Kale again

For the first few years of our CSA, we didn’t know what to do with all the kale we were getting.  We cooked first with the vegetables that we liked more, and knew what to do with.  Kale would often get pushed to the back of our refrigerator and stay there until it was clearly past usable, and then out it would go. Some kale recipes seemed worth trying, but none were worth repeating.  But we kept getting kale so I kept trying, at least occasionally.  The first way I liked kale was in a lentil stew flavored with lemon juice and garam masala.  Once we got used to the taste of kale, we learned to like it a lot, cooked in a lot of different ways, in place of other milder greens.  I was on to something with the lemon, though.  Most of the ways we cook kale have that in common:  lemon or some other acidic flavoring, like red wine vinegar.  

Now we like kale enough that we choose to buy it in the seasons that our CSA doesn’t dictate our vegetables.  It grows reasonably well in winter (presumably in hoop houses) here in Massachusetts, so it’s available at our winter indoor farmers’ market. 

Tonight’s dinner challenge was this:  use up kale (from the farmers’ market) along with leftover rice, tzatziki, and pita bread.  We successfully devised this recipe:

Greek-Inspired Kale

Ingredients: 

• 1 bunch kale, finely chopped
• 1 can garbanzos, drained
• olive oil
• lemon juice
• garlic, diced or pressed (onion would work well here, too)
• dried mint, oregano, basil, and black pepper

In a large skilled, heat the garlic in a generous amount of olive oil. 

Add the garbanzos and kale, and stir them around to mix in the oil and garlic. 

Then add lots of mint, a little oregano and basil, and a few grinds of pepper. 

Cook, stirring as needed, until the kale wilts.  (Avoid over-cooking the kale, even though most recipes instruct you to do just that.) 

Add a very generous splash of lemon juice, stir, and remove from heat.

Enjoy as an entree over rice, with pita triangles and tzatziki on the side.

 

Last Frost Date

It’s important for locavores to be aware of the agricultural cycle in their vicinity.  First and last frost dates are important to that cycle.  For the record, I am recording her my own “last frost” date:  on April 5, 2011 we moved the last items out of our chest freezer and into our refrigerator’s attached freezer, and unplugged and defrosted the chest freezer for the season.

There was some chard, corn, broccoli, carrots, tomato puree, and applesauce.  They joined mashed butternut, pumpkin puree, raspberry conserve, more applesauce, and vegetable stock already in our attached freezer.  (Our freezer is not a place of locavore purity.  It also contains commercial packages of veggie burgers, tortellini, etc.)  We still have 2 very large butternut squashes and 1 blue hubbard squash.  Were it not for the new winter farmer’s market, we would have finished our freezer stash long ago and resorted to buying grocery store produce.

Soup and Salad

The winter farmer’s market has made it possible to have salad!  One of the farms, and now I’m forgetting its name, is growing salad mix in unheated greenhouses.  The leaves are tiny and delicate, and packed with flavor and nutrients.  It’s a real treat, and it has become a weekly treat, too.  Here it is in a salad with beets stored from our summer CSA and local eggs from a nearby store.  The bread slice is also from the winter farmer’s market.

At $4 for a 5 ounce clamshell, the salad mix is an affordable luxury.  If we hadn’t been eating the seasons for so long, it would be easy to take such a thing for granted.   I do wish there were an alternative to the plastic clamshell, though.  If there’s one guiding principle to my food choices lately, it’s been minimizing packaging.

Today was another snow day, so I made minestrone soup.  I simmered a pound of dried garbanzos, then scooped most of them into a storage container to make other meals.  The remaining beans and all of their cooking water was the beginning of my soup.  I added a large grocery store can of diced tomatoes in juice, and spices (basil, oregano, garlic, salt, pepper).  The fun was throwing in a mix of vegetables from our freezer:  bell peppers, zucchini, corn, and beet greens, along with carrots from the winter farmer’s market.  It was a beautiful rainbow of soup.  I wish I had taken a photo!

Inaugural Winter Market

We were very excited this week to go to the inaugural day of the local winter farmer’s market.  The only market within the reach of the subway (a mile by bus or walking from Davis Square), it’s in the Somerville Armory.  It runs from yesterday through the end of March, on Saturdays, from 10 to 2.

We went about 10:30, half an hour after it opened, and it was already crowded and getting more so.  There was lots of congestion as people mingled socially and browsed the wares.  We were among the many pushing strollers, which added to the navigational challenge.   Soon the preschoolers and their parents took over the mezzanine for running around.  It seemed a perfect arrangement.

The mix of vendors was good.  There was one orchard (Apex) selling apples and two farms (Winter Moon and Enterprise)  selling vegetables.  We bought a half peck of braeburn apples, on the recommendation of the sellers that they are among the last picked.  They’re excellent in both flavor and texture.  Next week, I plan to try their empire apples.

Winter Moon was selling only their own produce, all storage crops of roots, squashes, and dried popping corn.  I was very pleased with my $3 bag of a bit more than 3 cups of ruby red popping corn.  The kernels are red, but the popped corn is white like any other popcorn.  Enterprise Farm was selling the same mix of items that they include in their winter CSA:  some stuff from their greenhouses and storage, some stuff from other New England farms’ greenhouses and storage, and lots of fresh items from the Carolinas and Florida.  All of it was clearly labeled as to origin.  They had the longest shopping line of any stand I saw.

I expect and hope that demand this year will be high enough that the same and other farms will invest in storage, and more local vegetables and fruits will be available next winter.

As a vegetarian, I didn’t pay much attention to the meat stands, but I did notice that there were 3:  one with fish, one with red meat, and one that might have been poultry.  Reseska Apiaries was there selling honey and beeswax candles.  Apex Orchards also had some honey.  Cook’s Farm, who was mostly there as a bakery, had some maple syrup and applesauce, too.  I saw a total of 3 bakery stands.  I guess it’s nice to have them there, if I’m shopping for an entire meal, but it still feels weird to me that bakeries masquerade as farms.  In other sweets, Taza Chocolates, based nearby in Somerville, had a table.

It was the first modern farmer’s market in Massachusetts history to have wine vendors doing tastings and sales, because a new law finally allows them to.  There were 3 wineries at the market.

Other vendors are on the publicized list.  Maybe I just didn’t see everyone, or maybe more will be there in future weeks.

For more information:
Somerville Winter Market Vendors List
Massachusetts Winter Farmer’s Markets List

Happy Holidays!

Yes,  I still exist.  Someday maybe I’ll have time to blog regularly again, but not for a while.  My life is very full – full of things to do, and also full of joy.  My freezers are also very full.  We’re starting to eat out of our freezers, while also still eating fresh vegetables.  One recent meal used cabbage from the last farmer’s market in November, carrots stored from our summer CSA, peppers that we froze, and tomatoes from a supermarket can.  I’m excited that our home-stored stuff can soon be supplemented from a new winter farmer’s market in our area!  (I’ve been continually excited by the increase in local food vendors as other people also realize that local food is a good idea.)

We have been reviving my husband’s grandmother’s Christmas tourtiere (meat pie) tradition.  Three Christmases ago, a cousin used her recipe – and that’s how we found out that her recipe had been written down.  Once we had the original recipe in hand, we figured out how to make a vegetarian version.  We first tried using fake meat in place of the real, and then figured out that we could make it cheaper and healthier by using a mix of lentils and mushrooms instead.  Here’s a link to my vegetarian tourtiere recipe.  This year, we’ll serve it with mashed butternut squash, because we still have a lot from our CSA.  (We also have hubbard, acorn, delicata, and pumpkin.)  I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

Two Recipes

Cooking from a CSA is deceptively difficult.  After all, you get a beautiful bounty every week of the sort of high-quality ingredients you can’t go wrong with.  But they rarely come in familiar combinations.  We now have a stable of stand-bys (and you can find most of them in old blog posts).  Sometimes we make things up.  But when we’re stumped or making something new, we often look on-line or in cookbooks, find something close to what we want, and improvise from there.  Here are two such recipes from this summer:

July Scafata

We needed to use fava beans.  We get them one or two weeks each summer from our CSA.  We didn’t want to let them go moldy in our refrigerator again, but we couldn’t remember what we’d done with them before, nor whether we’d liked it.  Looking on line, we found that scafata was the best match for our ingredients.  It was definitely tasty enough to repeat.  Aside from shelling the fava beans, which would have to happen no matter what cooked with them, it’s easy enough to repeat, too.  I couldn’t tell you whose website the original came from, it shows up in multiple places, but if they give a source, it’s La Cucina Delle Regioni D’Italia: Umbria, by Antonella Santolini.  Here’s our version, which modified both ingredients and cooking times:

In a large skillet over medium heat, cook 10 minutes:

• 3 T olive oil
• 2 T minced garlic (would have been 1/2 C onion if I could eat onion, because that was in the original recipe and we got onions from our CSA, we just didn’t take them home)
• 2 lbs fava beans, shelled and peeled (you could easily substitute a 10 oz box of frozen lima beans)

Add and cook about 5 minutes more:

• 5 medium carrots, sliced

Add and cook about 10 minutes more:

• 2 small or 1 large bulb fennel, chopped
• Salt to taste

Add and cook about 5 minutes more:

• 1 large can (28 0z) diced tomatoes (canned because we made this in July when we had fava beans and had run out of frozen tomatoes from last year, rather than waiting until August when we get more tomatoes)
• Water as needed to make stew (I don’t remember whether we needed any)

Add and cook until wilted:

• 1 bunch beet greens (because that was what we had, although we often have chard, which is what the original recipe called for)

Serve with some sort of starch.  Enjoy!

Refrigerator Sour Pickles

Because we needed something to do with lots of cucumbers, when we weren’t getting any other salad ingredients.  This is very loosely based on the recipe for 48-hour Sour Pickles in Putting Food By (see my References and Resources page for the full listing).

Mix together for brine:

• 1 C white vinegar
• 3 C water
• 1/4 C salt
• 1/4 C sugar

Pour enough brine to cover (but it won’t because the cucumbers will float) over:

• 3 large cucumbers, sliced
• garlic: 1 heaping tablespoon of jarred, or a few cloves pressed or chopped

Cover and refrigerate.  Best about 2 days later.

Fresh Milk, Very Locally Produced

I have new appreciation for cows.  That’s all I have to say about milk; I just couldn’t resist the title.

When I saw our CSA farmer at a market a couple of weeks ago, I asked about possibly picking up from a different location the week that I finally gave birth.  He drops off at different locations on different nights.  He has a general policy against changing dropoffs on a week-by-week basis, but when I asked, he said he makes exceptions for births and deaths, so it was fine.  Sure enough, we were in the hospital on pick-up day, so we sent an email the night before, and arranged to go to a different pickup later in the week.  On the new veggie day, all of us piled into the car.  Our baby enjoyed the ride to the pickup and our farmer stopped distributing veggies for a minute or so to come over to the car and meet the newest consumer of his food (processed through me, of course).

When we got home and unpacked our veggies, we found that we had received: 2 bunches each of kohlrabi, turnips, beets, broccoli, cilantro, chard, red leaf lettuce, bib lettuce, and romaine lettuce – a total of 18 items!  With a new baby, we’re barely able to cook.  We’re hoping that one of our friends who offered us some post-baby help can be convinced that blanching and freezing kohlrabi greens, turnip greens, beet greens, and chard is a good way to help.  (Despite frozen broccoli being so common in the supermarket, it’s one of the worse-freezing of our CSA vegetables.)  Lettuce doesn’t freeze.  Even if we didn’t have a new baby, I’m not sure how we could go through 6 heads of lettuce in a week.  In fact, we still had a head from last week, and don’t even have a full week before our next drop-off.  We had a brainstorm, a way to “save two birds with one bird-saving apparatus” as my brother puts it, for the benefit of the vegetarians.  We loaded up a bag with lettuce, and my husband went around to the neighbors we know.  At each house, he rang the bell, and if the door was answered he said “I came by to let you know we have a new baby girl and far too much lettuce, would you like some?”  Meanwhile, I watched from the bay window of our living room, holding our baby.  Over and over, I saw my husband receive congratulations and our neighbors receive lettuce.

First CSA Drop-Off

Our first CSA drop-off of the year was yesterday (a week earlier than normal), and it’s a bumper year for greens.  Our farmer tells prospective members to expect 5-7 items a week in a small share and 8-11 items a week in a large share.   We get a large share, and this week we got 16 items!  We’re feeling a bit inundated.

We got a small share for many years before upgrading to a large share 3 years ago.  What made us change was the combination of learning how to freeze vegetables for winter use, and really wanting our local eating to be year-round.  That was when I started this blog, to track how it went and share what we’d learned.  I explained more in my first post.

Over the 7 years we’ve belonged to a CSA, we’ve learned how to prepare various obscure vegetables.  We’ve found some new favorites, and found that favorites change depending on the year (growing conditions?) and the preparations we use.  We’ve learned how to freeze vegetables (detailed in an earlier post), what freezes well (or what cooks well after being frozen), and how to predict how much of our bounty we should freeze (because we won’t get around to eating it fresh).

Which takes me to this week.  There’s no way we can eat 16 bunches of greens in one week, at least not in any way that leaves us happy to repeat the process next week.  And why should we?  We very much enjoy our home-frozen greens when we eat them in January.

This week we got 2 bunches each of red leaf lettuce, bibb lettuce, and pea tendrils – none of which freeze.  I’ve heard good things about romaine lettuce in stir-fries, but not bibb or red leaf.  We’ll eat a lot of salad this week, but we’ll also revert to one of the best tricks for surplus: giving away at least 1 of our 5 heads of lettuce.  Pea tendril leaves can be enjoyed raw in salads, or get cooked into stir-fries or any dish that uses peas, because the flavors are so similar.  To do so, just pull the leaves off their vines.  The flavor is so nice and de-leafing so time-consuming that we usually eat them as finger food, grabbing a stem and munching leaves, flowers, and the edible parts of the stem, until all that’s left are un-chewable parts for compost.

We also got 2 bunches each of bok choy, mizuna, chicory, kale, and spinach.  If we didn’t have so much lettuce, we’d enjoy some of the spinach raw in salads.  Mizuna and chicory can go into raw salads, adding interest with their strong flavors – mizuna is spicy and chicory is bitter – but only in small amounts. 

Bok choy is generally a stir-fry green around here, but sometimes goes raw into cold peanut noodles.  My peanut noodle sauce involves throwing stuff into a blender until I’m happy with the texture and flavor:  peanut butter, sesame oil, soy sauce, rice vinegar, garlic, ginger paste, and chili oil.  That gets tossed with the noodles while they’re still hot, and sometimes sesame seeds also.  Sometimes I add the vegetables at the same time, so they get coated with sauce, but sometimes I add them later, so they don’t get wilty the hot noodles.  Scallions, carrots, bok choy, napa cabbage, and romaine lettuce are all good peanut noodle vegetables.

Bok choy does not freeze, and mizuna (also a stir-fry green around here) does not freeze well, so I predict a few stir-fries in our future this week.  They probably won’t go into stir-fries together, as they have affinities for different sauces. The bok choy will probably be joined by some of the turnips we still have in our refrigerator from last fall.  Both mizuna and bok choy/turnips will be stir-fried with tofu cooked firm, something I should have learned to do much sooner than I did.  The trick is to not use oil until after the tofu is browned!  Cut the tofu into large bite-sized pieces, and arrange them on the bottom of a large non-stick skillet.  Give them fairly high heat, and flip them over when the first side is browned.  After the second side is browned, add whatever oil, sauces, and seasonings you like, and of course vegetables.

Because we got so much this week, and so many things that just don’t freeze, we then have to freeze whatever we can.  This morning, I froze both bunches of kale and both bunches of chicory.  Having now been through two winters of home-frozen vegetables, I have a much better sense of what’s worth freezing.  Kale cooks almost as well from frozen as it does fresh.  Chicory loses some of its texture – particularly its nice, crunch stems – but retains enough flavor and texture to be worth freezing.  Now or next winter, you can cook it up with oil, garlic, lemon juice, and garbanzo or cannelini beans, to serve over couscous.

I have ambitious plans to turn the spinach into spanikopita filling, sort of a fritata, and freeze that (after baking).  I’ve been good about following my doctor’s recommendation to not eat feta during pregnancy, so I’m sure I’ll enjoy spanikopita all the more after the birth.

Eating Season Begins

Local farmers markets are opening this week! I’m going to as many as I can.  Massachusetts listings are at www.massfarmersmarkets.org.

On Sunday, I went to opening day of the Harvard Square (Cambridge) market.  It’s a small market, and I know that opening week tends to be sparse, so I wasn’t terribly surprised to see 4 vendors and barely a vegetable.  Variety has become a hallmark of local markets, so the four vendors were each selling something different:  flowers, meat, bakery items, and vegetables.  The vegetable farm mostly had flats of herbs to take home and plant.  They had a half dozen varieties of scallions or green onions. I can barely eat those, so I didn’t buy any. What they did have, as I expected and hoped, was rhubarb, so I bought a pound and a half. It will become sauce, probably for ice cream. I think the sauce will freeze well. It’s easy to make: slice the rhubarb, put it into a small saucepan, macerate it in sugar until it releases enough juices to not burn, then turn on the heat and stew it until the texture is good. How much sugar is a matter of personal taste.

I had hoped to bring home greens to cook, but there weren’t any.  So Sunday evening used the last frozen greens from our freezer.  The mizuna made a nice stir-fry with tofu, seasoned with Japanese flavors of ginger, wasabi, rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, and sesame seeds.  The mizuna was chewier than fresh would be, and reminded me of the texture of seaweed, but since I think of seaweed as belonging in Japanese cooking, it was just fine.

Apparently, I used the mizuna just in time because I did find greens at opening day of the Central Square (Cambridge) market on Monday.  My CSA farmer was there!  He’s having a strong enough early harvest that he’s going to start drop-offs next week, which is earlier than usual.  He had fresh mizuna, but I didn’t buy any.  Instead I bought romaine and red leaf lettuces, red chard, bok choy, and kale.  The chard is so young that its stems look like beet stems rather than the celery size (and crunchiness) that I’m used to from later in the summer.

The lettuces have already become salad for a few meals, with chick peas and a homemade balsamic vinaigrette.  The chard will become saute with the leftover chickpeas, with garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, and maybe a bit of oregano.  It will go over couscous, or rice, or maybe pasta.  The bok choy will go into stir-fry with tofu and some of the turnips still surviving since last fall in our refrigerator.  Kale could turn into almost anything that uses greens.  Mostly, I bought it because it keeps better than any other greens and I don’t know when I’ll go into labor and be away from my vegetables for a couple of days.

Boil Water Orders

All of a sudden, everyone in my vicinity is thinking a lot about where our water comes from.  I wonder if this thought about water sources and water security will also make people think about food sources and food security.

It’s making me recall a conversation with a Haitian colleague back in January, shortly after the Haitian earthquake.  He was telling me about the difficulty his still-in-Haiti relatives and friends in the city were having in getting food from the countryside.  It made him think about our food supply here.  He pointed out that a lot of the U.S. is closer to Haiti than California is to Massachusetts.  How would California produce, or any other food, get to us if we had a catastrophe?

This weekend, we did in fact have a catastrophe:  there was a rupture in a joint of the tunnel that brings water from reservoirs in Western Massachusetts to those of us in Greater Boston.   We’re now cut off from our regular water source, the Quabbin Reservoir, and its treatment plants.

Instead, we’re  getting water from a few ponds in the region that serve as backup reservoirs.  It’s good for firefighting and flushing toilets.  Washing hands in it doesn’t leave them clean enough for handling food, so hand washing has to be followed by antibacterial hand sanitizer.  Showering in it is a lot better than being sweaty, as Murphy’s Law kicked in and we got weather in the muggy 80s right when we stopped having potable water.    No, it’s not potable, because it’s not going through the right sort of treatment.  Water from one of the sources is untreated, while water from other sources is going through heavy chlorination.

Lots of people in the area are getting their drinking water by buying it in bottles, with all the environmental costs of shipping and plastic.  We’re not, but it’s not easy.  First we have to kill the bacteria by boiling the water – a rolling boil for at least a minute – then let it cool enough that we can run it through a Brita filter to take out most of that chlorine.

For all the hassle, it’s good to be reminded to appreciate the safety and convenience we tend to take for granted.