Food – Page 31 – Into the Woods

First tomato sandwich of 2014

One of holiest of white trash sacraments is the first tomato sandwich of the season. Around here, that means that certain nasty foods are temporarily allowed into the house. For this year’s bread, I chose Merita Old-Fashioned, just because it had a better squeeze on the store shelf than Bunny. The chips, as always, are Wise chips. Wise once made a New York Times top-10 list of best regional potato chips. Mayonnaise on both sides of the bread. Milk would be a proper accompaniment, but this year I had Coke from a commemorative bottle, over ice.

The remaining bread will go to the chickens. I hope it doesn’t hurt them. I’ll finish the chips.

Squash: make it a sin

Squash is coming out my ears. I couldn’t bear another bit of it without turning it into something sinful. Solution: pizza.

The sauce is a pesto sauce made from garden basil. The squash is masquerading as pepperoni. It didn’t fool me. There is — no joke — half a cup of garlic in the pesto sauce. At the abbey, garlic is a vegetable, not a seasoning. The crust is homemade, though I have to admit that I have never learnt the knack of making a truly sophisticated pizza crust. I need to study up on that.

Making the most of squash

The abbey garden is cranking out squash faster than the abbey kitchen can handle it. Squash has been on the menu almost every day. Squash can be one of the most boring vegetables in the world, so preparing it is a big challenge.

Everyone’s favorite squash dish, of course, is sliced squash dipped in batter and fried. That’s a great treat, but it’s a bit too high carb and high fat to have too often. Not to mention that it makes a big mess in the kitchen. The healthiest way I know to make good squash is to sear it in a skillet. Done poorly, the squash becomes hopelessly watery. However, if done carefully, the squash can be very appealing. It won’t turn to mush, and browning it adds a lot of flavor.

Use a hot skillet with a little oil. Olive oil can’t take higher heat, so I use sesame oil, sunflower oil, or even grapeseed oil. Salt makes vegetables release their water, so I don’t salt squash while it’s being cooked.

You want the pan to be not quite hot enough to smoke, but hot enough that the squash will brown in only a few minutes. Any water released by the squash (which won’t be much if you give it just a few minutes of high heat) will dry up in the pan.

To make up for the lack of salt, serve the squash with some sort of salty sauce. One of the abbey’s favorite sauces is what I call “cucumber sauce.” That’s a chilled sauce made of about 3/4 sour cream and 1/4 mayonnaise, seasoned with salt and pepper.

Tender is the greens

A serious weapon that every kitchen needs, for wielding against hard-to-cook foods, is a pressure cooker. I wouldn’t know how to cook garbanzo beans without one (and we eat a lot of hummus). Lately I have turned the pressure cooker toward the problem of tender mustard greens.

Tender mustard is a desideratum of every gardener. Picking the greens very young might help. But one can’t waste all those mature greens, can one? Twenty-five minutes in the pressure cooker and the greens are perfect.

Mustard greens

A squash bloom

A humble turnip

Lettuce, approaching maturity

A cabbage, which will soon use its one-way ticket to the kitchen

My family heirloom beans

The garden on June 2

The first day lilies, with thousands to follow

A wildflower patch

Lemons

When did lemons get to be so expensive? For years, I rarely bought them, because they just didn’t seem worth the price, and the quality was rarely appealing.

And yet, lemons can be useful. Nothing is better than fresh-made lemonade on a hot day. Trader Joe’s has pretty good prices on lemons, so I’ve been buying them again.

When I was a young’un, growing up in the Yadkin Valley, there was pretty much no such thing as exotic foods, because foods — at least fresh foods — weren’t transported very far then. And yet, as I recall, there were almost always lemons in the refrigerator, almost surely from Florida. Fresh lemonade was not unusual (though iced tea was an everyday thing). I remember a lot of lemon custard pies. I remember cake frostings with lemon peel grated in. My 1942 edition of The Joy of Cooking frequently calls for lemons, as though Irma Rombauer assumed that, even in the 1940s, cooks were likely to have them. Lemons have been shipped around for centuries, I’m sure.

In any caste, I’m resolved to get into the habit of buying lemons in the summer, as long as the price is right.

As for the lemonade, it needs to be sweet. That would require far too much sugar. I’ve been sweetening the lemonade with stevia extract. Stevia extract is not a perfect sweetener (nothing is perfect other than sugar). But the intensity of the lemon taste masks the aftertaste of the stevia.

Normally I use vinegar in hummus. But lemon juice works well too, and it gives the hummus a much brighter taste than vinegar.

The garden kicks in

The abbey is far from self-sufficient in food, a fact made clear by expenditures at Whole Foods. But each year when the garden kicks in, there begins a time, lasting for several months, in which the abbey is pretty much self-sufficient in produce. Eggs too are an important part of the equation. Eggs from the abbey’s expert hens provide up to 20 percent of our protein year-round.

So the season is beginning in which suppers at the abbey largely consist of food grown here. Yesterday’s supper (above) was omelette, a salad of lettuce and broccoli with homemade garlic-Roquefort dressing, turnip and mustard greens, and a side-dish medley of seared turnips, baby bok choi, and some leftovers. All the produce except the garlic came from the garden — garden to table in about an hour.

On the next trip to Whole Foods, I’ll buy very little produce — a significant savings. Instead, Ken will slave in the garden.

Lettuce, cabbage, and brussels sprouts

A young cabbage

Some of the finest broccoli this year I’ve ever seen

Above, a young tomato. For those not familiar with the Carolina foothills, the soil here is mostly red. Over the past five years, the garden has had literally tons of compost and other organic materials added. Building the soil and feeding the worms is a years-long process, and the process is now well along here. I’ve never seen such rapid growth in the garden. No doubt the insect pests will get worse as the weather gets hotter, but so far the garden has been almost bug free.

Young corn

We have walls and walls of heirloom roses on the garden fence and elsewhere.

A rose on the garden fence

We’ve got lettuce

We are so rich with lettuce right now that we donated some of it to the Stokes Future Farmers’ Market.

The garden is looking great. Photos soon…

Kitty and Ronda, who help hold the farmers’ market together

A good drink was had by all

There had been barely half an inch of rain in the last month. Yesterday, it rained — 1.56 inches. This morning you can almost feel the exuberance of the green things. The honeysuckle and the roses are just getting started. We’ve been eating lettuce for a week, and now we’re covered up with lettuce. The first broccoli probably will be harvested today, and mustard greens tomorrow. Soon there will be cabbage and onions.

American classic

Sometimes when I am out and about and the only choice is to eat what the natives eat or go hungry, I eat what the natives eat. One of the few reliable items on any country menu will be the hamburger. This is because it’s food they understand, and they have to make it fresh.

This classic American burger is at Jim’s Grill near Yadkinville, North Carolina. Jim’s Grill has been around for decades. In the 1950s, it was a hot spot, with curb service, a jukebox, burgers, shakes, and teen-agers. Now it’s a place where old people go for lunch. Many of those old people, no doubt, went there as teen-agers in the 1950s.

The griefs of starting an orchard

This apple tree looks spare and lanky because it was pruned heavily last winter. It won’t produce much fruit this year and instead will put all its 2014 effort into the growth of the tree. But, next year and in future years, the pruning will pay off.

Lucky is the man who has a mature, productive orchard. Starting an orchard is like trying to raise children in the Dark Ages — the investment is enormous, and the mortality and accompanying heartbreak run high. The oldest trees in the abbey’s orchard will be six years old this fall. The other trees vary in age, as trees that have been lost have been replaced. This process of death and replacement continues.

Among the lessons learned, a couple of things stand out. For one (as with dogs), know your breeder. Fruit trees that come from fruit-tree puppy mills may look nice when you see them at the big-box hardware store. But they may have come from nurseries far away, and they may be of stock and varieties that are not hardy and not suitable for your area.

The abbey’s strongest trees are all old Southern varieties of antique or heirloom apple trees from a nursery two counties to the east that specializes in such trees — Century Farm Orchards. Though I lost (and replaced) two of those twelve six-year-old trees, that mortality rate is good compared with the mortality rate of other fruit trees. We’ve almost given up on cherry trees. Insects defoliate them. We were on our second or third attempt at growing fig trees, and things were looking good, until the near-zero temperatures last winter killed the figs. So while the cherry trees, figs, and even the pears die of the whooping coughs, smallpoxes and scarlet fevers that afflict young fruit trees, the hardy old apple trees and peach trees carry on. Getting fruit trees to maturity is not a small challenge.

We were tempted to attempt olives. But we pretty quickly decided against it, because olives are not truly suited to this area, and the risk of mortality in any given year would be high. Even figs are a big risk. But we love figs so much that we soldier on.

If (at least in this area) you want maximum fruit and minimum grief in your young orchard, stick with apples and peaches, of old and proven varieties, from known nurseries with a track record and a nurseryman who will answer your emails (as David Vernon from Century Farm Orchards always does).

A baby peach

Baby apples

A fig stalk, killed by the cold winter, though its roots may still be alive