Eating seasonally: winter

Eating seasonally has been less local this year, because of pregnancy.  Which foods are appealing has changed, and that at least somewhat correlates with my different nutritional needs.  The biggest change from past years is that I fully succumbed to the citrus fruit cravings that I get every winter.  The only local fruit available over the winter is homemade applesauce.  While I’ve been eating some of that almost every day, it’s no substitute for raw, whole fruit. 

Citrus is in season now, not locally, but in season.  Relative to California, Florida isn’t so far away.  I’ve been buying Florida grapefruits and minneolas, although I also bought long-distance clementines while they were fully in season in December.  As long as I’m buying fruit at the supermarket, I figure I may as well get things that I can only get at the supermarket, so we’ve been enjoying a variety of tropical fruits:  mangoes (while they’re 50 cents each), papaya, and bananas. 

We’ve been eating greens from our freezer, and roots from our fridge.  Tonight it was pasta with broccoli rabe, veggie sausage, parmesan and mozzarella cheeses, and Italian spices.  Yesterday, chard went into soup that started with a can of tomato bisque, but also included canned tomatoes (the blight this summer meant we couldn’t freeze enough local tomatoes).  Earlier this week, turnip greens from the freezer joined turnips from the fridge in a tofu stir-fry.  Turnips and parsnips made a lovely pureed soup a couple of weeks ago, with caraway seeds, salt, and pepper, and served with a pat of butter in each bowl. 

The most exciting of our local foods this winter has been sprouts that my husband grows in a jar on our kitchen windowsill.  When nothing else green, fresh, and crunchy is local, we can have nutritious, delicious sprouts that have traveled no distance at all.  Commercially grown sprouts are more likely than other vegetables to harbor bacteria, and are therefore off-limits to pregnant women.  Homegrown sprouts, though, seem perfectly safe.   Now I just need to figure out where to get sprout seeds locally.

Bulk fun

We tried a new way to cut down on packaging and on trips to the grocery store, and ordered some bulk grains through Harvest Co-op.  I ordered 25 lbs (the smallest bag size) of organic brown rice, and 25 lbs of organic whole wheat couscous.  I don’t know if something got messed up in the order, or the retrieval, or in the information I was given when I placed the order, but the rice they brought out to us was brown organic basmati (which is not the same as regular brown rice) and the couscous bag was 25 kilograms (not 25 pounds).

These huge bags, which are sitting on the floor in a corner of our kitchen, don’t re-seal.  Our priority now is to get the grains out of the bags and into more useful containers.  A ball jar that I used to use as a sugar canister was pressed into service, as was another random very large glass jar.  We already had a couple of food service containers, wide-mouth plastic jars that used to each hold a gallon of salad dressing, and they now each hold a bit more than 6 pounds of couscous.  When we went out to brunch this weekend, we asked for empty containers and came home with two tubs that each used to hold five pounds of whipped butter.   Next week they’ll probably have more for us.  At least the volume in the bag is now low enough to roll the top down and hold it with a bag clip.

I have an appetite for vegetables again, which is a good thing when meal planning is all about what’s good atop couscous.  Last night’s meal plan was Tunisian vegetables, using green cabbage that has been sitting happily in our fridge since we bought it at the farmers market a month ago, carrots that have probably been in the fridge longer than that, and green bell peppers frozen some time last summer.   Adapted from a recipe in Moosewood Cooks at Home, the vegetables join chickpeas and currants (or raisins) and are generously seasoned with coriander, some cinnamon, turmeric, cayenne, plenty of salt of course,  and at the very end a generous splash of lemon juice.  Because the flavors are so different from other things we cook, and because the recipe so flexibly works with many different combinations of vegetables, it has become one of our standbys.  It’s delicious over couscous.

In a different sort of adventure in bulk foods, my husband made 20 pounds of apples into sauce this weekend.  One batch was Spencer and the other was Roxbury Russet.  All of the apples were from Kimball Fruit Farm, a large local IPM farm that was selling 10 pound bags of apples for $5 by the end of the season!

Vegetables? Yuck!

I haven’t been blogging for a while because suddenly, unexpectedly (although maybe it shouldn’t have been unexpected) I lost pretty much all appetite for vegetables.  Greens, in particular, turned me off.  There was a particularly pungent bunch of celery from our CSA that kept me from opening my own refrigerator for a couple of weeks.  My husband tried to blanch and freeze our farm share while I was out of the house, so the smell wouldn’t bother me.  We took to referring to the fan over the stove as the “fume hood.”

Why?  Well, I knew exactly what was going on, but I wasn’t quite ready to tell all of cyberspace:  I’m pregnant!

Some local foods have been staples:  apples (including cider and sauce), potatoes, and yogurt.  Eggplant was good but the season was ending.  Little dumpling squash appeared at just the right time.  Baked with a stuffing of diced apples with maple syrup and butter they were delicious, and a vegetable I could eat.

We’ve been buying more vegetables at the grocery store, both fresh and frozen, as I’ve had an appetite for them.  Mostly we’ve been able to get organic.  They don’t have the flavor of farm fresh, but honestly, I don’t want vegetable flavor at the moment.

I trust that my taste for vegetables will return fully, and when it does, I have a freezer full of everything I didn’t want to eat this fall.

Autumn Fruit Muffins

I know I haven’t posted in almost forever.  WordPress knows it too, and had to re-activate access!  I hope to be posting more again soon.  I made these muffins this morning and had to share.

The flour, baking powder, and spices are not local.  Apples, cranberries, maple syrup, milk, and eggs are all local ingredients for me.

Cranberry Muffins with Apple and Spices

Makes 12 muffins.

Mix together dry ingredients:

• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon cardamom (I like cardamom with cranberry, but if you don’t have it or don’t like it use cinnamon, maybe with allspice or cloves)
• 1 teaspoon ginger (unless you’re using fresh grated or jarred, in which case it goes into the wet ingredients)

Fold into the dry ingredients, to coat:

• 1/2 bag cranberries (frozen are fine), about 6 ounces
• 1 large apple, grated (I had to rip up skin bits by hand because they weren’t grating well), including its juice (or use 1 cup of apple sauce)

Mix together wet ingredients:

• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1/2 cup maple syrup (if you use brown sugar you’ll need to add more liquid, either milk, water, or apple cider)
• 2/3 cup milk
• 1/2 tablespoon fresh grated ginger, if you have it (I used jarred)

Mix the wet ingredients into the dry-and-fruit mixture.  Distribute among tins for 12 muffins.  Bake at 400 F for about 20 minutes (yes, that’s a long baking time, but the fruit makes them very moist).  Enjoy!

 

Farming is Risky

This summer was our 8th season with the same CSA.  We knew going into it that part of why CSAs work well for farmers is that the risks are spread among the shareholders.   For 7 years, we’ve won at our gamble, and gotten an excellent value.  This year was different.  The weather didn’t cooperate.  Our farmer lost a lot of plants including all of his corn crop.  Many weeks, our share was smaller than we’ve been accustomed to.  Finally, he had to end drop-offs about a month earlier than usual.  It was a very bad summer for farming here in Massachusetts.  Next summer should be better, and as long as our farmer is doing a CSA, we’ll be back.  Until then, I’ll enjoy the flexibility of choosing my vegetables at the farmers markets.

I worry, though, about how some of the other shareholders might be responding to the situation.  People tend to forget that it’s natural to lose a gamble.  We gambled on the weather, and this yer we lost.  But in our age of supermarket produce, it’s easy to forget that farms, particularly small farms in New England, do not produce like factories.  I worry that other shareholders, losing sight of this, will blame the poor harvest on the farmer, harassing him now and choosing not to join his CSA next year.   Granted, he can do without the sorts of shareholders who harass him.  I hope most people share my perspective and stick by their local farmers, especially when the weather is bad.

Oven-Braised Cabbage

Sometimes it’s nice to cook things in the oven, so that the hour or so before eating is not the time you have to be in the kitchen cooking. Braising is usually a stovetop procedure, but the idea of cooking with very little liquid translates well to the oven. Here’s a recipe I made this week. It was fun to serve alongside roasted blue potatoes from the farmers market.

• Quarter, core, and knife-shred one red cabbage.  (A green cabbage would probably taste just as good but not be as pretty.  They also tend to be larger, so increase all the seasonings accordingly.)
• Quarter, core, and slice about 2 apples.  (I used only one but it was a hefty ten ounces!)  McIntosh have a wonderful flavor, although by the time the dish is cooked, they’ll have turned into applesauce.
• Put half the cabbage into the bottom of a deep lidded casserole.  Layer half the apples over it.  Then the other half of the cabbage, and the other half of the apple.
• Sprinkle the top with salt and pepper to taste, and a generous sprinkling of caraway seeds.
• Pour about 3 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and about 2 tablespoons of water over the cabbage and apples.
• Bake at 350 (or whatever temperature your other food needs, but adjust time accordingly) for about an hour.
• About 10 minutes before serving, remove the lid.  Stir together the cabbage, apples, and spices.  Leave the lid off to evaporate some liquid and gain texture.

I’d made similar dishes before, but this was the first time I tried it with caraway seeds, and I was very pleased with the results.  If you don’t have cider vinegar, you could use red wine vinegar, but the cider vinegar really kicks up the apple flavor.

My husband also found this tasty, but said he’d have preferred his cabbage and seasonings as colcannon, so I’m offering a link to my recipe for that, too.

Traveling and Coming Home

I think I’ve been away more than usual this summer.  I like traveling, and I was away doing things that I enjoyed or at least valued.  The food from a week at a camp and a week at a conference center, however, left me feeling lousy.  Dairy and eggs left this vegetarian craving beans.  Processed starches left me wanting whole grains.  And I acutely missed the abundance of fresh, local, delicious vegetables and fruits that I would have had at home.

At the end of the summer, I had the opposite travel experience.  We visited friends in Seattle and enjoyed plums and blackberries that grow on their property.  Then we went to a farmers market that was about 5 times the size of the larger of my local markets.  The variety of produce, cheeses, baked goods, and meat was overwhelming, in a good way.  The prices of fruits were much lower than what I’m used to paying.  I’ll admit a bit of climate envy.

At home, food this week has been about combinations.  A ratatouille included tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, green pepper, and fresh garlic along with garbanzos, dried oregano, salt, and of course lots of  olive oil.  It would have included fresh basil, too,  if we’d had energy to pick some from out back.

A stir-fry included green beans, broccoli, turnips, turnip greens, radishes, radish greens, and some cilantro.  As has become usual, we firmed up the tofu by heating it without oil in a single layer on a nonstick skillet, flipping it when the first side browned.  To work with the cilantro’s sweetness, the sauce used a generous amount of jarred hoisin sauce along with rice vinegar, soy sauce, and sesame oil.

We brought back a salad we particularly enjoyed last fall:  arugula with cheddar and apples, with a balsamic vinaigrette.  We’ve started to get apples from our CSA, and the rainy summer means this should be a particularly good apple season.  Flashback: last year I posted a catalogue of apples.  So far, we’ve gotten Ginger Gold.

Maps for Gastrotourists

A couple of Boston Globe articles alerted me to the existence of two types of gastrotourism maps for Massachusetts.

At hungrynomadmaps.com you’ll have the opportunity to buy maps of bicycle and walking routes to visit farmstands, vineyards, ice cream stands, and picnic spots.  There’s also some information available directly on the website.

At www.mass.gov/agr/massgrown/wineries.htm you’ll find a list of Massachusetts wineries and the chance to order a Wine and Cheese Trails map that covers the entire state.

Ridiculously Easy Biscuits

Inspired both by MangoChild and a novel that involved everyday sodabread, I’ve been playing around with soda-based quickbreads.  Tonight I made up a biscuit recipe that was so easy and came out so well that I have to share.

Mix together the dry ingredients:

• 2 cups flour (I used whole wheat)
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt

Then mix in the wet ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons oil (I used olive)
• 1 1/4 cup water (this is approximate, start with 1 cup, then slowly add more as needed)

Drop biscuits onto a cookie sheet.  I like to use 2 spoons: one to pick up dough, the other to push it into the sheet.  Leave an inch between biscuits because they’ll puff up during baking.

In an oven preheated to 400 F, bake for 10 minutes.

Yields about 20 biscuits.

***

Totally unrelated, but I might forget to write about this otherwise, a fruit report:

We have lots of blackberries growing this year.  It’s fun to watch them plump up, because some of the lobes plump up much sooner than others.

Our raspberries have been doing okay.  We’ve been able to pick a few at a time, every few days, for a couple of weeks.  Our total yield might be about 20 berries.  Since we only have 2 canes and we planted them only a year and a half ago, that’s just fine.

Unfortunately, birds (or maybe other critters) got our blueberries before they were ripe enough for us to have any.  Last year we only got 8, though, so it’s not like high expectations were dashed.  I splurged and bought a pint at the farmers market this week.  They’re good, but not as good as fresh-picked wild or homegrown.

Fennel Tabbouleh

During the summer, I find myself making a lot of variants on tabbouleh, depending on what vegetables I have around.  It’s great for using pretty much any veggies that are good raw, especially when I don’t have lettuce to make salad.  I often add chick peas to turn tabbouleh from a side salad into a satisfying lunch.  Last week’s tabbouleh confetti-colorful with orange carrots, purple-skinned kohlrabi, and green fennel.  I diced the carrots, halved the small fennel and quartered the large then sliced it thin, and the kohlrabi I made into matchsticks to make sure every piece showed some purple.  (You’ll notice a total lack of the traditional tomatoes or even cucumbers.)  While fresh parsley is best, frozen-thawed works fine.  When I don’t have either of those, I use some dried parsley, which mostly serves to add some color.

I liked the crunch of fennel in my confetti tabbouleh, and I liked the way its flavor played off the lemon juice.  Then I had an inspiration: I could use the fronds!  We haven’t had parsley the past few weeks, so it was easy to leave parsley out all together and use fennel fronds as the green instead.  Here’s my recipe:

Ingredients:

• 2 cups bulgur
• 4 cups chopped fennel:  bulbs and fronds (but not stems), which is probably 3 bunches
• 1 tablespoon dried mint (fresh would be lovely if you have it)
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1/2 cup lemon juice
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 1/2 cups boiling water

Directions:

1. Put the bulgur and dried mint into a large bowl.
2. Pour the water over the bulgur and mint, stir, and let sit until water is absorbed (about half an hour)
3. Stir the salt, lemon juice, and olive oil into bulgur.
4. Stir in the fennel (and fresh mint if using).