Food – Page 51 – Into the Woods

Potato salad revisited

Sweet potato salad. No guilt necessary.

My local grocery store in Walnut Cove has North Carolina sweet potatoes on sale for 29 cents a pound. I bought some last week and baked ’em and mashed ’em with cinnamon. They were so good I went back and bought a bunch more, wondering what to do with them. An idea for an experiment dawned on me: make some sweet potato salad and try it out on my mother and brother, who were coming up for lunch on Wednesday.

Why sweet potato salad? Part of my theory of eating is that, especially at a certain age, we all should eat like diabetics even if we’re not. It’s not surprising that white potatoes are a high-glycemic food, not good for diabetics. It is very surprising, though, that sweet potatoes are a low-glycemic food, good for diabetics. The North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission claims, with good evidence, that the sweet potato is the most nutritious of all vegetables. They’re rich with Vitamins A and E, lycopene and potassium.

Thus the sweet potato is an important staple in the winter for those who, no matter how far from the Mediterranean, want to follow the Mediterranean diet. In fact, says the Washington Post, a low-glycemic diet and the Mediterranean diet are pretty much the same thing.

Now is as good a time as any to try to summarize my theory of diet and health.

1. Read Michael Pollan.

2. Adapt the Mediterranean diet to your location and tastes.

3. Follow a low glycemic diet.

4. Eat in such a way that your blood pH is neutral (you’ll need to do some research on this).

5. Keep your body’s net level of inflammation low with the anti-inflammation diet (you’ll need to do some research on this). Your overall level of inflammation can be measured with the C reactive protein test. Some doctors seem to give this test routinely, but you may have to ask for it.

6. Manage your oil and fat intake and your omega-3 omega-6 balance such that your cholesterols stay at the vein-washing, rather than vein-clogging, levels. Flax seed oil is your friend.

7. Maintain a level of fitness such that your resting pulse is below 75 beats per minute.

8. Maintain a body mass index of 23 or lower.

This is not a quirky diet. It’s not an expensive diet. It’s not a limited diet. These principles are not whims; they’re all backed up by good research. It’s easy to Google for these terms and see why these principles are important. Steps 4 and 5 will make perfectly clear what foods are good for you and what foods are not good for you.

Now, about the sweet potato salad. Make it just the same as you would make regular potato salad, but use sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes. To cook the sweet potatoes, put them whole and unpeeled on a cookie sheet, and bake them at 350 degrees for about an hour. Take them out of the oven and let them cool down. When they’re cool enough to touch, pick the skin off and cut the potatoes into cubes. This is much easier than peeling and boiling the potatoes, and the nutrients don’t get washed away.

What they're eating on Maui

And here are some fruit shots emailed in from Maui, with a couple of cats for a bonus. Above, Mama Maya.

Gandalf the Gray

What they're eating in the south of France #1

A friend in Perpignan sends an email with the subject “The slaughtering of a Pomelo” with three photographs.

“Remark,” she writes, “how great a part of the Pomelo constitutes skin and albedo,” sending me to the dictionary, because I’ve only encountered the term “albedo” in technical discussions of global warming. Note also that, in the south of France, especially when a fruit or vegetable is head-shaped, like a pumpkin or a cabbage, they speak of “slaughtering” it or “killing” it, as some of us do here.

I think I’ve seen pomelos in grocery stores in California, but I have not seen one in North Carolina. As for this poor pomelo that met its death in Perpignan, I believe it was imported from China.

Your cauliflower is calling you…

OK, so cauliflower lacks color. But we don’t hold that against taters or chardonnay, do we?

Now that the fresh greens have died out and the garden is in winter mode, we’re back to the winter diet. One of the vegetables that even the country grocery stores have during the winter is cauliflower. Cauliflower is relatively cheap, probably because it keeps well, with a low spoilage rate for shipping and shelving. Cauliflower is nutritionally dense, with all the virtues and anti-cancer properties of its family, Brassicaceae. Here’s the Wikipedia article on cauliflower.

I eat a lot of cauliflower during the winter, but with this cauliflower, I sinned a bit and made a light cheese sauce. It would be tempting to use butter, but I used toasted sesame oil instead. The flavor of all the cabbages — cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts — is highly compatible with toasted sesame oil.

If you’re new to cauliflower, boil it until it’s just barely tender and mash it exactly as you would mash taters, with butter and hot milk.

The garlic bed

Now that the turnips and mustard are clear of the raised bed, I’ve planted the garlic. The burlap cover is to keep the cat out. After the garlic has a good start, I’ll remove the burlap. The cat, Lily, ruined a third of the turnip and mustard crop by flinging dirt before the plants were established.

This raised bed has been here only since spring, but this is the third crop to go into it. First it was tomatoes, peppers, etc. Then the mustard and turnips, and now the garlic. Before spring I have to build at least five more of these beds. It’s an incredibly easy and efficient way to garden.

The garlic bulbs came from the Garlic Store. I planted three varieties: California Early (the standard garlic of Gilroy, California); Transylvanian (for teasing vampires); and Stull (which according to the Garlic Store was discovered at a garlic festival in New York). I’m a little late planting the garlic, but I think it will be fine.

Lesson learnt, turnipwise…

My pitiful turnip crop, 2008. That’s mustard on the right.

I head eaten turnip and mustard greens for weeks and weeks, but last night the poor turnips froze. I wasn’t careful enough. Turnips don’t mind frost, but they sure didn’t like the hard freeze we had last night. According to my outdoor thermometer, the low temperature last night was 17.8 degrees F. That’s unusually cold for this time of year.

I pulled all the turnips and threw away all the frozen turnip greens. The mustard greens didn’t freeze, but they’ve clearly stopped growing, so I pulled all the mustard too. Tomorrow I’ll clean up the plantbed and plant garlic in it.

I must have had 20 or more messes of fresh mustard greens from my small raised bed. I’d have had even more, had the cat not frolicked repeatedly in that pretty black dirt.

The frozen turnips will have to be cooked today instead of stored in the pumphouse for Thanksgiving.

Actually, after I cleaned them up, it appears that the turnips handled the freeze much better than the leaves.

Apple trees

An old-fashioned limbertwig

You’d think that for all the work I did planting apple trees this week that there’d be something more photogenic. But at this point there’s not really much to see. Each tree is four feet tall (with almost a foot of it underground). And each tree is heavily pruned.

I planted nine apple trees and one pear tree. The trees came from Century Farm Orchards, which specializes in old Southern apple trees. I planted nine different varieties of apples. I tried to select varieties that would extend the season from early to late (July to November or so), and apples that store well. For the record, here are the varieties:

Arkansas black (2)

Kinnaird’s choice (1)

Old fashioned limbertwig (1)

Mary Reid (1)

Smokehouse (1)

Summer banana (1)

William’s favorite (1)

Yellow June (1)

Plumblee pear (1)

Though the trees are all old-fashioned varieties, they were grown on MM.111 rootstock, a hardy rootstock.

With luck, I’ll have apples in three to six years.

Another mess of greens

Of all the low-intensity gardening I did this year, the mustard greens probably were the most productive for the least effort. I just sprinkled some seeds in the raised bed, and, ka-boom, instant greens.

The rain of the last three days has rejuvenated them. I think I’ll harvest all the turnips next week.

Wednesday: Sauerkraut-making day

After Monday’s cabbage-buying expedition to the Virginia mountains, Wednesday was sauerkraut-making day. To make sauerkraut, you need:

1. Cabbage. I bought cabbage in 50-pound sacks close to the farm in Carroll County, Virginia.

2. Sea salt. I used refined sea salt bought in bulk at Whole Foods. I would have preferred to use a really premium salt like Celtic sea salt. Any good salt will work, though, as long as it’s not iodized.

3. Something to slice the cabbage with. We used a wooden box slicer made in Eastern Europe that I bought at an on-line store. This slicer is pretty efficient, and it slices the cabbage nice and uniformly thin, which is essential for good sauerkraut.

4. A crock to ferment the sauerkraut in. I used Harsch No. 15 crocks. These crocks are made in Germany especially for fermenting vegetables. They’re not cheap.

5. A friend to help with all the work. A friend from California is visiting this week. We made 30 pounds of sauerkraut in about 3.5 hours. Hard work, but not that bad.

About kraut recipes and the amount of salt: The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends way too much salt in homemade sauerkraut. According to the article about sauerkraut at Wikipedia, this is because, if the fermentation temperature is too high, the wrong kind of bacteria will grow. Most sauerkraut recipes on the web call for 6 tablespoons of salt for 10 pounds of cabbage. The recipe that comes with the Harsch crocks calls for 5 to 8 grams of salt for 1 kilogram of cabbage, far less than the USDA number. After much deliberation, I decided to use 2.5 tablespoons of salt for 10 pounds of cabbage, in the range recommended by Harsch. I believe this is a ratio of about .008, in the low end of the acceptable ratios given by Wikipedia — .006 to .020. If you use a larger amount of salt in the sauerkraut, the kraut is too salty to eat and must be washed before eating. That washes away the nutrients — bad idea.

Why canned sauerkraut isn’t as good for you: There are some good brands of sauerkraut on the market in glass jars. But if you put the sauerkraut in jars, you have to heat it, killing off the beneficial bacteria and enzymes. To get the full health benefits of sauerkraut, it must be eaten from the crock, unheated and unwashed. In other words, you have to make your own sauerkraut.

Washing the cabbage

Some of the sauerkraut-making apparatus

Slicing the cabbage

The crock filled with salted cabbage

The cabbage with the weights on top. These weights come with the Harsch crocks. They hold the cabbage down so that it stays covered with brine.

The crocks all filled and ready to start fermenting. These crocks are in the cellar of my new house.

Monday: Cabbage-buying expedition

Wednesday was to be sauerkraut-making day, so Monday’s chore was to go to the mountains and get the cabbage. In Carroll County and Patrick County, Virginia, cabbage is a major crop. That’s about 45 miles from my place in Stokes County, N.C. This time of year the quality of the cabbage is high, and the price is low. At farmside stands, it was selling for $8 for a 50-pound sack. At roadside produce stands, it was selling for $10 for a 50-pound sack. I bought two sacks of cabbage.

The trip to cabbage country goes right past Mabry Mill on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The water trace

An old wagon, part of the Mabry Mill museum of old mountain technology

A small whiskey still, also part of Mabry Mill’s museum