and a celeste fig.

Another nice thing about the abbey’s modest-size orchard is that it’s on a fenced slope, nicely turfed, fed on organic fertilizer and lots of chicken droppings. The grass and clover in the orchard are incredibly lush, and of course all that organic nutrition and earthworm activity works down into the soil and benefits the apple trees. We use only natural pesticides. The poor trees pretty much have to fend for themselves, like 9th Century peasant children.

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I picked up two new blacktwig trees today.

Cornish pasties

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I love reading novels set in another time, another place, in which the author describes what the characters are eating. I’ve been reading Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. In it, a monk (seemingly a monk, at least) and a knight are sharing a pasty in the monk’s hermitage deep in the forest. That really stuck in my mind, and I resolved that, when cold weather returned, and after election season was over, I’d make some pasties.

Pasties are an ancient food. They go back to the Middle Ages. Now, I love nouvelle cuisine and California cuisine as much as the next person, but I also love archaic cuisine as much as I love archaic language and archaic settings. Note how the word is pronounced, though. It’s like “pass,” not like “paste.” I haven’t had a pasty since I was in Cornwall many years ago, and I had never made pasties until today.

If you want to make pasties, first I suggest that you Google around and study some recipes. Also, for the technique for crimping the crust, there are some good YouTube videos. Pasties are eaten all over the British Isles, but it is chiefly the Cornish who lay claim to the art of pasty-making today. Cornish pasties generally contain beef (skirt steak). I wanted vegetarian pasties. There are certain ingredients that are optional and certain ingredients that are not optional. Among the non-optional ingredients, in my opinion, are potatoes, rutabagas (which the British call “swedes”), peas, onions, and celery. To today’s pasties I also added a bit of grated cheddar cheese with truffles in it, as well as a little cream.

If you did your Googling, you’ll have found many different recipes for the crust. The crust resembles pie crust, except that the crust should have more “structure” than pie crust. OK. I added an egg. I also wickedly used butter in the pie crust, diluted with about 25 percent olive oil. Unlike pie crust, pasty crust can take a little kneading. Be sure to refrigerate it for a couple of hours before you roll it out.

My crimping would not pass muster with the Cornish defenders of traditional pasty-making. Maybe I’ll do better next time. But it held together.

An egg wash or milk wash will give a nice, shiny crust. I used egg wash because the abbey chickens produce more eggs than I can possibly use when Ken is away. For pie crusts, I have terrible luck if I mix any whole wheat flour into the unbleached flour. But with the pasty crush, half whole wheat and half unbleached flour yielded a very tender crust. And by the way, I no longer use any flour that isn’t organic. It makes a huge difference in quality.

The pasty was obscenely good. Have it with wine, and by candlelight and firelight, to enhance the medieval effect.

Speaking of medieval, a reader asked me to comment on the election. I was campaign manager for a candidate for county commissioner, and that job has eaten me alive for more that two months. It was like having a full-time job — meetings, constant phone calls, a heavy load of email, lots of promotional work. We ran an extremely sophisticated campaign that scared the living daylights out of the opposition. But in the end, we went down, hard, in the wave of hatred, ignorance, anger, and apathy that swept across the country on Nov. 4. But we will never give up on dragging Stokes County, North Carolina, kicking and screaming into the 18th Century.

I’ve fled back into the woods, and I hope to stay here for a while.

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Just out of the oven

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With the egg wash, before going into the oven

Compromising with carbs

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Chapati bread, four parts whole wheat to one part soy flour

We’ve known it for years, but a major new study has confirmed the evidence that carbs will make you fat, and fats won’t hurt you. Below is a link to the New York Times story about this study:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/health/low-carb-vs-low-fat-diet.html

In my own experience with dieting, I certainly have found this to be true. I am five feet 10. I have never weighed more than 165 pounds, but 165 pounds is way overweight for me. I’m an ectomorph with slender bones. My ideal weight as a younger man was about 148, with some muscle-mass maintained in a gym. Without any gym-maintained muscle mass, my ideal weight is closer to 145 or even a few pounds lower. I judge my ideal weight as the weight at which I look trim and at which my waist is a sensible 32 inches.

Just over a year ago, I had gotten close to 165 pounds, partly because I had expended a lot of effort in learning to make decent sourdough bread. Bread is my downfall. It is my favorite food. I was a picky eater as a child, and without bread I probably would have dried up and blown away.

But here’s the problem: How can we keep bread in our lives but keep carbs down?

Lately I have been experimenting with flat breads. Oven-baked breads, whether risen with yeast or with a sourdough culture, just won’t rise if the dough is heavy. It’s difficult to make good bread even with 100 percent whole wheat, because it’s too heavy. But flat breads are a whole different thing. Flat breads don’t require a bubbly dough. Rather, the dough is rolled thin before it’s baked so that the steam during baking causes the bread to balloon up with one big steam bubble in the middle. The bread sinks as it cools, but it’s very tender. Indian chapati bread is the classic version of this. It’s baked not in an oven, but on a griddle or in a skillet.

It’s very, very easy to make delicious chapati bread from 100 percent whole wheat flour. But it’s also possible to mix in low-carb flours such as soy flour and still end up with great-tasting, tender bread. I’ve been able to make good chapati bread with two parts whole wheat flour to one part soy flour.

However, if you’re not experienced with chapati bread, I’d recommend finding a recipe on the Internet and figuring out the technique. Once you understand how to roll the dough to the right thickness and get it to puff up in a hot skillet, you’re ready to try lower-carb versions.

I’d recommend starting with a ratio of about 5 parts organic whole wheat flour to 1 part soy flour. If the results are good, then try a ratio of 4-1, then 3-1, and then even 2-1. Notice how the soy flour changes the texture of bread. It’s up to you to find the ideal ratio.

The addition of soy flour to whole wheat flour not only increases the protein and lowers the carbs, it also reduces the glycemic index of the bread.

For a year now, I have been able to keep my weight below 147 pounds. To lose weight, I have to ruthlessly cut out carbs. But maintaining a good weight is much easier. It’s all about figuring out what your own limits are with carbs. It’s also about watching the scales and adjusting your weight when you’re only two pounds over, rather than 20. I hope I never have to lose 20 pounds again.

Peanut butter: a cream substitute

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Several times recently I’ve written about quick pasta dishes based on garden vegetables and a sauce made of cream heated in a skillet until it thickens. There’s also a vegan and no-cholesterol alternative: peanut butter sauce.

To make the peanut butter sauce, gradually add water to peanut butter in a bowl, and stir it in. When you’ve stirred enough and added enough water, it will make a creamy sauce. Make your peanut butter sauce fairly thick if you’re using watery vegetables like tomatoes. Heat the sauce in the skillet with the other stuff.

Cashews or walnuts will add a nice crunch. Peanuts, remember, are legumes, not nuts. So the mixture of nut and legume rounds out the amino acids for maximum protein. I always use organic whole wheat pasta. The combination of grain, legume, and nuts is the vegan ideal for maximizing the protein from vegan sources.

Peanuts and tomatoes also are very good friends. Try thickening a fresh tomato soup with some peanut sauce, for example.

The garden is still cranking out vast quantities of tomatoes, though they soon will fade, along with summer.

More garden pasta

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It’s spooky how much tomatoes like cream. This is linguini with fresh tomatoes in a creamy parmesan sauce.

Flash-sautée the tomatoes in a hot skillet (but not hot enough to smoke). Cook the tomatoes for only one to two minutes, just until they’re hot. Put them in a bowl and set them aside. Add some butter to the same skillet. Add cream, salt, pepper, and about a teaspoon of vinegar. Boil gently and stir with a whisk until the sauce thickens. Add grated parmesan and stir with the whisk until the parmesan is melted into the sauce. Add the cooked pasta and the tomatoes and toss it in the skillet until the pasta is covered with the sauce.

I did not peel the tomatoes. The skins curl up when the tomatoes are heated. I skinned the tomatoes at the table, as though I was peeling shrimp.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do with all the tomatoes. I ought be in the garden right now picking yet more more of them instead of sitting here in front of the computer.

Next surplus: tomatoes

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For the new gardener, just getting things to grow is a triumph. But an art of gardening that must take a lifetime to refine is stretching out the seasons. That is, not only does one want the earliest possible fresh food in the spring and the latest possible fresh food in the fall, one also wants to stretch out (say) the tomato season for as long as possible, instead of having all the tomatoes come ripe at once.

If the object is canning and freezing, then having everything come ripe at once is not a big deal. But, for a kitchen garden, it’s a different matter.

The abbey tries to stick to old-fashioned ways when the garden is in. If it’s not in the garden, you don’t eat it. And if it’s in the garden, you eat it. In the spring, if the garden is going well, I pretty much stop buying produce except for things like garlic and bananas. In the early spring, we ate so much lettuce that it’s a wonder our hair didn’t turn green. By the time the squash crush arrived, the lettuce was gone. The tomatoes came a couple of weeks behind the squash. Soon there will be corn, though I’ll have to fight the raccoons for it, and the raccoons will almost certainly win.

I had pasta two nights in a row. Tonight’s linguini was made with fresh tomatoes. There’s a lot more where that came from. Maybe the tomatoes will turn my hair red.

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Squash again (and again, and again … )

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A couple of days ago, I sent a friend home with about eight pounds of squash and other garden vegetables (which he thoughtfully picked for himself in the brutal heat). He has been reporting on his use of the squash, and he made a great observation. That was that onions in his squash casserole was a kind of cliché. His squash casserole was very good, he said, but the onions reminded him of all the bad, runny squash he’s ever had.

I thought that was a brilliant insight. The trick is to look for different, unexpected flavors to go with squash. I’m still thinking about that, but while thinking about it I used tarragon.

A standard sauce at the abbey is what I call faux Bérnaise sauce. True Bérnaise, of course, is made with Hollandaise. I am very much out of practice with Hollandaise, and it’s a peck of trouble. Faux Bérnaise is much easier. I use it often for salmon. It’s astounding over mashed potatoes.

If possible, use a skillet that was just used to cook something else, so that there is some glaze and flavor in the pan. Deglaze the skillet with a little vinegar or lemon juice. Add some butter. When the butter is melted, add some cream. Stir it with a whisk and boil it gently until it thickens into a proper sauce. Add salt and pepper and a pinch of tarragon.

The squash in this dish I cooked according to the quick-sear method described in a post a few days ago. Stir the linguini, the squash, and the sauce together at the last second, just before serving.

I confess that I always have heavy cream in the refrigerator. Both Ken and I had our cholesterol checked a few months ago and it was excellent, so the heavy cream is not a problem if you otherwise eat sensibly.