Food – Page 40 – Into the Woods

Time to make sauerkraut

You need cabbage, crocks, a scale, a shredder, and the right kind of salt

Making sauerkraut is not my favorite chore. Shredding the cabbage is tedious, and bits of cabbage go everywhere. I did the job out on the deck to keep the mess out of the kitchen. I use Harsch crocks, which are made in Germany especially for making sauerkraut. The Prago cabbage shredder requires a lot of manual work, but it does the job and gets the cabbage exactly the right thickness for sauerkraut.

I made 15 pounds of sauerkraut today, from cabbage bought in Virginia. I used a little more salt than last time — 3 tablespoons per 10 pounds of cabbage. Next spring I hope to make sauerkraut from my own homegrown organic cabbage.

The first tasting should be in early December.

Shredded and in the crock

I keep the crocks under a table near the kitchen

Sweet potato harvest

Spread out to dry on the deck

I had not really planned to grow sweet potatoes this year, but back in late July or early August I came across some sweet potato sets in a produce shop at Walnut Cove. I bought a pack of the sets.

Ken then made a sweet potato bed about 6 feet square by turning a spot of garden with a mattock and heaping on lots of compost. The sweet potatoes flourished (in spite a few raids by Mr. Groundhog) until the frost bit the vines yesterday morning. Today I composted the vines and dug up the potatoes. That 6-by-6 plot yielded a large grocery bag full of potatoes.

Restaurant china

New soup bowls made by Buffalo china

I have long had a great fondness for restaurant china. It’s heavy and durable, and it’s relatively inexpensive. I bought eight soup bowls on eBay that arrived today. Somehow I have to find room for them in the cabinets with the Victor “truck driver” mugs and the Buffalo cups and saucers. They don’t match? No problem, at least to me.

A while back, I wrote about how the right mugs and cups help to get coffee to the right temperature for drinking and keep it there. With soup, something similar is going on. Serving soup from deep, narrow cereal bowls just doesn’t work for me. The soup won’t cool properly. In my opinion, soup should be served very hot, and in small servings. The hot soup should go into a wide, narrow bowl, where it will cool quickly to the right temperature for eating it. The shapes and sizes of the bowls, plates, cups and mugs that we all use reflect a cultural consensus on how food should be served. Consensus changes. For example, these days there seems to be a growing consensus that coffee should be served in something gigantic. I object.

The makers of institutional china, at least in previous decades, got it about right, in my opinion. These bowls are new old stock, probably made in the 1980s. Buffalo china is still being made. Buffalo is now owned by Oneida.

Buttermilk

One of my disappointments when I moved back to North Carolina from California was the poor quality of dairy products in this region of the country. I very rarely drink milk, but I do use butter and a bit of cheese, and I like having buttermilk in the refrigerator. It was almost impossible to find buttermilk that wasn’t somehow adulterated — thickened with tapioca or emulsified with diglycerides. Not only that, but finding milk here from cows that are not given hormones is almost impossible, unless you go to Whole Foods, which is a 50-mile roundtrip for me. In San Francisco, there were fantastic boutique dairies nearby, such as the Strauss Family Creamery in Marin County, north of San Francisco.

But last week, at the Ingle’s grocery store at Walnut Cove, I stopped at the dairy case (I usually speed by) and found proper buttermilk. It has the no-hormones label, and it contains nothing but milk, salt, vitamin A and vitamin D.

My favorite way to use buttermilk is to just drink it. The bacteria that is used to culture buttermilk is different from the bacteria used to culture yogurt, but, like yogurt, buttermilk is good for the digestive system. Buttermilk also is easier to digest than regular milk, because the bacteria break down the lactose and turn it into lactic acid.

The label on this milk even says where it came from — Asheville, North Carolina. That’s good cow country.

On how to wash eggs

I wish I had known a year ago that there are guides from the experts on how to wash eggs from backyard chickens. I had been doing it wrong. For one, I had assumed that cold water was better, to avoid heating the egg. Wrong.

If you Google for egg-washing, you’ll find lots of often contradictory opinions. There are many people who say that you shouldn’t wash eggs at all. However, I think I’ll go with the university people on this. The University of Nebraska has published a guide meant particularly for people with backyard chickens. There’s also a PDF version of the guide.

Hot water (90F to 120F) is best because eggs are porous (that’s how the chicks get air before they hatch). Cold water causes the contents of the egg to contract, potentially pulling in microbes through the pores. Hot water causes the contents of the egg to expand, pushing microbes out of the pores. The eggs should not be soaked. They should be kept in the water only for the time it takes to wash them. And yes, it’s OK to use a weak bleach solution to sanitize the egg, as I had been doing.

Another brilliant idea that I learned from Googling: Use a pencil to write the date on each egg. Though I’ve always rotated my eggs, it’s a very good thing to have dates on the eggs.

Shepherd's pie

James-Michael, who returns to California tomorrow after a 10-day visit to the abbey, cooked tonight’s supper. It’s shepherd’s pie. This kind of all-in-one dish makes great sense for working people like James-Michael. Make the dish on the weekend, and the leftovers will help get you through the week.

First fall-garden harvest

Ken and James-Michael pick mustard greens. The chickens want to know what’s in it for them.

Ken planted the fall garden, so I was very happy that he was able to be here for the first harvest. He has a short fall break at school, and he stopped at the abbey while on his way to go hiking in the mountains.

Neither the fall greens nor the sweet potatoes are fully mature, so we harvested only enough for a fall-feast supper. After supper, Ken built a bonfire. Fall bonfires, like pumpkin pie, are a sacred ritual. James-Michael, a friend from California, was here to share the feast and the bonfire.

Ken with a sweet potato

Turnip, mustard, and beet greens, washed and ready for the cooking pot

Pumpkin pie

All done.

Fall is probably my favorite time of year. Making pumpkin pie is a sacred ritual. Cooks who I would have sworn knew better sometimes tell me that they make pumpkin pie with pumpkin-pie filling bought in a can. They probably buy frozen crusts, too. There is no excuse. Pumpkin pie must be made from scratch.

I always cook my pumpkin by baking it. It’s not a big deal. This is also the method that Irma Rombauer describes in The Joy of Cooking, 1943 edition. That’s my standard reference for traditional cooking, though I rarely follow her recipes exactly — rather, I use her concepts. Actually, I don’t think much of Rombauer’s pumpkin pie recipe. It produces what I would call pumpkin-flavored custard, because it contains less pumpkin and a cup of milk or cream. I prefer a more dense, pumpkiny pie. All I add to the pumpkin is a cup of sugar, a couple of eggs, and cinnamon and nutmeg.

Here’s the process.

Find a nice pumpkin. Next year I will grow some.

Cut it in half. Scoop out the seeds and pulp and give it to the chickens.

Put the pumpkin in a roasting pan and put it in the oven at 325 or 350 degrees.

By the way, I found this Williams Sonoma roasting pan at a local junk shop for $10.

In about two hours, the pumpkin will be tender. You’ll have clear liquid standing inside the pumpkin shells.

Scoop out the pumpkin flesh. You must remove the liquid, or your pie will be soggy. I squeeze it out while the pumpkin is in a bowl, but you can also use a collander. Save the liquid for soup stock.

Add the sugar, eggs and spices and pop the pie in the oven.

A chocolate fit made me do it

I had a chocolate fit this evening, and I thought of brownies. If I’ve ever made brownies before, I don’t remember it. As usual, I turned to the 1943 edition of Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. She has a recipe for brownies that uses molasses mixed with the sugar. I substituted olive oil for the melted butter, and I used whole wheat flour. Not that much can be done to lessen the crime of making brownies.

La saison de la soupe est ouverte!

Vegan cream of mushroom soup

The low temperature last night was about 50 degrees, and today at noon we were up to only 72. So I decided that today is the official start of soup season.

This was a vegan soup made with mushrooms, minced onions, celery, and carrots. All that was sautéed in olive oil. I thickened the stock with a little whole wheat flour. I added some broken linguini to the stock to make the soup heartier, and I creamed it with soybean milk.

Now if it would only rain.

My mother has been visiting at Acorn Abbey this week, and not much work got done outdoors. Next week I’m planning to shop for a tiller and start on the fall gardening chores.

The sautéed mushrooms go into the stock.