Harvest Meal: Roasted Parsnips

This winter we have a surfeit of parsnips to harvest, which is wonderful because they are one of my favorite vegetables.  But parsnips can be tricky to cook well, because they aren't very dense.  So when you roast them (one of the very best cooking methods for this vegetable) with other root crops, they tend to cook through much faster than carrots, potatoes, or turnips.  Add to this the abundant sugars in a winter-harvested parsnip, and you have a recipe for burned, or mushy parsnips, or worst of all, both conditions at once.

So I like to roast parsnips on their own, and I recently hit on a fabulous way of doing that.  It's a bit more fussy than other methods, but it produces such deliciousness that I'm willing to go to the extra effort.  The nicest thing about this dish is that all the major ingredients are either homegrown, or homemade.

I start by cutting up several slices of my home cured guanciale.  I'm sure bacon or pancetta would work fine as well, but the extra seasonings that I add to my guanciale give the dish a little something special.  If you use bacon or pancetta, one or two slices should do it.  My guanciale is small, and my slices short; I used about seven slices for two full pans of roasted parsnips.  A little bit of fatty cured pork goes a long way in the flavor department.  So the slices are cut into bite-sized pieces and gently heated in a skillet just enough for some of the fat to render out into a liquid state.  Some of the guanciale pieces begin to brown a little, but I'm not aiming to crisp them up at this point.

While the fat renders I go to the trouble of peeling several parsnips and cutting them also into bite sized pieces.  I check my quantities by spreading out the chopped parsnips on a sheet pan.  I don't want it overcrowded, but neither do I want too much open space on the pan.  The vegetables should all fit in a single layer with a bit of space around the pieces.  To each sheet pan of parsnips I add several peeled cloves of garlic, left whole, a good amount of finely chopped rosemary, and freshly ground white pepper.  I gather up the ingredients to the center of the pan, pour over the rendered guanciale fat and the guanciale pieces, and add just a bit of olive oil to the pile.  Then I mix everything by hand so that the vegetables are well coated with oil and fat.  These get spread back out to an even layer, and sprinkled with kosher salt just before going into a 375 F oven.

A single pan of these parsnips will take about 25-30 minutes to roast.  If you make two or more pans of these goodies at once, it'll take longer.  It's a good idea to rotate pans between shelves, as well as turning them 180 degrees if you're making a lot.  I didn't need to stir the parsnips around from time to time as they cooked.  With larger pieces of root vegetables I've noticed that doing so encourages more even cooking.  The smaller pieces don't seem to need it.  When the parsnips and guanciale develop a lovely browned appearance, you'll know they're done.

It may seem strange that I'm elevating what most people would consider a side dish to the status of a proper meal.  All I can say is that I tried using these roasted parsnips as a topping for pasta, and while it worked just fine, I noticed that the pasta seemed more of a distraction from the vegetables than a help.  So I gave up and next time just ate a large bowlful of the roasted parsnips.  Not the most nutritionally balanced meal in the world, but I can't stop eating them.  I'm thrilled to have stumbled on a great recipe for parsnips that uses homegrown garlic and rosemary, which is doing well by the way under protection.  We've hardly needed much in the way of season extension infrastructure with the mild winter we're having, but that's another post.

I got the basic idea for this dish from Molly Stevens' All About Roasting cookbook.  She takes her dish in a sweeter direction than mine with the addition of brown sugar.  To my mind, a parsnip that is allowed to stay in the ground through a few frosts so that it sweetens up on its own is plenty sweet enough, so I leave the sugar out.  But I appreciate the attention to detail in Stevens' book.  Hitting on the best temperatures and cooking pans for roasting all sorts of different foods is not an intuitively obvious thing, but one arrived at through much trial and error.  So I'm grateful for the sheet pan and temperature recommendation on this recipe, and the topic of the book is well suited to the season.

Anyway, I hope some of you will try this parsnip recipe, especially if you've never been impressed with this humble treasure before.  It was once the main winter staple crop of Europe, before the potato was brought from the new world.  I do wish that I could retrieve some of the ways our ancestors prepared this vegetable.  I'm sure they had some very good ways with the parsnip.  If you have a favored recipe for parsnips or other root crops, please do share them in the comments!

Cooking an Old Hen, with Knefles

When we slaughtered the last of our broiler chickens towards the end of September, we also dispatched our two Cuckoo Marans hens at the same time. The Cuckoo Maran is a dual-purpose chicken, which means it divides its energies between laying eggs and putting meat on its bones. We found the legs on the Cuckoos quite sizable, though the breasts weren't all that much to write home about.  After butchering the birds into cuts, I put the carcasses into the freezer to save for making stock and rendered all the fat into schmaltz to use for sumptuous roasted potatoes and other vegetables. Given my penchant for frugality and the amount of meat the two Cuckoos yielded, I decided to try again to make old hen meat palatable.

I had tried the time-honored coq au vin recipe with a previous batch of hens to no avail.  Still, to buy myself some time, I let the cut up legs, wings, and breasts marinate in some cheap white wine in the fridge for three days.  Maybe this was excessively long for marinating, but I was hedging my bets as well as simply being too busy to get to it sooner.

I had ambitions for experimenting with several different methods for cooking the meat, but as it happened the one that I managed to execute worked out pretty well.  So I'll outline what did work.  I started with a few diced onions cooked in olive oil just until they were softened and then lightly seared the chicken parts in the same pan.  The onions and chicken went into a bowl with some of the white wine marinade (enough to come about halfway up the meat in the bowl) and then were cooked in my pressure cooker for 45 minutes, at about 10 pounds of pressure.  When that was done, the meat was reasonably tender, so I gave some thought to how I might use it.  And here we come knefles and to what I can only hope is a worthy divagation.

Chicken and dumplings is a time-honored American dish for good reason, and I felt like going in that direction.  But it was cold outside, and I wanted something a little denser than the light biscuits that feature in the classic southern supper.  So I thought of knefles, a culinary guilty pleasure of mine.  I found the recipe in a fortuitous reprint of a delightful old cookbook, Cooking With Pomiane.  The book is genteelly dated and well worth the read, more of a tour through a charming bit of culinary history than a cookbook for our times.  But the recipe for knefles has proved an exception and earned a place in my kitchen repertoire.  They're a sort of Gallo-Germanic pasta that would be considered an abomination by the Italians, which, I grant you, isn't saying much.  The Italians think that any deviation from the particular pasta of their own particular region results in something fit only for barbarians.  Knefles, which hail from the Alsace region, would be distinguished then by the unanimity with which Italians of every region would heap scorn upon them.

So what are knefles?  Just a rough dough made with flour, milk, and egg, then scooped up by the teaspoonful.  You knock the scoops of dough into boiling salted water as you make them one by one and cook for ten minutes.  That's it.  Sort of like gnocchi, or schupfnudeln, or spaetzle, but not really any of those things.  Knefles are easier to make and less refined.  You can sauce them when they're cooked, or add a little butter and cheese and bake them, or you can play around with them like I do.  I like to add lots of finely minced fresh herbs from the garden to the dough.  I'm fairly certain that it's incorrect, but I pronounce the K in knefles.  It reminds me of Roald Dahl's vermicious knids.  And how likely am I to run across anyone who could authoritatively correct my pronunciation?

To get back to my harvest meal, in this case I used knefles as replacements for the dumplings in chicken'n dumplings.  So I put some chicken stock on to boil with the remaining white wine from the marinade, threw in the onions that had pressure-cooked with the chicken cuts, added some thyme and made a batch of knefles with chives and garlic chives in them.  Here's the recipe, which can easily be doubled:


Knefles

1/2 pound (~230 g) flour (1 1/2 generous cups)
finely minced fresh herbs to taste (optional)
1 egg
about 1/2 cup (~24 cl) of milk

Combine the flour with the herbs if you are using them.  Mix in the egg and then enough of the milk to make a thick, shaggy dough that is just a shade too sticky to knead by hand.  Work the dough with a sturdy spoon for a few minutes in the bowl to develop texture.  Bring salted water or another cooking liquid to a brisk simmer just shy of full boiling and begin to shape the knefles.  Using the tip of a teaspoon scoop up a small hunk of the dough, only enough to cover about half the spoon.  Dip the spoon into the boiling water and knock it firmly against the rim of your pot.  The dough will fall into the water.  (Avoid the urge to scoop more dough and make bigger knefles.  The dough will expand anyway when cooked, and bite-sized knefles cook through better than large ones.)  Repeat until all the dough has been shaped and put into the water.  Stir the contents of the pot once very gently to detach the knefles from the bottom of the pan.  Cover the pan and adjust the heat so that the knefles cook at a steady simmer for ten minutes.  The knefles should have doubled in size and all be floating. Test for doneness the first time you make them, just in case you made them too big.  Then drain and sauce to your liking. Serve hot.

I cooked the chivey knefles in the chicken stock and wine, adding chopped garden carrots when they were halfway done.  While that cooked I took the chicken meat off the bones and tore it all into bite-sized pieces.  When the knefles were finished cooking I added the shredded chicken meat, some frozen peas and chopped parsley to the pot and let those ingredients just heat through.  This was all served up in a thoroughly non-photogenic mess.  What can I say?  The light in my kitchen sucks.  But the mess went down very nicely, very tastily indeed.  Since my childhood didn't equip me with nostalgia for chicken'n dumplings, I have to say that old hen'n knefles is a superior dish in my book.  This definitely counts as a harvest meal for us.  On our sub-acre lot we produced the hen, chicken stock, eggs, carrots, and all the herbs that went into the dish.  I happened to use purchased onions for the dish, but it could just as easily have been made with homegrown leeks.

An illicit glee invariably accompanies the preparation and consumption of a dish so comfortingly barbaric.  At least for me.  We always have the ingredients on hand, so it's sort of surprising that we don't indulge in them more often.  Knefles are about as cheap as anything you could possibly prepare at home.  Even a single batch makes more than two adults will eat as a side dish.  I sometimes save half the dough in the refrigerator and make the rest the next day.  The dough won't keep much longer than that, though surplus cooked knefles can be held in the fridge for a few days.  Put a little oil or melted butter on extras while they're still hot if you want to hold them; it will prevent them sticking to each other.  Cooked knefles can be pan-fried, but if you've refrigerated them try to bring them to room temperature first and cook them slowly and gently so they heat through without burning.  If you want to pan-fry freshly cooked knefles, spread them out to air dry for a few minutes so they'll brown a bit better.

If you make any similar sort of dumpling-y, comforting dish from flour, potatoes, or other starchy ingredients, I'd love to hear about it.  In detail, of course.

A Good Gleaning Haul

Yesterday while running an errand I noticed that the Bartlett pear tree around the corner from our home was hanging heavy with fruit.  The owners of this property have put up a "free pears" sign on their lawn about half the years since we've been living here, but it hasn't been consistent.  Well...I wanted those pears, and I wanted them before they all fell to the ground.  Pears are best picked off the tree before they ripen.  Many times the ones that fall naturally develop hard crystal-like formations in their flesh, which aren't very pleasant to eat.

We purchased a long-handled fruit picker basket last year to help us pick the high fruit from our own apple tree.  It's a handy thing that extends our reach by about 9' (2.7 m).  So we put it in the car along with a bushel basket (I was feeling optimistic) and went to ask after the pears.  The property is just far enough away from ours that I don't consider these people neighbors, exactly.  Our area is sort of rural, and sort of suburban; "around the corner" can be a fair distance in these parts.  As is so often the case, when we asked politely the owner of the property was delighted to let us take the pears.  He said he didn't like to see them go to waste, but that he and his wife don't use them.  I mentioned that I'd collected pears from his tree a few times in previous years when he'd put the sign up, and thought perhaps he just hadn't gotten round to putting one up this year.  He said that was exactly the case and emphasized repeatedly that we were welcome to come back any time for the fruit.

We cleaned the tree of almost all the fruit that was still on the branch.  There were a few that even our long-handled picker couldn't reach, but not many.  As a courtesy we picked up all the fruit on the ground too.  Most of these had obvious damage on them, some from a lawn mower.  I'll send them on with our early drop apples to my farming friend who raises hogs.  The appearance of the pears makes it obvious that they haven't been sprayed with anything, so I'm sure she'll feel comfortable giving them to her animals.  The fruit we kept for ourselves came nearly to the top of our bushel basket.

I mentioned that pears are best picked before they ripen on the branch.  It turns out that pears are rather tricky to bring to what humans consider a nice state for eating.  They need to be picked before maturity and then chilled.  The chilling time depends on the variety, but fortunately the Bartlett only requires a couple of days.  So these will be in our refrigerator for a little while and then I'll spread them back out to ripen up on cardboard in the front room.  That way I can keep an eye on each one and no fruit gets crushed by the weight of fruit above. It's certainly a lot of fruit.  I don't mind though.  In fact, getting this much fruit free for the picking was a great mood booster.  I've been frustrated with several things that are happening or not happening around the homestead lately.  Free pears go a long way towards cheering me up.  And this is a nice time of year to make jam and do the hot work of canning.  Temperatures are definitely dropping off.  I put aside a small amount of elderberry juice last month and stashed it in our freezer.  I know what a surreal and gorgeous color even a little bit of juice makes when I combine it with a pale fruit like pears.  So when the pears ripen up, I'll make more elderberry-pear jam.  Needless to say, when it's done some will go to our benefactors around the corner.

I'm also planning to revisit an amazingly yummy cake recipe I found over at 101 Cookbooks.  Heidi's salt-kissed buttermilk cake recipe is easily adapted to many different seasonal fruits.  I tried it once with pears from the farmer's market and simply could. not. stop. eating. it.  The nice thing about that is that for a cake, this one is surprisingly non-naughty: only half a cup of sugar and 4 tablespoons of butter.  Buttermilk does the rest in terms of adding flavor and body to a very light-textured cake.  I switched from Heidi's raspberry and lemon zest flavorings to sliced pear, minced crystallized ginger and almond extract.  The salty-sweet topping for the fruit made the flavors really pop.  This one went directly into my printed out recipe binder.

My husband is shocked that I don't count gleaned fruit as part of our harvest tally.  I explained that my project is to demonstrate how much food can be produced by perfect nobodies on an average residential lot in our area.  Since we didn't grow it ourselves and it didn't come from our property, I don't see that we should get "credit" for it as part of our harvest.  I'd certainly count any weeds we foraged off our own property for consumption, but gleaning elsewhere is another thing entirely.  Still, gleaning what we can is part and parcel of our overall drive for frugality, and I hate to see food go to waste.  So I see his point.  Maybe from now on I'll keep a separate gleaning tally for things we gather off-property.  It could be an interesting adjunct figure to go with our harvest tally.

Any good gleaning going on in your neck of the woods?

Harvest Meal: Pad See Ew

There are two topics I want to cover in today's post: a new variety of broccoli that I'm growing this year, and the dish I keep making with it. Let's start with the crop.

It's a Brazilian variety of broccoli called piracicaba.  Yes, it's a mouthful.  Say: "peer-ah-SEE-kah-bah."  Piracicaba is referred to as a non-heading broccoli, but what that really means is that the heads it produces are quite small.  The largest ones I've seen on my plants are the first ones formed in the center of the plant.  They're big enough to divide into two or maybe three good sized spears.  When that one is removed, more heads start to form on the outer branches, each one smaller than the last.  The salient point here is that piracicaba broccoli was bred for its leaves, not its florets.  I learned to love broccoli leaves when I lived in the city and shopped at a good farmer's market.  There was a vendor who sold "baby broccoli leaves" which I used for stir-fries.  Maybe that vendor was hip way back then, and they were piracicaba leaves.  They were certainly addictive.  So growing a variety of broccoli which can deliver a steady supply of small and tender leaves all through the summer is a real joy.

But wait, there's more.  Perhaps it wouldn't surprise you to hear that a Brazilian broccoli variety is exceptionally tolerant of heat and drought.  The extent of this plant's endurance is on display this summer.  We've had scorching heat and very, very little rain; and the piracicaba couldn't care less, apparently.  Given the way our summers are trending with the global climate weirding, this is an attribute that has my full attention and respect.  Piracicaba is also fairly cold hardy.  I grew some last year as a trial and found that it held on till the first frost.  That did surprise me.  That's still not all though.  The most amazing thing about this brassica variety is that the cabbage moths (small whites) utterly ignore it.  I mean they have NO interest.  None, zip, zilch.  The only damage I find on the piracicaba leaves is from flea beetles, and that's pretty minor. 

Noticing this lack of damage from the cabbage moths last year, I resolved to grow no cabbage at all in the spring this year.  My spring brassicas therefore consisted of Tuscan kale, piracicaba, kohlrabi and a few turnips.  Without the cabbage in the garden to attract the moths, all the other brassicas took much less damage than usual from them.  I've got my fall cabbages under a row cover now, to protect them from the depredations of both moth and heat.

Piracicaba & pad see ew ingredients

So how do I eat this stuff?  That brings me to a harvest meal that's been in heavy rotation this summer: pad see ew, a Thai noodle dish.  I grew to love Thai food in those years I lived in the city.  Now I indulge in some of my favorites at home.  Thai cuisine is well suited to summertime in Pennsylvania, since I don't want to heat my house up any more than strictly necessary.  Thai cookery usually relies on lots of ingredient preparation followed by a very short cooking period which brings everything together into a delicious whole.  This describes pad see ew to a tee.

This dish is not at all spicy-hot, and can include meat or be vegetarian.  I've been making a vegetarian version, so that's what I'll describe.  What follows will prepare a generous single serving.  Scale up proportionally to feed more people.

Place 2 ounces of celophane (transparent) rice noodles in a pot.  Cover with cool water and soak for at least one hour before cooking.  The longer the soaking time, the less you'll need to cook them.  I've seen this dish most often prepared with the widest rice noodles.  These will require some heating to fully cook through.  Medium cut noodles require less, and the thin cut noodles can skate by with no pre-cooking if you soak long enough.

Prepare all your other ingredients.  Slice one or two shallots, and mince three large cloves of garlic, or as much as you like, according to your tastes.  Wash 3-4 ounces of piracicaba leaves and florets, or an equivalent amount of any other type of broccoli.  Trim them into small pieces that will cook quickly in a stir-fry.  In a small bowl measure out 1 and a half teaspoons of fish sauce, and add 2 tablespoons of soy sauce.  Keep both sauces on hand in case you want to add more during cooking.  Beat one egg in a small bowl.  Measure out one tablespoon of sugar in another small bowl.  Coarsely chop several stems of cilantro.  Have all these ingredients and some cooking oil laid out near your cooking area.  A long handled spoon or cooking chopsticks will be useful, and you may want tongs for serving.

Check your noodles.  If you are using any but the smallest of the flat rice noodles, put the pot of noodles on the burner and warm the water, giving the noodles a gentle stir from time to time.  You will not even need to bring the water to a boil.  (Don't put rice noodles you failed to soak into boiling water.  They'll just stick together in a tangled mess.)  Make sure they are well softened, but keep in mind they'll get a final cooking as part of the stir-fry.  Do not overcook them or they will fall apart when you cook the rest of the dish.  When softened, turn off the heat.  Have a colander in the sink ready to drain them at the last moment.

Preheat your largest heavy skillet over high heat for at least four minutes.  Add a generous amount of cooking oil to the pan and immediately add the garlic and shallots.  Stir these only long enough to separate them in the hot oil.  Then add the piracicaba and stir it very gently around the pan so that it just begins to wilt.  Drain the rice noodles, shaking off excess water, and stir them to combine with the broccoli.  Sprinkle the sugar over the ingredients in the pan and continue stirring until the broccoli is wilted.  Push all the ingredients to the edges of the pan, forming a ring of ingredients with a hole in the middle.  If the pan looks very dry in the center, add a little more oil.  Pour the beaten egg into the center and let it sit for a moment.  Pour the fish sauce and soy sauce mixture in a circle over the mixture of noodles and broccoli.  When you can see that the bottom of the beaten egg has begun to set up, mix all ingredients thoroughly in the pan.  The uncooked egg should coat the noodles and broccoli.  Check the color of the noodles.  They should be brown from the soy sauce.  If they are very pale, add a bit more soy sauce and mix well.  Cook just long enough that the eggs have cooked and excess liquid has evaporated.  Turn off the heat and mix in the chopped cilantro.

If you're a strict vegetarian you can leave out the fish sauce.  If you're a committed carnivore you can add small pieces of raw meat to the center of the skillet before the eggs go in.  Cook the meat thoroughly and push it to the edges with the other ingredients before adding the beaten egg.

Ugly picture, yummy food

I count this as a harvest meal for us since we produced the shallots, garlic, eggs, cilantro, and piracicaba that goes into the pad see ew.  The rice noodles, sugar, oil, fish sauce and soy sauce are purchased.   This is another one of those dishes that I just can't seem to get enough of.  Fortunately our six piracicaba plants produce very steadily.  From those six plants I can harvest enough leaves every three or four days to prepare a meal for my husband and myself.

I plan to have some piracicaba plants in the hoop house this winter.  We'll see how long they hold on in there, and perhaps they'll even overwinter with enough protection.  Piracicaba will definitely be a mainstay brassica in next year's garden.  I recommend it to anyone who loves broccoli and lives where the summers are warm.  Seeds are getting easier to find.  Fedco has carried them for at least the last two years.

What harvest meals are you preparing these days?

Spring Harvest Meal: Cream of Lovage Soup

The temperature is gradually warming up, but the weather has been grey and damp and dreary lately.  The herbs are all coming on strong, and the asparagus are just breaking ground in their raised beds.  I got my spring haircut, so the nape of my neck is bare, which only means I don't have a great desire to be outside more than necessary when the sun is hidden. This is all a roundabout way of saying it's soup weather.

So today I whipped up a bare bones, easy-peasy cream of lovage soup.  Cream soups were a staple of the curriculum at culinary school.  There we were taught a formula and a methodology rather than individual cream-of recipes.  Pretty much, you can make a cream-of soup out of any ingredient.  Now, having told you there's a formula, you might reasonably expect me to tell you what the formula is.  Sadly, the exact proportions are lost in the mists of time, at least to my mind.  What has stuck are the ingredient list and the methodology, which is admittedly a bit fussy in the sense that too many pans get dirtied.  It is after all, a French recipe.

When I was in culinary school "lilies" were shorthand for anything in the onion family.  I believe at one time all onion relatives were classified in the lily family by botanists.  In any case, the chefs just referred to "lilies" in a formula, while an individual recipe would specify which lily was called for, such as onion, shallots, leeks, ramps, scallions or even garlic.  Lilies are one cornerstone of a cream-of soup, and the other is the main ingredient.  Then of course there's the cream.  Since this is a French recipe, it goes without saying that multiple additions of butter are also involved, one of which is likely to be roux.  Roux is just a cooked mixture of flour and butter.  (Enough divagations yet?  Can we move on?)

So my cream of lovage soup recipe took advantage of my three-year-old lovage plant, which is up and at 'em very early in the year.  Convenience came into it in other ways as well.  There were those salvaged and precooked leeks hanging out in the chest freezer, and scrumptious canned stock made from our home raised turkey.  Also there was some parsley butter (a convenient means of preserving last year's herbs) in the freezer.  Those four convenience foods made this soup a snap to pull together in no time.

The prepped leeks were roughly equivalent to one medium leek, already chopped up and partially cooked in butter.  These went into a soup pot to thaw over medium heat.  When thawed, I added two bay leaves, a good pinch of kosher salt, and half a pound of lovage - the chopped up stalks first, the leafy tops initially reserved.  There was enough butter in the leeks to handle the lovage stalks too.  When these were nicely sweated and softened, I added the leafy tops, a quart of our smoked turkey stock, and about 2 tablespoons of the parsley butter.  While that warmed through, I cooked a very thick roux with a couple tablespoons of butter and three heaping tablespoons of flour in a separate pan. I went to the hassle of straining the solid ingredients from the liquid (removing the bay leaves) in order to puree them.  The strained liquid was gradually (to avoid lumps) mixed into the roux, and then the pureed solids returned to the pot.   (A wand blender, if you have one, would get you close enough to the same effect with less bother and cleanup.) From there I added a good glug (1/2 a cup or so) of cream, tasted to adjust seasonings, and then warmed the soup through for serving.  It was very nice, but light enough to need some toasted bread for extra ballast

If we'd had any potatoes left, they would have been a perfect addition to this soup.  They'd give it some heft, turning it into a far more substantial meal, and would be a satisfying way to use up the last of the winter stores by pairing them with a bright new flavor from one of the earliest spring crops.  Another option that suggests itself to my tastebuds is the addition of wild rice to this soup.  I think the complex flavor of the lovage would complement the dark nuttiness of wild rice very nicely.  And fully cooked wild rice is an excellent thickener when pureed.  With the addition of either potatoes or wild rice, the roux could be omitted, making the dish gluten-free.

I suppose I should talk about lovage, since it's not the most familiar herb to modern palates.  The taste of lovage is commonly likened to celery, but I think there's a great deal more to it than that.  While I certainly taste the kinship to celery, lovage also reminds me strongly of cardamom.  The later in the season, the more the celery taste recedes, and the more the cardamom flavor predominates.  But lovage has something else all its own that is neither celery, nor cardamom.  It's hard to describe, but lovage is a big flavored herb, far stronger tasting to my palate than self-effacing celery.  The stalks of lovage are round and hollow, so some people apparently use them as straws - particularly for bloody marys, which benefit from the celery-ish taste imparted by the stalks.

As a plant, lovage has many virtues too.  It's perennial and hardy to zone 4 or 5, depending on whom you believe. On my homestead it tolerates half a day or more of total shade, and actually requires partial shade in warmer zones than mine (6b).  It is reputed to improve the health of many other crops when companion planted, and it provides habitat for beneficial insects, especially hoverflies.  Though it can become bitter and tough in hot weather, you can cut it back hard in summer to encourage the growth of tender new stalks with milder flavor.  Like many herbs, lovage is unfussy about soil type, water, and temperatures once it has established itself.  In the second and subsequent years it gets tall by mid-summer - up to 5 or 6 feet, but is not an aggressive spreader.  This is an herb that I have utterly ignored except for an occasional shovelful of compost side-dressing once in a while, usually in fall.  It comes up reliably for us and is much appreciated at this time of year, when we crave green things.  It can be propagated from seed or root division, which we plan to try next  year.

So that's the run down on lovage.  If you've got a shady spot that has gone begging, you might consider giving it to this early, delicious, and easy to grow herb.  If you already grow and cook with lovage, I'd love to hear what you do with it.

Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease

Success! It took a few politely persistent email requests, but I've now got the long coveted recipe for the lacto-fermented ketchup I sampled at 2010's PASA conference. The recipe comes from Maureen who blogs at Nourishing Traditional Cook.  I know more than one reader has asked for this, and I very much wanted it myself. I'm posting the recipe now so that anyone who wants to try it out with canned tomatoes can do so. Perhaps some of you Aussie readers have fresh tomatoes still to play around with. I'll probably wait until our own tomatoes come in and then smoke a few to mimic the fire-roasted flavor of the Muir Glen tomatoes called for in this recipe.

Lacto-fermented Ketchup

1, 20 oz Muir Glen Fire Roasted Tomato Puree
2 Tbsp. raw cider vinegar
2 Tbsp. whey (liquid, unpasteurized)
1/4 cup fermented fish sauce or 1/2 can anchovies in oil
1/4 large green pepper, sliced
1-2 Tbsp. raw honey
2 cloves garlic
2 tsp. basil
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp ground mace
1 tsp dry mustard
2 pinches ea. ground cinnamon and nutmeg

Puree in blender or VitaMix. Let sit on counter for 12-24 hours, refrigerate. You may also substitute balsamic vinegar for the whey. It won't be as much fermented, but is truly delicious!

By the way, I can attest to the high quality of the canned tomatoes called for in this recipe. They're what I relied on before we became self-sufficient in tomatoes. I don't know how many vegetarians or vegans are going to be put off by this recipe. All I can say is that this ketchup rocked my world. I'd eat this stuff on eggs, beans, or as a side dish to just about anything. It was that delicious.

I will definitely be playing around with this recipe this summer, and may post an update on any successful tweaks that I find especially pleasing. I'm curious to see whether I can incorporate a bit of onion without overwhelming the other flavors. My fumbling experimentation with lacto-fermented ketchup last year definitely taught me that any addition of onion should be tiny in comparison to the rest of the ingredients. If any of you experiment with the recipe - either using canned tomatoes or homegrown - I would really love to hear back from you about any tweaks you make, or just what you think of the recipe. Please let me know!

NOTE: If you entered the drawing for the homesteading books with an anonymous sign in and no identifying details (first name + city, or email address in the body of the comment), I can't verify your identity if you win. If this applies to you, leave another comment with some details to be sure you get a chance at the books. Anonymous entries with no details will be discarded. It's great to hear about so many small scale homesteads from all of you. Keep up the good work!

A Heroic Commitment to Leftover Consumption

These lovelies complemented my fried egg breakfast yesterday.  Potato pancakes made from the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers.  What's in them?  Leftover mashed potatoes (which had been made with milk, cream, and sauteed leeks), two sliced up scallions, a few twists of ground garlic (from our sliced, dehydrated garlic, placed in a peppermill), and a few tablespoons of flour to help the pancakes hold their shape better.  Knead all ingredients together with the hands, form the patties, pan-fry them gently in oil over medium heat, a few minutes each side, blot on pages torn from an old phone book.  Thank goodness the leftover ordeal is over, huh?  Yeah, life's tough.

Harvest Meal: Kinpira Gobo

This is the most macho harvest meal yet to grace our table. Sure, it looks like a wimpy vegetarian dish, but a lot of muscle went into the harvest and preparation.  It's kinpira gobo, which is Japanese for awesomely delicious burdock root.  I know, "kinpira gobo" sounds so much better.  Gobo is burdock in Japanese.  They've cultivated this root vegetable which is viewed only as a common weed where I live, refined it into a proper crop.  Though if you know your weed lore, you know that burdock burrs were the inspiration for velcro, so show it some respect.

I put a few Takinagawa burdock seeds into a patch of deeply amended ground early this year, watered them once or twice and then largely ignored them through our brutally hot summer.  Like the good descendants of common weeds that they are, nearly every last one of them germinated, and they thrived on neglect.  Really.  What they did can only be described as thriving.  They outgrew the elder seedling we planted nearby, almost to the point of shading it out. (I'm not worried.  The elder is a perennial, and those plants grow big in year two.)

When our first WWOOF volunteer was here, we dug up a few gobo, even though the specimens of this long season crop weren't all that big yet.  She was of partly Japanese descent, and damned if I was going to let someone who knew what to do with this plant get away without cooking it if I could help it.  She whipped up a dish of kinpira gobo with a few early dug gobo roots, plus a few carrots from the garden.  The dish was strikingly hearty and satisfying, and I resolved to master the dish myself when the roots were ready for harvest.

Gobo is reputed to be anticarcinogenic and an excellent tonic plant for the liver, and it's also supposed to make you strong.  The joke is that you don't get strong by eating gobo; you get strong from trying to prize the suckers out of the ground.  Gobo roots will grow up to a yard long if given the right soil conditions.  Euell Gibbons recommended against even attempting a frontal assault on the wild variety.  It's pointless to try to dig the root out directly.  Instead, dig as deep a hole as possible alongside the root, then pull the root into the hole and cut it as low as you can.  Like I said, our gobo was planted in extremely well worked earth, amended with a lot of compost.  And it still felt like earning my dinner to harvest these roots.  Every single time I dug for a gobo root, I left part of it in the ground.  This is fine by me as it only adds more organic matter to the soil.  Dinner and soil amendment in one go.  Yay!

Kinpira gobo ingredients: homegrown gobo in the foreground

Okay, to the recipe.  This is based on the way our volunteer prepared it, and not necessarily "authentic."  She was working within the limitations of the ingredients we had on hand, and substituting as necessary.  As usual, I don't have measurements.  The root needs some moisture to cook through, but not so much that it turns mushy.  It should retain a toothsome firmness.  Here's an ingredient list:

Gobo root - about 5"-8" of root per serving, depending on root diameter
carrots - optional
kombu (a dried seaweed) for dashi (you can substitute another seaweed or another kind of stock if you wish)
cooking oil - peanut, canola, or the like
sake (you can substitute a sweet mirin if that's what you have, but then omit the maple syrup)
soy sauce
maple syrup
bonito flakes (fine shavings from dried, fermented tuna)
sesame seeds for garnish, optional
rice to serve it over

Make a simple dashi (Japanese cooking stock) by gently simmering a 10" strip of kombu (dried seaweed) in a pan, uncovered, with about 1 cup of water for 15 minutes.  Meanwhile, fill a large bowl with water and place another empty bowl in the sink.  Hold the gobo root at one end, so that it points away from you. Using the back of a chef's knife, scrape all the skin and small feeder roots off of the root, allowing the scrapings to fall into the bowl.  Rinse the root as needed to remove all bits of the skin.  As each root is peeled, put it into the bowl of water.  This will prevent or at least slow discoloration on the root surface. Once the skin is removed, swap the bowls so that the bowl of water is in the sink.  Begin cutting off slim shards of the root with the knife, rotating the root as needed, as though you're sharpening a pencil with a penknife. Allow the shards to fall into the bowl of water.  The pieces should be less than 1/2" thick and no more than 3.5" long.  Continue cutting pieces off the root until only a small piece remains in your hand.  Cut the remaining part of the root on a cutting board, into similar sized pieces to those in the bowl.  Leave all the shards in the water until ready to cook to prevent excessive darkening.  If using carrots, cut them into pieces similar in size to the gobo.  You'll want the proportion of carrot no more than equal to the gobo. 

When the dashi has simmered for 15 minutes, heat your largest skillet over high heat for a few minutes.  Strain the dashi and drain the gobo root very well.  Add some light cooking oil to the skillet to coat it generously.  Then add the gobo to the pan.  Stir-fry the gobo for a few minutes, until the sizzling of the pan is reduced.  Add the dashi, some sake, and soy sauce to the pan.  Cover the pan loosely with a lid or a baking sheet if you don't have a matching lid.  Stir the gobo about once every minute or so, until the liquids are almost completely evaporated.  If using carrots, add them when most of the liquid has cooked off.  Taste a small piece of gobo for doneness and flavor.  Add a small amount of maple syrup with a little water or additional sake to the skillet, and a generous toss of bonito flakes.  If necessary, also add more soy sauce at this time.  Stir constantly until the liquid is again reduced almost entirely.  The gobo should have a nice golden brown color and a rich flavor.

It surprises me, but I find this dish of two vegetables plus rice to be substantial enough for a full meal.  My husband remarks on how "meaty" the gobo seems, every time I make this dish.  When I include carrots, I don't feel the need to pair it with anything but rice, though something green is also nice to have should the ambition strike me.  If you follow this sketch of a recipe, you'll probably end up with something pretty good, but you can refine it with a little practice and experience.  The dish should have plenty of flavor, with a lovely balance of earthy root, salty soy, rich ocean, and just a hint of sweetness. 

We're definitely planting this crop again next year.

Update: See my follow up post on the portion of the root that remains in the ground after harvest.

Harvest Meal: French Peasant Soup

Tonight we'll have our first serious frost.  Temperatures forecast below freezing, so no ambiguity.  October is the month of goodbyes to all the bounty of summer.  The last vine-ripened tomato.  The last eggplant.  The last basil and parsley and tender sage.  A last flurry of harvests, and a growing appreciation for the sturdy leeks and kale that will hang on a few more weeks through the early frosts.  We draw in, rummage through the freezer for ingredients, turn our thoughts to the canning jars in the cellar, full of preserved spring and summer.

So today I gathered huge fistfuls of parsley.  They will keep for a few more days in the refrigerator.  You know this trick, don't you?  Place them in a large drinking glass full of water, cover them with a plastic bag, and secure the bag with a rubber band.  Really, they'll keep beautifully for about a week if they're cut fresh.

But I've also been longing to prepare a recipe I came across in Emelie Carles' book, A Life of Her Own.  It's not a cookbook, but a sort of memoir, from the era before memoirs were fashionable to write and trivial to read.  This book is sturdy, like the peasant woman who wrote it.  Yes, she called herself and her neighbors peasants, and used the term matter-of-factly, with neither pride nor shame.  This endeared her to me immediately.  I like the word peasant, and feel an affinity for it in the sense of being tied to the land.  I recommend the book to anyone interested in how people lived in a isolated mountain valley from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century.

In the Claree Valley, where Emilie Carles lived all her life, wild greens and herbs were available for the picking for more months out of the year than any cultivated crops.  She sketched a simple soup made with an evenhanded mixture of many of these foraged foods, plus a bit of garlic, and potato or rice.  It sounded far too good to resist.  So I also gathered all the herbs and greens I could find today.  Madame Carles stressed that the key was to balance all these green ingredients, so that no one flavor predominates in the soup.


"Wild" arugula - Though in fact it was something I planted deliberately once upon a time.  Now it simply shows up all over the property.









Dandelion - Began reappearing in the cool fall weather after a summer hiatus.







Sage - Only the tiniest leaves now meet my fussy standards.  The bigger ones have toughened up too much in the chill.












Nettles - A transplant put in before our long hot summer.  Apparently thrives on utter neglect.







Chives - Because the recipe doesn't call for any onion, and how could I resist?











Parsley - Surely the backbone of any herb and potato soup.








Thyme - Two tiny sprigs of regular, plus one tiny sprig of lemon thyme.

Oregano - Barely hanging on through the early frost.

Rosemary - So as not to overpower the other flavors, only the merest clipping from the top of one stem. (This one's potted up and sitting winter out in the living room.)










Altogether my herbs and greens came to 100 grams, or 3.5 ounces.  The parsley and chives were finely minced, the rest well diced.  I started the soup with a generous hunk of butter to saute the minced garlic.  I debated the authenticity of this fat however.  Would an Alpine peasant more likely cook with lard, or butter?  Lard seemed more likely to me, and I could have started the soup with some of my home cured lardo.  But I didn't feel inclined that way today, so butter it was.  Once the garlic had sizzled a bit, the finely minced parsley and chives went in to sizzle for a couple of minutes as well.  The rest of the greens and herbs went in along with a double handful of our potatoes, cut up onto bite size pieces. I added a good pinch of kosher salt and several twists of white pepper.

I added just barely enough water to cover, wanting to test how much flavor the ingredients would give a simple water broth.  There was always the possibility of adding some chicken stock later, if it needed a little sumpin' sumpin'.  So keeping the liquid minimal at this stage was important to preserve that option.  I let it simmer gently for 15 minutes and tasted.  The broth was very flavorful, but I still thought the chicken stock would benefit it.  I added 1 1/2 cups of that and another pinch of salt.  This is probably an unforgivable deviation from authentic French low cuisine.  But you know what?  It's really fantastic!  Green tasting, with a straightforward integrity, and yet also a complex interplay of flavors among the greens and herbs. And everything but the salt and pepper were produced right here.

This may well become a late October tradition on the homestead.

Sow's Ear, Silk Purse: Oatmeal-Raspberry Pancakes

These days, many of our meals seem to have stories behind them.

We've had red raspberry canes producing for the last two years.  Problem is, the berries have no sweetness to them at all.  My husband found them utterly insipid, while I thought they had flavor, just no sugars.  We were going to give them this one more year to see if their first year's production, last year, was just off because they were young or because 2009 was such an atrocious gardening year.  If things didn't improve, they were for the chop, to be replaced by something that earned its space in the sun on our modest lot.  Nothing much changed this year, except for them producing more heavily.

It about killed me that we had raspberries going to waste.  I didn't particularly enjoy eating them, it's true.  And we didn't really have enough at any one time to merit breaking out the canning equipment.  Finally I decided to harvest them and just turn them into a simple raspberry sauce.  The sample I put in my husband's mouth floored him.  He couldn't believe it was from our red raspberries.  The black raspberries that came ripe back in June have won his heart, but the red raspberries have disappointed him mightily.  Heck, honey, all you gotta do is add sugar. Given the unbelievable deliciousness of the raspberry sauce, it seemed like the obvious thing to do was to reproduce the raspberry-oatmeal pancakes from a favorite little breakfast place I used to frequent back when I used to frequent breakfast places.  My husband says that I have an infallible memory for food, such that I can remember meals in detail years, even decades later.  In fact, I can sometimes even recall what he ate, when it differs from what I ate.  Let's just say that favored breakfasts indulged in repeatedly don't lose their spot in my memory banks.

My version of oatmeal pancakes called for buttermilk, prepared oatmeal, and some oat flour to mix with all purpose.  Let me tell you - these require neither butter nor maple syrup at the table; they're that good.  I don't have a little ketchup bottle to drizzle out the sauce all pretty-like.  But a rustically ugly-charming splooge of spooned-out raspberry sauce over dusted powdered sugar has its own style.  I wouldn't really call this a harvest meal, since only the raspberries and the eggs are from our own production.  I'll just call it awesome instead.  My recommendation is to make up both the sauce and the pancake batter the night before you want pancakes.  It's a decadent thing to wake up in the morning and have these waiting for you in the fridge.



Oatmeal-Raspberry Pancakes

For the raspberry sauce:
1 1/2 cups fresh raspberries
3/4 cup sugar (or less, to your taste)

For the pancakes:
1 cup rolled oats, ground into 3/4 cup oat flour
1 cup all purpose flour
2 tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
3 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted (plus extra for the pan)
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
1 cup cooked oatmeal, cooled
2 large eggs

Powdered sugar for dusting (optional)

Make the sauce: Rinse the raspberries and drain them, allowing a little water to cling to them.  Place them in a small saucepan and add the sugar to them.  Place the pan over medium-low heat. Mash the berries and sugar together with a potato masher or a fork, just until the sugar is blended with the mashed fruit.  Heat gently for about ten minutes, until no granules of sugar are visible when you look at a thin layer of sauce on a spoon.  Cool the sauce.  It will thicken slightly.  It can keep for 1 week in the refrigerator.

Prep the pancakes: Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, whisk the butter, buttermilk, cooked oatmeal and eggs together until thoroughly combined. Gently fold the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Do not overmix.  Allow some lumps of medium size to remain.  Let the batter rest for at least 15 minutes.  For best results, cover the batter and chill it overnight.  Thin it with additional buttermilk or milk, one tablespoon at a time, if it has thickened up too much while resting.

Heat a cast-iron skillet or heavy pan over medium heat for a few minutes, then turn down to medium-low. Brush the pan generously with melted butter using a pastry brush or paper towel. Quickly pour in about 1/3 cup of batter, to make a pancake about 5" in diameter.  (If the batter does not spread well, thin with additional buttermilk.)  Cook 2 or 3 such pancakes at a time. Once bubbles begin to form all over the top of the pancake, flip the pancake and cook until the bottom is dark golden-brown, about 5 minutes total. Re-apply the butter to the pan before cooking the next batch. Continue cooking until all the batter is used. Makes about 12 medium pancakes

Pancakes can be kept warm in a very low oven (175 F/80 C) if you wish to serve everyone at the same time.  Arrange each serving on a plate, dust it with powdered sugar, and drizzle the raspberry sauce over the pancakes.  Serve warm.  Eat.  Die happy.

Garden Glut Solution: Imam Biyaldi

Imam biyaldi for one

Right.  The eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes are coming in fast and furious.  This, I know, is a problem a lot of people would like to have.  But when you've harvested 10 pounds of eggplant in less than three weeks, and turned a third of that into freezable baba ganoush, and you're still looking at lots of eggplant coming in, you need some ideas.  Caponata is a popular choice.  But I dislike olives and capers, and neither of them grow in my garden.

Imam biyaldi is my choice for addressing the eggplant glut.  I like it because it can be made in two stages, plus it pretty much uses up all the garden ingredients I need to be using up right at the moment, chili peppers, tomatoes and eggplant being chief among them.  In fact, this is very much a harvest meal, since everything but the spices and olive oil can be grown in the backyard.   It also easily scales up or down to feed however many people you need to.  Imam biyaldi is a Turkish dish that translates as "the holy man swooned."  The implication is that the dish is so rapturously delicious that it can make you faint with delight.  If you survey the top google returns for Imam biyaldi, you'll see that the basic idea is a filling of onions, tomato, possibly pepper - all cooked in olive oil seasoned with paprika and sometimes with either cumin or dill.  I'm firmly in the paprika and cumin camp.  Rarely you'll find a version that calls for the addition of either ground beef or ground lamb. There are many, many different ways of putting these ingredients together.

My personal take is a riff on Madhur Jaffrey's recipe from World Vegetarian - an excellent cookbook, by the way.   Here's an ingredient list and what I do:

Small or baby (globe type) eggplant 5-7 inches (13-18 cm) long
olive oil
onions
garlic
extra eggplant for the filling
pepper - hot or mild chili, or bell pepper as suits your taste
tomatoes
salt
pepper
paprika
cumin
lemon
fresh parsley

The filling benefits from sitting in the fridge for a day, if you're into advanced planning. It's also good as a topping for many other things, so I usually make extra.  For two servings I start with 1 medium onion, a large tomato, good sized long and skinny eggplant, and a small chili pepper. But I encourage you to play around with the ratios of the ingredients.  You'll find it hard to go wrong.   Small dice the onion and saute it in plenty of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Mince the garlic and add it to the onion after a few minutes.  Add the seasonings and the extra eggplant for the filling.  Make sure there's enough olive oil in the pan to keep everything coated.  When the eggplant is well coated and begins to cook a bit, add the diced tomato and finely diced pepper.  Turn up the heat to medium-high.  Cook for a few minutes to reduce the liquid.  Taste the filling and adjust the seasonings.

You'll need one small to medium sized globe eggplant for each person you plan to feed.  Leave the stem intact, but trim away most of the green cap.  Peel off three long strips of the skin, spaced evenly around the circumference of the eggplant.  Place them in a roasting pan and pour over enough olive oil to coat.  Rub the olive oil thoroughly into the exposed flesh and completely coat the remaining skin of each eggplant.  Sprinkle kosher salt over the dish.  Cover with a lid or aluminum foil and bake in a 350 F oven for 45 minutes to an hour.  The eggplants should be somewhat softened, but not collapsing or too mushy.  Remove them from the oven, uncover them, and let them cool just until you can handle them.  They should still be quite warm.

Make a pocket opening in each eggplant. Lay an eggplant on its side and cut a slit lengthwise, starting 1/4" from the cap and stopping 1/4" from the blossom end, but do not cut deep enough to cut through the bottom.  Push the stem end and the blossom end gently together to open up the inside of the eggplant.  Carefully scoop out a small amount of the flesh, in the center to enlarge the opening.  Chop the removed flesh roughly, and mix it into the filling.  Sprinkle the cavity with a little salt.  Put a generous amount of filling inside each eggplant, and arrange them nicely on a platter.  Squeeze a little lemon juice over all the eggplants, and top with finely chopped parsley.  At this point you could serve immediately, chill the Imam biyaldi for later consumption, or put them back in the oven if you wish to serve them very hot.

I've seen this served once or twice with a garlic-mint yogurt sauce.  If this appeals to you, it's as simple as can be.  Very finely mince a clove of garlic and mix it into a bowl of plain whole milk yogurt.  Stir in either dried or finely chopped fresh mint and a good pinch of salt. The flavors will become stronger over a few hours.  Keep this chilled, whatever temperature you plan to serve the Imam biyaldi at.

If you chill the Imam biyaldi overnight, it's best to let them come back to room temperature for an hour before serving.  I like both the serve-at-any-temperature nature of this dish, as well as the unlikelihood of spilling anything in transport; these qualities make the dish ideal for for potluck contributions and picnics

P.S.  I once read a menu in Europe which presented this dish as "Imam van Biyaldi."  Clearly the proprietor interpreted "biyaldi" as the imam's proper name.  I had a good laugh over that one.

A Simple Solar Cooked Meal

This exceptionally hot summer has given us tomatoes worthy of the name in July.  I usually have to wait until August for a good garden tomato.  Pretty soon here, the fresh tomatoes will be coming in like gangbusters, and hardly a meal will squeak by without the addition of tomato in one form or another. In a week or so, I may have enough tomatoes at one time to do some canning.

Sometimes after a long day of gardening and other chores, I want a break with dinner preparation. Less frequently, I have foresight enough to know when I'm going to need that break. When that happens, this is a recipe that gets me a long way towards having dinner taken care of before I've eaten breakfast.  I like it and share it with you because it's a solar-cooked dish that can be prepared by anyone with a place to set a bowl in full sunlight for several hours during the day.  I made this back when I was a college student, long before I thought about investing in a solar oven.

Here's what to do:

Ideally you've got a large clear pyrex or glass mixing bowl.  Barring that, a ceramic bowl with a dark glaze is a good choice, but any non-reactive bowl will work.  Cut up the equivalent of a few large tomatoes (about 1.5 lbs/ 0.75 kg) directly over the bowl into rough chunks, allowing all the juices to fall in too. You can mix and match your tomatoes - anything ripe from the garden is perfect.  Then peel a few cloves of garlic, chop them, and add them to the bowl. Drizzle in some olive oil, add a generous amount of salt (preferably kosher) and freshly ground pepper, and stir everything once or twice. If you want to, you can add a fresh sprig of thyme, oregano, sage, or torn up basil leaves. Or you can wait until the sauce is "done" to season it further. Cover the bowl with saran wrap (plastic, I know, but this is a good use for previously used pieces) and poke several tiny holes in the plastic with a toothpick.  Place it where it will get sun as much of the day as possible.  If sunlight is limited where you are, placing it on a dark surface such as brick or macadam will speed the cooking.

At the end of the day, this delicately cooked tomato sauce will be warm, luscious, and still chunky. A little bit of the moisture will have escaped by the holes in the plastic, but it will still have quite a bit of liquid.  Taste it and adjust the salt and pepper if you wish.  Now all it needs is the addition of an herb if you didn't add any before cooking.

You can cook some pasta and add the sauce, dressing it up with extra veg if you have any. Or you can toast thick slices of bread (stale bread would be okay), tear them into bits and toss with the sauce and some mozzarella cheese for a simple panzanella salad. You can mash stale bread cubes into the liquid, add some chopped cucumber, pepper and onion, and have a warmish sort of gazpacho.  This stuff is also superb over thick slices of grilled eggplant. If you happen to have some cooked white beans on hand, they pair beautifully with this sauce and some extra olive oil. If left to sit with this sauce overnight, freshly cooked beans will soak up much of the extra liquid.  The sauce would probably compliment steamed or poached fish beautifully too, though I haven't tried that.

In any case, I like having dinner half made and already in a bowl when 7 o'clock rolls around.  And I especially like a dish made largely from garden ingredients with free energy.  Try it; I think you'll like it.

Grillable Bread - Onion Naan

We're nearly out of our usual no-knead bread. I try to get a ton of bread baked and stashed in the chest freezer by mid-May, so that we have homemade bread all summer without the need to heat the house up by baking. Baking is a winter habit in our home. Alas, I was low on the bread flour we buy in 50-pound bags, and I didn't want to buy another one and hold it over the summer because this flour contains the germ of the wheat. Wheat germ contains fat, which goes rancid rather quickly in warm weather. So keeping 50 pounds of the stuff was out of the question with our summers.

Enter this recipe for naan, made with all purpose flour, and able to be grilled on a charcoal or gas grill. This is a fast rising dough, needing only 1 hour in warm weather to be ready for shaping and cooking. I usually give the dough more than that, part of the time in the refrigerator to slow it down and allow flavor to develop. I adapted this recipe from one by Mark Bittman, from his Best Recipes in the World cookbook. Leave it to me to figure I could improve on the best. This recipe makes a dozen flatbreads.

Grilled Onion Naan

1 Tbsp. active dry yeast
1 Tbsp. sugar
2 Tbsp. live culture yogurt
2 Tbsp. milk
1 medium onion, peeled and roughly diced
2 tsp. salt
4 cups all purpose flour (you can substitute a whole grain flour for a small part of this volume)
1 egg
3/4 cup water
extra flour for kneading
oil for the bowl

Thoroughly combine the yeast, sugar, yogurt and milk in a small bowl. Set this aside.

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the diced onion, flour and salt. Process for about 30 seconds so that the onion is finely diced. Add the egg and process another 15 seconds. With the blade running, add the yogurt mixture through the feeding tube. Then add the water in a moderate stream until a more or less uniform ball of dough forms. You may not need to add all the water. The dough should be fairly sticky but not as liquid as a batter. Add water or flour a tablespoon at a time if the dough is either excessively dry or wet.

Take the dough out and place it on a well floured board. Knead it 8-10 times and form a ball. Place this ball in an oiled bowl with a capacity at least twice the volume of the dough. Cover and place in a draft-free spot for 1-2 hours, or keep in the fridge for 5-6 hours.

When ready to shape, take the dough out and form it into a thick roll on the floured board. The roll should be about 2 1/2 inches thick and about 20 inches long. Cut it in half and then in quarters. Cut each quarter into three equal pieces. Roll each piece into a little ball and set them on the board. When they are all finished, cover them loosely with plastic wrap or a clean towel. Let them rest for 15 minutes.

Holding the dough in your hands, shape each ball of dough into a flat oblong, roughly 5 by 9 inches. Start by thinning the dough in the center and then work outward in a circular fashion. Let the dough hang from your fingers, always working at the top, turning it, gently pulling it, gradually stretching the edge so that the dough elongates and thins. Each naan should be quite thin in the middle, slightly thicker at the edge, but try not to have any paper thin areas as these will burn quickly on a grill. If you stretch one part too thin (hold it up to a light to tell), pinch the dough together over that area to make it thicker. Dust the shaped naans with a little flour and place them on a baking sheet as you finish each one.

Cook the naan over a moderate charcoal fire or high heat on a gas grill. Holding the naan on your fully open hand, slap the dough down on the grill and make sure no part of it folds over on itself. Don't overcrowd the grill. Keep an eye on them as they can move from cooked to burnt in very little time. They will cook very quickly, no more than 2-3 minutes on the first side, and less on the second. Keep tongs handy to turn them so each side is nicely cooked. If you wish, you can brush the naan with melted butter or garlicky olive oil as you remove them from the grill.

These naan go well with just about any grilled meat and are much better than store-bought buns when folded in half for hamburgers. They also compliment BLTs and Indian dishes. Or put some good, soft, thinly sliced cheese on the naan while still on the grill, as soon as the first side is done and you flip them over.  We've been making these naan quite often. It's not the same as the multi-grain round loaves we like to slice and toast to eat with our eggs, but it's good fresh bread that doesn't heat up the house. You can also omit the onion if you want a more all purpose bread, but you'll need to add just a bit more water when mixing the dough. They'll also bake up well on a preheated baking stone in a hot oven if you want to make them indoors in wintertime.

Sustainable Cooking: Curried Chickpeas with Tomato

I've made very little progress towards my goal of using our rocket stove and solar oven more frequently this year.  Of course I have excuses, and they're semi-legitimate, but they boil down to the universal excuses for everything that's wrong with our culture: I'm busy, and it's not convenient.  I'm working on making it more convenient to use either the rocket stove or the solar oven, but in the meantime, I need to just suck it up and cook out there anyway.

It helps that the heat has been infernal lately.  Who wants to cook inside with such weather?  So on Saturday evening I soaked a bunch of chickpeas.  On Sunday morning, I cleaned up the solar oven, and added a bunch of seasoning ingredients to the chickpeas.  The day was blazing hot and sunny almost all the time.  The dish didn't come out perfectly: I'd left a lot more liquid in with the beans than was really needed.  But they cooked through quite well and were tasty.

I wasn't working with a recipe, but here's what I did.  First I drained the soaking liquid the chickpeas were in and then recovered them with fresh water.  I chopped up about five cloves of garlic, and minced about an inch of a fat section of fresh ginger.  These were added to the soaking liquid along with a palmful of dried minced onion, and some spices, roughly in descending order of quantity: cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, black pepper, cayenne, and amchoor.  I also added a good drizzle of oil and a coarsely diced fresh tomato.  This left my cooking pot for the solar oven absolutely brimming.  It went into the solar oven around 9am, and as I checked the temperature in the oven throughout the day it varied from 150-255 F (66-124 C) as the outdoor temperature climbed to 94 F (34 C) and clouds occasionally scudded across the sky.  I only added salt when the chickpeas were done cooking.

Towards the end of the day I put some basmati rice to cook in the steamer out on the porch.  I also went out to the garden to rustle up a quicky relish to go with what is essentially a beans and rice dish: roughly equal parts fresh cilantro (including soft stems) and spearmint (leaves only) along with a whole scallion, a pinch of salt, and a bit of lime juice.  Everything whizzed together in the food processor, with the sides scraped down a few times between bouts of whizzing.  This crude relish isn't shown in the picture but it added a lovely bit of green both visually and taste-wise.  Very refreshing it was too, on a hot evening.  I think adding a zucchini or two to the chickpeas for the last hour or so of cooking would have added a nicer balance of veg too.

I'd make this again but definitely reduce the amount of liquid that goes in the cooking pot.  It worked as a somewhat soupy dish because the rice could soak everything up.  But more concentrated flavor would be better.  Cooking in a solar oven is definitely an experimental endeavor for me.  It's a bit like baking in that you have to set things up and then relinquish the possibility of intervention once the actual cooking begins.  Because the cooking containers are very nearly airtight, I'm having to learn how much liquid to add.  And this is an iterative process.  Also it seems to me that flavors in solar-cooked dishes are more mellow and more diffuse than I would expect from conventionally cooked food.  The flavors in this dish reminded me of leftover curry that had been cooked a few days previously - all the seasonings had spread themselves out and reached a point of equilibrium among all ingredients.  So I might also learn to be a little heavy handed with the seasonings as I continue with the solar cooking goal for this year.

Oh, and by the way, Happy Solstice!