Food – Page 41 – Into the Woods

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.

Shiitake mushroom garden

Ken Ilgunas with the mushroom logs — all done except for the deer protection

Acorn Abbey has only five acres. But on those five acres, it’s amazing how many microclimates there are. Only an acre is open to the sun. That’s where the house and garden are. There are four acres of woods, with a small stream flowing between two steep ridges. Now what can we grow down in the bottom where the two little streams meet, where the sun never shines and where it’s always damp? Shiitake mushrooms, of course.

We bought our shiitake spawn plugs, by the way, from Oyster Creek Mushroom Company in Maine. If you’re interested in starting a mushroom garden of your own, Google for instructions. You’ll also find some videos on YouTube.

This is the first experience either of us has had with mushrooms, so we were following instructions that came with the spawn. We regard this as more of an experiment, or pilot project. We made some compromises. Most instructions for doing this recommend cutting the trees in the winter. We wanted to get started, so we took our chances with late summer. Most instructions for shiitake mushrooms say that oak logs are preferred. I can’t bring myself to sacrifice an oak for mushrooms. We used poplar, of which I have a surplus. Poplar also is nice and straight, so the logs stack well. Most instructions say that any hardwood tree will do. Another mistake we made is that we ordered our spawn a little too soon. It waited in the refrigerator a bit longer than we would have liked. Still, we’re hoping that the process is forgiving and that the mushroom growth is exuberant enough to make up for our compromises. Also, I’m hoping for a boost in that the mushroom environment in Acorn Abbey’s little branch bottom seems close to ideal.

Ken did all the work. Here are photos of the process.

Above: Ken cuts a poplar tree. We used only one tree for this starter project. We don’t have any power saws. Ken used an axe to fell the tree.

Above: Ken saws the tree into four-foot logs.

Above: The tree made 10 logs.

Above: Ken drills holes for the spawn plugs. The plugs are just pieces of wooden dowel, about three-quarters of an inch long. The plugs have been treated with mushroom spawn.

Above: Ken hammers the plugs into the holes in the log.

Above: Ken uses a brush to cover each plug with hot wax to seal in the spawn. The wax was melted on a camp stove.

Above: Ken notches a log for stacking.

Above: All done except for the deer protection!

Above: Ken puts up chicken wire to keep the deer away from the logs.

Above: The branch bottom. This area is almost perfect for a mushroom farm. There’s a small track into the woods suitable not only for the wheelbarrow, but also for the Jeep if needed. To the right in this photo about 20 feet out of sight is a small stream. Behind the camera is another stream. The streams are small, but the larger of the two runs year round. The smaller stream sometimes stops in extremely dry weather. But the humidity here is always high, and except in winter the thick hardwood canopy blocks almost all the sunlight.

Above: Mushrooms grow everywhere in this area. Even in dry weather, the mushrooms grow in the branch bottom.

Above: All done and ready for the deer. The instructions say that we can expect mushrooms in five to 12 months. The logs should produce two harvests a year for three to five years.

Apple economics

Ugly apples = good apples

If you want good apples, the best way is to grow them yourself, I’m sure. But my young apples trees probably won’t produce for two more years or so. The summer heat is hard on the appetite and the urge to cook. I haven’t made sourdough bread for over a month. But the craving for apple pie never goes away, and I expect the craving for apple pie to get even worse as fall approaches.

Anywhere in the country one drives during the summer, one sees old apple trees hanging full of apples, but how to get them? I fantasize about an apple raid. In the local grocery stores, all the apples are from Washington. All of them. The same thing is true at Whole Foods in Winston-Salem — nothing but Washington apples. I refuse to buy them. There are local apples everywhere, going to waste, but there’s no system for getting them to someone who might use them. We did ask a neighbor if they’d sell us some apples, and they said sure, they’d give us all we want. But those apples aren’t quite ripe.

On Friday at the Danbury farmer’s market, the farmer couple who I now refer to as our favorite farmers had some apples for 50 cents a pound. I bought enough for a pie. These apples look the way apples are supposed to look — all sorts of colors, with spots and even the occasional worm hole. No problem. Cut around it. To me, those perfectly shaped things in the grocery store that they call apples are not apples. They’re more like cardboard, usually.

The best apples I ever had were from old, abandoned apple trees.

Today’s pie from ugly apples

A good persimmon year?

The wild persimmon crop won’t be ripe until early fall, but they’re coming along nicely. I pass three wild persimmon trees on the way to the mailbox, and they’re all heavily loaded with nice, plump, green persimmons.

I’m hoping for some nice persimmon pudding this fall.