Free rice, for real

A couple of weeks ago th'usband sent me a link to a little vocabulary quiz site that promises to earmark 10 grains of rice for U.N. food programs for each obscure, scrabble-grade word you can correctly define.

I thought he was just trying to see if I could be distracted from my newfound corporate zeal, but I got so addicted to trying to push my "vocab level" up past a high of 43 or 44 that I managed to feed a village anyhow. A virtual village, I figured. After all, this is the same husband who is always finding my latest item of credulity listed on some killjoy urban legend-buster site, so I was careful not to let myself be too taken in.

It turns out that the rice game is for real, though, and generated enough rice to feed 50,000 people for a day in October. That's pretty cool, but I know we can do better than that. If me and you and everyone we know (to borrow a phrase) can just spend 5 concerted minutes a day slacking off with the rice game, I figure we can feed the world.

Onion Soup

I'm making onion soup. That's an excellent thing to do when you feel that there is nothing to eat at home, and it's the closest thing to feeding the masses with loaves and fishes that we mere mortals may ever know. All it takes is a pound or more of onions, sliced thinly and sprinkled with salt and sugar and left to brown in butter and oil over medium heat while you root around for the other things.

If you're like me, you've got all kinds of useful things stuck away in the freezer. Take out that old bread now, the loaf that was dry and just short of molding when you threw it in there for safekeeping or breadcrumbs, whichever came first; slice it into baguette-ish slices and brush each side with melted butter. Line these up on a baking sheet and stick the whole business in the oven, set at 350 degrees. Check back in 10 minutes to flip them, and take them out 10 minutes after that. When you do, have a garlic clove peeled and cut in half on hand, and rub it on the cut sides of your toasts. Leave the oven on for browning purposes later. Anyhow, baby, it's (finally) cold outside.

In the meantime, keep adding lots of salt. You'd be surprised how much it takes, especially when you're using homemade stock, which has no salt in it and which by this time you've taken out of the freezer too if you're lucky enough, like me, to have a husband who makes it and concentrates it and freezes it into little cubes for just these kinds of occasions.

When the onions are looking good and brown and nigh unto burnt, you can switch to flour and sprinkle a good couple of tablespoons over them. Then stir like crazy. After 3 or 4 minutes, pour in a half cup (ish) of a sweet, dark rich alcoholic little something-something. It's supposed to be vermouth, but if you happen to brew chocolate stout and have that on tap, I'm sure you won't mind if you do.

With the hooch to loosen things up, you'll be able to scrape most of that brown goodness off of the bottom and into your soup. To which you should now add about 6 cups of stock, more salt, a bay leaf or two, and any spices that come to mind. The dried thyme is good, and the fresh Italian parsley you bought for the dinner party but then forgot to use is perfect. Put a whole handful of stems in there, and crank up the heat. You're going to boil it first, then cut it back to a simmer and keep it there, covered, for a half hour.

Here's where I've gotten to now: I've just shut off the burner and ladled soup into two bowls and picked out the parsley stems. Th'usband is spending the evening with a friend whose father just died, so he won't be home for awhile and his bowl can wait. Mine I top with the aforementioned toasts and a good stiff layer of grated Gruyere left over from last week's fondue, even if Gourmet--on whose basic recipe all this is based--says I ought to feel relieved for the chance to escape the tyranny of overcheesed restaurant onion soup; I pile it on and stick the bowl in the oven. Whoops. I forgot the Worcestershire and the brandy. I just recently bought a quality bottle of brandy so you'd think I'd be putting it on my breakfast cereal. Oh, well. I pour th'usband's soup back into the pot--we've really got to stop eating so late, but I don't believe that he'll make it back from Long Island in an hour anyhow--and dose it with two capfuls of the Worcestershire and a huge salad tong-type spoon of brandy. This means that his will be better than mine later on tonight, and of course whatever is left will be even better tomorrow. That's the way soup is.

But by now, the cheese on mine has got to be melted and all that's left but the shouting is for me to put it under the broiler for a minute to brown it. Then lift my spoon to you, dear reader, and bid you smakelijk eten.

What's Fresh Now: [Mostly] Local Meals

As I've mentioned before, September is this year's official Eat Local Challenge month. The organizers of this event, which is now in its 3rd year, are an incredibly encouraging bunch. If what you need is a good rational reason why eating locally produced food matters, they'll give you ten. Tips and guiding principles? Here are a nice even seven. Testimonials? Loads of them. Help with sourcing ingredients? Well, the Bay Area is this movement's spiritual home, but you might find a link to closer compadres here. Enough already and you'd like to sign up? Suit yourself.

While I hesitate to call th'usband and me full-fledged participants--on account of the fact that we haven't done anything in September so far that we didn't already have underway in June, July, or August--the good news is that simply by trying to make frugal use of our CSA produce, we've enjoyed one or more [mostly] local meals each week. I'll give you a few examples.

1. The Red Meal: Th'usband and I are both going to start new jobs on the 24th. Cooking is going to have to get a lot more programmed without someone at home to run last-minute errands or speed-thaw something from the freezer, so we've cracked out the crockpot again. I had a roommate once who used one to make split pea soup, and th'usband is justifiably proud of his own slow-cooked barbeque chicken, but all I really know how to make it in so far is corned beef. Fortunately, I like corned beef a lot. This meal started out with a red onion, a bunch of red carrots, and some juicy red beets from our CSA layered under the corned beef and nice little red potatoes. Four or five hours later, after the meat was cooked, I took it out to make room for a red cabbage, cut into wedges. Nothing could be easier--and while it seems like wintery fare, when you use a crock pot, you don't even heat up the kitchen.
2. Roast chicken and applesauce: Our friend A. was having a bad day. After we walked the dogs, I suggested that he come over for dinner and homebrew. That's the great thing about roasting a whole chicken--you can just spontaneously ask folks over, and there will be plenty to go around. I got our chicken from Dines Farms, of course, and brined it for a couple of hours in a mixture of salt, sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, and maybe a few other things like red pepper flakes, but don't quote me on it. After drying it thoroughly and hitting it with salt, I crammed whatever fresh herbs I had on hand--thyme, I think, and some basil--under the skin and popped it into a 450 degree oven for about an hour. In the meantime, I peeled some apples recently procured from my uncle's tree and sliced them into a pot along with a pinch of salt, a shake of hibiscus sugar that an acquaintance in Minneapolis makes (and that I imported to the state on my person when I moved here), a twist of lemon to keep everything from getting too brown, and some of that world-famous Brooklyn tap water. Covered and simmered for a half hour or so, this turned into applesauce, and freed me up to steam and saute veggie sides--a mess of green beans and some more of those red potatoes--courtesy of our very own Farmer Bill.
3. Mmmm. Montauk: I really wish I'd taken a picture of this one, but our hunger got the best of us. Th'usband and I like to pick out fish when we go food shopping, and look forward to a fast, healthy meal just as soon as we get the other groceries put away. This week, we wound up with yellowfin tuna steaks, fresh caught on Montauk. As soon as we got home, I started heating up a half-inch or so of (non-local) canola oil in a cast iron skillet, and sliced six or eight medallions of (non-local) polenta to fry in it. After that was sizzling away, I turned to cleaning green beans and peeling and slicing some gorgeous little carrots that I had to clear out of the fridge to make way for this week's batch. I steamed the beans, but softened the carrots in butter while I made up a little marinade/sauce in another skillet. It's a favorite of ours ever since we came home from Vermont last fall with a very large and yummy jug of maple syrup. I start by melting a little bit of butter, then adding equal parts (non-local) soy sauce and syrup. When all was blended, I brushed a goodly amount onto the tuna steaks and popped them under the broiler. The rest of the sauce went into the carrots, and I smacked a lid down on top of them so as not to lose the moisture. Five minutes later, everything was done and so beautiful that I pulled out my favorite rectangular, terra cotta rimmed plates. I laid down a grid of 4 crispy polenta medallions on each plate, then topped this with a tuna steak. I heaped the carrots on top of the steaks, letting the sauce flow freely down, and finally, filled out each place with a great green swath of beans. I ain't even saying, I'm just saying: heerlijk!
   

What's fresh now: apples

I went apple picking with my friend S. on Sunday. I thought they'd give us a ladder, but instead we each got a long stick with a plunger on the end. S. laughed at me because I was wearing this stupid dress, and because I didn't understand how to use the plunger at first. I showed her, though, and pulled out three apples just as she was attempting to document my ineptitude. It was actually a bit hot and very humid out, which seemed wrong to both of us.

The apples were Jonamacs. Yesterday, I mixed these with some Wealthys I got from my uncle's tree when we went to Maine over Labor Day, and made apple crisp. You always get a better tasting pie or crisp when you use multiple apple varieties. I'm not giving this one rave reviews, but there's really no such thing as bad apple crisp.

Ask the Huisvrouw: DIY calcium intake boost

Dear Huisvrouw,

I've been reading your blog for a while now. I love the mix you have going on here--crafty stuff like writing and knitting, culture and the arts, and especially all your fantastic food content.

The question I'm writing to you about today has to do with that last, food, and I'm afraid it's a two-parter. It's recently come to my attention that I really need to increase my intake of calcium. Per my doctor's recommendation, I'm taking some very sciency, organic supplement, but she's been really stern with me about needing to incorporate more calcium-rich foods into my regular diet. So, part one of my question is, what should I be eating?

Part two: Here's the deal: I have a partner and a cat, but no kids, yet. I'm in my early thirties, and of modest, modest means. And I'm a bit of a food moron. I'm an awesome waitress, but my back-of-house knowledge set and self-efficacy is nill. I do, however, reallllllllly want to learn. I'm passionate about living healthier for myself and for my partner and the kids we might get lucky enough to have someday. So, and dumb it down for me, Huisvrouw, how do I eat the calcium-rich foods, once I get them home from the store?

Signed,

Waitress Lost in the Kitchen

Dear WLitK,

I'm so flattered you asked. I've had calcium-boosting behavior drilled into me since birth, almost, given how many risk factors for osteoporosis (the brittle bone end game for insufficient calcium intake) I happen to embody: I'm female, white, thin, and have a family history of low bone density (dad, not mom). But I enjoyed doing a little research on the subject, primarily at the National Osteoporosis Foundation and the totally excellent, interactive, customizable new government food pyramid site (It's so nice to feel positively about something the feds have done in the past 5 years).

Let's talk first about the role of calcium in the body and what's behind your doctor's concern.

Calcium is an important structural component of healthy bones and teeth. In addition, calcium ions play a messenger role in all kinds of other cellular business, from the firing of muscles to the firing of synapses. A small amount is also excreted each day, mainly through the kidneys, and when women are breastfeeding, they secrete enough to meet the considerable needs of the little bone-growing machines that depend on them. If there doesn't happen to be enough calcium in circulation at the time that it is needed, your bones dispense it like an ATM. It just gets harder and harder to make compensatory deposits once bone growth has ended, so over time the bones can get porous and weak. A person with osteoporosis not only might fall down and break a hip, but she might spontaneously break a hip and fall down.

Women suffer from osteoporosis at higher rates than do men (20% of white and Asian women over the age of 50, vs. 7% of the corresponding demographic of men; for non-Hispanic blacks, 5% of women vs. 4% of men; and for Hispanics, 10% of women vs. 3% of men) not only because of the potential breastfeeding component, but because we generally have smaller, finer bones, which are the effective equivalents of smaller starting bank accounts. (The same thing goes for us skinny folks.) Also, estrogen levels drop precipitously with menopause, while testosterone production in men declines more gradually, and it turns out that these sex hormones help the body to retain calcium. It is possible for women to lose 20% of their bone mass in the first 5-7 years after menopause.

Smoking further leeches calcium out of your bones at whatever age you do it, as does an inactive lifestyle. On the positive side of the equation, stretching and weight-bearing exercise helps to build bone strength, as does an ample supply of vitamin D, which has to be present for bones to absorb and store calcium. Your skin actually makes vitamin D out of sunlight (which might have something to do with why pale whiteys like me who have to stay out of strong sun are at greater risk for osteoporosis than people of color are), so more and more doctors are starting to recommend that we allow ourselves 10-15 minutes of sunscreen-free exposure to the sun 3 or 4 times a week.

Now I know that you didn't really ask me for a whole science lesson, but I always find it easier to figure out the kinds of changes I'm willing and able to make when I also know the hows and whys involved. If you look in the paragraphs above, you can already see a number of things you can do to make maximum use of the calcium you're already taking in: stretch, exercise, spend a little time outside each day, and try to give up cigarettes if you smoke. The next step is to consider what kinds of foods you can eat to average about 1000 mg of dietary calcium a day.

We'll start with the easy stuff: dairy products. Everyone knows that milk has a lot of calcium, and now you know why; nature intended that milk for calves, which also need to build bone as they grow. One cup of milk provides about 300 mg, or 30% of your recommended daily allowance. You can get the equivalent amount of calcium from 1 1/2 ounces of hard cheese, 1/3 c. shredded cheese, 1/2 c. ricotta cheese, or 2 c. cottage cheese; or you could enjoy a single 8-ounce serving of yogurt. And here's another sneaky thing: there are about 52 mg of calcium per tablespoon of nonfat powdered milk, and you can add it into homemade baked goods at the rate of 2T per cup of flour.

But what about the majority of the world's population that is more or less lactose intolerant? (As a group, only Northern European peoples seem to retain the ability to digest milk after childhood.) And what about a balanced diet? Well, consider these other options:

Fish (especially whole or canned ocean fish with bones): A 3-oz serving of salmon, which realistically speaking is about half of an entree-sized portion, contains 180 mg of calcium. The same 3-oz. serving of trout has 146; sardines, 325 mg; ocean perch, 116; and even shrimp have 102.

Pretty much any fruit or vegetable you pick up contains 40-60 mg of calcium. The real heavy lifters, though, are dark green veggies. Consider how much calcium there is in one cup of each of these foods, and load up your plate: Spinach, 291 mg; collard greens, 266 mg; turnip greens, 246 mg; okra, 176 mg; broccoli, 188 mg; bok choi, 158 mg; okra, 176 mg; rhubarb, 348 mg.

Beans: A lot of the sources I consulted specified dried or canned beans; I doubt the preparation method has anything to do with calcium content. More likely this is just a reflection on our overall impatience with foods that take a long time to cook. At any rate, you should feel free to crack open a nice convenient, easy can now and again--just make sure it didn't come from China, and it's not on the current botulism recall list. One cup white beans, 192 mg; cowpeas, 212 mg; kidney beans, 80 mg; refried beans, 90 mg.

Soybeans are beans too, you know: 1 cup edamame provides 176 mg calcium, and there's also good calcium in soy derivatives: 3 oz. tofu, 150 mg; tempeh, 82 mg.

Miscellaneous: Nuts (1/4 c. almonds, 89 mg); Blackstrap molasses (1 T, 172 mg); and a few other things you can look up yourself at the sources I cited above. (If I could sneak in one more plug for the MyPyramid site, it would be that you can use the Tracker function to get both a broad view of the quality of your diet over time, and the specific nutritional content of almost any food you can think of.)

Whew. This is getting really long, so I'm just going to wind it up with a baker's dozen or so of calcium-rich meals or snack ideas to get you going.

1. Spinach lasagna, made with tons of spinach, ricotta, and mozzarella cheese; you can really get a lot of servings out of a pan of lasagna, so this is a good, cheap meal
   
2. Salmon steaks with something dark green on the side; season the fish with salt, pepper, and a little dill if you want to get fancy, then stick it under the broiler for about 5 minutes
   
3. Raw broccoli dipped in a yogurt-based dip; add some instant onion soup mix to plain yogurt for an easy savory dip, or make a sweetened yogurt dip for fruit, which is always good, too
   
4. Stir fry with bok choi and tofu; there's a Dutch saying (or maybe something that I just always have said) that is central to my stir fry logic--hoe kleurrijker hoe gezonder. The more colorful, the healthier it is. Saute a bunch of seasonal veggies on high heat, starting with the hardest vegetables and working your way down to the tender ones. Just make sure you've got one or more dark green things in there
   
5. Plain yogurt on your baked potato (similar effect and much more calcium than sour cream)
6. Molasses cookies, made from scratch with blackstrap molasses and powdered milk sifted into the flour
7. Fruit parfaits made by layering yogurt, almond granola, and fresh fruit
8. Keep almonds and cheese around for grab-it-and-go snacks
   
9. Spinach salad
10. Steamed soy beans with coarse salt, aka edamame; you can buy these frozen and then all you have to do is heat them up, sprinkle salt on them, and sit back and look fabulously cosmopolitan
    
11. Soul food! Say yes to collard greens and baked beans, okra, and (yep) sneak some powdered milk into the flour you use to batter the chicken and/or green tomatoes
    
12. Haute bourgeois tapas with sardines, garlicky white beans, and a wedge of Manchego cheese; considering that you can get the beans canned and just jazz them up a minute with some garlic and whatever fresh herbs are plentiful in the moment, this is remarkably easy, and with the possible exception of the cheese, pretty cheap. Actually almost anything, even the fancy looking stuff, is cheap if you are willing to do all or part of the preparation
    
13. Caesar salad with fresh dressing: go heavy on the anchovies and parmesan cheese
    
14. Rhubarb cobbler with ice cream
    

What's Fresh Now: CSA week 8

green beans
shelling peas
cabbage
scallions
Swiss chard
cucumbers, lots of cucumbers

A few related comments:
1. I love beans.
2. No more lettuce!
3. This time I'm not screwing up the Swiss chard. At my brother-in-law-the-chef's advice I'm going to blanch it in some really salty water for a couple of minutes, then saute it (though I patently refuse to blanch or saute it "off" as current chef speak dictates--no offense, B., it's just my own little losing usage battle) in olive oil with a whole lot of garlic.
4. I will make some nutritious use out of the cucumbers. I will probably slice one up for a snack in a few minutes, for instance. But mostly I will make Cucumber Drinks, my summer cocktail of choice for 5 or 6 summers running, ever since my friend J. from Leipzig-by-way-of-Zipolite introduced me to them.

Cucumber drinks (snazzier names welcome):
If you're like me, you grew up thinking of cucumbers fondly enough maybe, but ultimately as vehicles for vinegar and/or salt. One sip of this cocktail will turn you on to a subtle but sensuous pleasure that's been right under your nose all this time.

1 bottle of seltzer
1 bottle of ginger ale
1 cucumber
ice

• Peel your cucumber if it's waxy; if it's not, leave it alone because it will make the finished product taste that much more green.
• Next, using a slicer or a sharp knife and a steady hand, cut paper-thin cross sections. You'll need a quarter cup or so per serving. I like making up a whole pitcher at a time, but you can do it glass by glass if you don't mind having to keep going back to the kitchen as people try them and decide they want their own.
• Combine the shaved cucumber with (per serving) a couple of fingers of vodka, ice, and more or less (depending on how sweet you like it) equal amounts ginger ale and seltzer.
• Steep for about 5 minutes and serve. If it's really hot and you're worried about the ice melting and the fizz fizzling before they're ready to go, you could steep the cucumbers in just the vodka ahead of time. I'm just never that organized.

What's Fresh Now: CSA week 6 or 7

I've lost count how many weeks it's been, but we are now officially, as a newly favorite blogger of mine commented, in "a new spot in the summer....deep summer." It's made for a lot of bitching about the humidity, which I actually enjoy to a certain extent (the humidity, not the bitching), as well as for a whole lotta tasty veggies. Here's a picture of this week's haul (red lettuce, arugula, basil, broccoli, snap peas, carrots, squash).


I should also mention the deep summer flowers bought for a pittance at the market on Saturday: butterfly weed and some kind of brilliant little tiger lilies, a frenzy of red, yellow and orange in a vase.

After several weeks of killing everything by being just way too fancy, last night I finally cooked a good meal by simply steaming the broccoli and tossing it with bacon, yellow raisins, toasted pine nuts and some oil and vinegar; sauteeing the squash with some garlic and butter; and letting the thighs of a couple of happy, pasture-raised chickens testify to the beauty of their lives without much added hoopla.

Simplicity is the name of Marc Bittman (aka The Minimalist)'s game, and here in his list of 101 quick summer meals, he's dazzlingly prolific and inventive, too. No excuse not to cook now. I think I'm almost--but not quite, since I can't seem to resist including the link--ready to forgive him for once including a buddy's (Spanish) tapas bar as the final insult in an overwhelmingly sloppy review of regional Mexican restaurants in Mexico City.

Farm Bill time

Within the last several years that I've been living back in the U.S. as an ex-expat, I've discovered the simple pleasure of calling my representatives in Washington, and more recently, in New York. There is so much about the current governance of our country that does violence to my beliefs that if nothing else, calling up my elected officials and telling them that I'm cranked up or pissed off about something makes me feel slightly less powerless. It's amazingly easy to make an impact; when in D.C. for a few days last summer, I stopped by my House Representative's office, and the intern behind the desk claimed to recognize my name. The other day, when I called up my State Senator to register my disgust that a) the Democratic majority had failed to pass a congestion pricing measure in time to receive much-needed federal funds for public transportation and b) said SS had attributed the problem to Mayor Bloomberg's failure to adopt an "ingratiating" posture, I was pleased to hear from the haggard-sounding woman who took my call that the phone had been ringing off the hook.

If you'd like to try it out yourself, let me just remind you that every five years Farm Bill time rolls around, and that this is the week. The politics of food production are intimately involved in all kinds of commonly held concerns, including environmental protection, health, energy independence, trade deficits, labor rights, immigration, and social justice. Phone calls and letters have already helped remove a measure from an earlier draft of the current bill that was intended to preempt state laws or regulations beyond those mandated at the federal level. Here are some of the current provisions you could weigh in on with your Representative, particularly if s/he is on the House Agriculture Committee:

• an amendment by Representative Goodlatte (R-VA) would gut COOL (country of origin labeling) mandates, making these voluntary and restricting them to the 20 most commonly consumed fruits and vegetables, capping potential fines at $1,000, and defining imported animals as domestic unless they did not pass Go and went straight to the slaughterhouse
• in happier news, other amendments support:
  
• organic conversion assistance (Rep. Gillibrand, D-NY)
• "fair share" of USDA-ARS funding for organic research (Rep. Kagen, D-WI)
• mandatory funding for organic research (Rep. Cardoza, D-CA
• you could also express your views, among other issues, on:
  
• increased funding for the Food Stamp and Nutrition program
• mandatory funding for the Community Food Project Grant Program, the Organic Research and Extension program, the Fruit and Vegetable Snack Program and the Healthy Enterprise Development Program that would help small and mid-sized farmers distribute their products to local markets
• changes to the Conservation Security Program to make it easier for organic producers to participate and receive on-going financial assistance rewarding the implementation of conservation practices on their farms
• crop insurance equity, leveling the playing field for organic farmers who currently must pay a 5% surcharge on their crop insurance rates but are typically reimbursed for their losses according to conventional prices that don't take the greater value of their products into account

For more information or to sign and send a pre-fab letter instead, click here. To get contact information for your elected officials in Washington, click here.

in praise of the sturdiness of yeast

In the last meal that food journalist Michael Pollan prepares in Omnivore's Dilemma--the meal assembled of hunted and foraged ingredients--he makes an interesting comment with regards to the bread. It's a sourdough, made from a strain of yeast Pollan captured in his yard. The air around us is teeming with microscopic yeast spores, so all you really have to do to get a starter going is to create an environment with the food and moisture yeast need to thrive and let nature do its thing. Pollan mixes flour and water to make a loose paste and waves the container around in the air for a few seconds before covering it. Within a day, he's got a bubbling, beery smelling sponge, a live culture of yeast that he can use to leaven his bread.

Recalling that incident comforted me yesterday in the moments--OK, not the first moments, but within the first hour--following a long chain of brewing mishaps that culiminated with the discovery that my yeast had not been incubating for the past several hours as I'd thought. I'd been pondering and mixing and boiling rather expensive ingredients all afternoon in my first attempt at beer recipe development, and waiting several hours to properly culture that yeast would put the cooled wort at risk of bacterial infection. I panicked and threw the contents of the yeast packet in cold.

I've been off my game a bit lately, culinarily speaking. Last Monday, in a fit of let me just clear out the refrigerator here before the next CSA pickup frenzy, I'd made a dinner that was nothing short of God awful. In one pan I had Swiss chard with olives and raisins, in another pea pods and garlic, and in a third, hanger steaks with some red wine, mustard and stock that I was trying to use as a braising liquid for mustard greens while still keeping the steaks well left of medium. Oh, and I forgot (then as now), a saucepan full of red lentils on the back burner. Needless to say, the steaks were way overdone and tough; the mustard green "sauce" I'd cooked them in a stringy, disconcertingly greyish mess; the lentils blown apart into so much baby food. Th'usband tried to put on a brave face and assured me that "most people would think of this as a fine, homecooked meal," but though I might have graciously accepted such a meal had Most People in fact made it for me, what with my pride all mixed up in there it was really, really hard to swallow.

To make it worse, a few days earlier, I truly had made that roast chicken I'd been going on about, a lovely meal to warm the kitchen and the cockles of one's heart--in November. Outside and now in our kitchen, it was at least 95 degrees. How was I managing to take all these fresh, locally produced, seasonal ingredients and turn them into such heavy, wintery meals?

But then get this: the day after the steak disaster, needing to pack a lunch for a day at the office, I filled a to go container with arugula, layered it with the swiss chard and olives stuff, and topped it with a few strips of steak. . . and Reader, it was gorgeous: peppery, summery, and light. I repeated that lunch 2 or 3 times before it was all gone, and was sorry to see it go. Sometimes food is merciful like that.

As I learned last night, so is yeast, particularly the Belgian strain I was using for this particular batch of Saison beer. Tim at Bierkraft had introduced me to the style, explaining that it was farmhouse ale traditionally made in the spring to ration out (at the rate of 4 or 5 liters per day) to summer field hands. No one was using fussy, refrigerated yeast cultures; some brewers just left their wort in vats open to the air, and others carried yeast strains from village to village on the end of a stick. (This notion comforts me too, in that lacking a Y chromosome, I don't seem to have the crazed sanitation gene common to most other brewers.) In the words of Erik the Brewmeister--who'd sold me the yeast in the first place, then spent the better part of Friday and Saturday calming me down when I started freaking out about the wisdom of shipping liquid yeast cross country on the hottest week to date of the summer--

Saison yeast is about as bullet proof as anything. After all, Saison's or Farmhouse Ales were made up of just about anything the brewers had that would ferment, and fermented in the barn, so hot temperatures and stressed yeast just adds to the complexity and is normal. Seriously, it will be fruity and estery, but it is that way anyhow.

I really hadn't set out to make a seasonally appropriate beer, but it turns out that I did. And the happy ending to the whole story is that five or six hours later, when th'usband and I returned from a dinner to celebrate the near-completion of his (totally excellent) documentary and keep me from doing violence to myself or flushing the wort down the toilet, fermentation had set in. Tick, tick, tick goes the little bubble in my airlock. Bring on the fruity esterytude! And long live this streak of successful batches brewed in a stuffy 1-BR apartment in the heat of a New York summer!

Newsflash: Contrary to market wisdom, Americans do care about more than just price

Call me crazy, but I think we've got something like a groundswell going here. Check out the results of this Consumer Reports poll, released on Wednesday following a phone survey in June. A few of the highlights:

• 92% of consumers agree that imported foods should be labeled by their country of origin; a 2002 Farm Bill provision mandated country-of-origin-labeling (COOL) but implementation was delayed until 2008; now there's hope Congress may move the enforcement date up to September 2007
• 86% of consumers expect the 'natural' label to mean that processed foods contain no artificial ingredients (so no more sneaking in the high fructose corn syrup, please; ditto for partially hydrogenated corn oil)
• 83% of consumers expect 'natural' meat to come from animals that were raised in a natural environment. Currently, the USDA standard for natural meat only pertains to how the cut of meat was processed and not how the animal was raised or what it ate
• Only 46% of consumers approved of using the 'pasteurized' label in place of 'irradiated.' This is bad news for producers depending on irradiation to cover for the poor sanitation endemic to feedlot operations, because just 29% of consumers would buy 'irradiated' meat
  

how to eat closer to home

Not long ago, my friend H. challenged me to write some how-to's for would-be ethical eaters. She had been reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a book about one family's experiment with eating locally, and was inspired to eat 'better' herself--just a little unsure about how to start. I haven't read the book myself yet, but from what I understand, the Kingsolvers decided to opt out of our heavily industrialized food chain by spending a year eating only what they could grow on their land or buy from their neighbors.

While totally sold on the various arguments for eating locally, I feel pretty unqualified to tell anyone else how to shorten their food chain. I'm new to the pursuit, and rather longer on theory than I am on practice. But I can probably pass on a general principle or two of the sort that can always be taken up a notch from wherever you--or I--happen to be at the moment. I eagerly invite any and all other lovers and defenders of real food to chip in their respective two cents.

1. Summertime, and the Eating is Easy....At no other point in the year is fresh, locally produced food going to be so abundant. Look for it today, whether by stopping at a roadside stand or shopping at a farmers' market; here's where you'll find one.
2. Connect an existing priority or personal goal that you have to a new, specific commitment that you can make to these food sources. Do you want to reduce your exposure to pesticides? Keep this wallet-sized list of the most and least contaminated kinds of fruits and vegetables handy when you do your shopping, and be as consistent as your budget allows about limiting yourself to the organic, local versions of the worst offenders. Trying to lose weight? Exercise auto-portion control by starting your largest meal of the day with a salad, then aim to get some or all of the fixings from a local food source. Want to shake your reputation for being a picky eater? Try one new (seasonal, locally produced) vegetable every week of the summer. Alarmed by reports that the oceans are running out of fish? Print out a regional guide and commit to buying (and ordering) seasonal, sustainably fished seafood only. Grateful for the animals in your life? Decide that eggs from cage-free chickens are worth a little added expense.
3. Do anything and everything you can think of to emphasize the social dimensions of eating. As often as possible, eat meals that an actual identifiable and known-to-you someone has prepared. Call up your mother-in-law and ask her for that great recipe. Plan a picnic. Get home from work in time for dinner with your actual or improvised family. Organize a group of friends to pick apples, can tomatoes, or take a cooking class. Strike up a conversation with someone at the farmers' market about their plans for that fine-looking eggplant. And--this is most important--ask questions of the people who sell you your food, whether the lady selling sweet corn or the guy behind the butcher counter. Reward those who give you knowledgeable, thoughtful responses and take pride in the quality of their product with your loyalty. Food has the power to connects us in all kinds of wonderful ways. By making eating a social practice, you will find yourself naturally inclined to cut out the middle man on lots of different levels.
4. Learn to cook. Keep it simple--fresh, quality ingredients don't need a lot of fancy preparation. Instead of going out to the store with a list of things you need for a specific recipe, go to that farmers' market or roadside stand and buy what's in season, which not coincidentally will also be the cheapest and most plentiful stuff there. This is the information age, and I promise you, you can come home, google a recipe, and come up with a million doable ideas, especially if you keep some basic staples on hand.
5. Be frugal about your food. This is different from being cheap. Being frugal amounts to a much more complex appreciation of the value of your food. It means making thoughtful decisions about what and where you buy; limiting your purchases to what you can actually use (last night's roast chicken can be today's chicken salad, and you can make soup or stock from the carcass and the vegetable peelings); and saving money not by pinching or bypassing local farmers, but by buying food in season and doing the value-add part (whether peeling the carrots, frying the chicken, making the applesauce, or canning/freezing those beautiful green beans) yourself.

nose to toes preparation

Read this. These are the kinds of lives that simultaneously inspire my thinking about food and creativity and make anything that I've imagined so far seem small.

local vs. organics, round two

A recent post about organic and/or local produce drew this comment about another certification option:

...Certified Naturally Grown (CNG), a certification program created in 2002 specifically for farmers who grow organically and sell locally but may not have the time and/or money to pursue USDA Organic certification. Certified Naturally Grown is designed to supplement the agri-business focused National Organic Program by recognizing small, local, organically committed farmers for their sustainable practices and giving customers assurance that CNG farmers adhere to specific, publicly-documented standards.

Certification through our program requires an application process, an annual inspection, and publication on our website of documents signed by the farmers and their inspectors. Certified Naturally Grown bases its standards on the National Organic Program, but improves on these standards where necessary (particularly with respect to livestock living conditions and access to pasture).

Currently almost 500 farms in 48 states are Certified Naturally Grown. CNG is a private, independent, non-profit grassroots effort that runs primarily on free-will donations from farmers and supporters, it's nationally recognized and endorsed (http://naturallygrown.org/supportive-orgs.html), and it is a legitimate alternative to the "non-local certified organic vs. local non-certified” conundrum.

Meanwhile, the May/June issue of Eating Well features an interesting article comparing and contrasting organic and conventional agriculture, particularly with regard to the impact of pesticides on food safety. Cited are a number of other organic certification alternatives, including

...Food Alliance, an Oregon-based group that has created its own alternative certification program for farmers committed to sustainable agricultural practices.

Part of the impetus for creating local certification bodies is a practical one; certain heirloom strains of apples and tomatoes, the article points out, are extremely susceptible to pests that require management practices off limits to organic farmers. Other farmers, like the ranchers behind Food Alliance, reject the kinds of compromises that overly strict organic regulations can occasion:

Doc Hatfield, a veterinarian by training, [explains], “We’ve got 14,000 acres of our own, but our cattle also range over land maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, and the BLM sometimes uses pesticides to clear weeds away from the roadside.” For that reason, his cattle can’t qualify as organic. But the Hatfields have come to believe that letting the animals roam over as much land as possible is more important to their health—and contentment—than restricting them to organic acreage.

Still others ask the kinds of questions raised by environmental journalist Michael Pollan in Omnivore's Dilemma and elsewhere about what organic labels mean when they are applied on a large, commercial scale. From the EW article again:

...a Wisconsin-based farm policy research group called the Cornucopia Institute reported in April that at least some organic milk sold by a major nationwide brand comes from industrial-style dairy farms with thousands of cows who are kept confined rather than being allowed to graze. Wal-Mart, meanwhile, recently announced that it will double its organic produce offerings—sparking new worries that the original notion of organic farming as small and local has been lost to big business.

I'm worried about all these certification tiers. I think that all or most--even the federal organic guidelines--are designed with the best of intentions, and provide important information to consumers in the absence of direct contact with producers. The danger, though, is that faced with a dozen different virtuous-sounding labels, a lot of people are going to get confused, and then cynical.

My guess is that the organic standard will soon really only be meaningful at the national level (when choosing between oranges, for instance, all of which are raised far outside of my foodshed), and as a gauge of the relative nutritional value (as in EW's focus on pesticide residues) of items within a category. For all the things that I eat that can be produced closer to home, meaningful choices are going to require a correspondingly closer look at the standards applied. Really, though, I'm back to the same realization that I made a few weeks back when trying to figure out what my food goal for the summer should be: it's only once I've completely adopted a locavore lifestyle that I need to worry too much about the relative merits of this apple vs. that one. And that's still a long way off.

What's Fresh Now: CSA week 2

Here's a picture of this week's harvest, avec chat. I figured that if I let her momentarily indulge her taste for green leafies, she might leave my basil plant alone for awhile. Here's the list, L to R:

• romaine lettuce
• mizuna (a Japanese stir-fry green)
• leaf lettuce
• strawberries
• rhubarb
• more curly cress

Last night's dinner already made use of the mizuna and rhubarb (which I cooked with duck breasts, to mediocre & mushy effect; if there's any more rhubarb next week, I'm going with this instead) and the strawberries, for strawberry shortcake. I also neglected to mention the other day that I made a soup out of last week's sunchokes.

the organic/local food conundrum

I take a hobbyist's approach to many of my greatest passions--something I ought to discuss with a skilled therapist, perhaps--but lately, I have no trouble finding confirmation of their relevance in the daily news cycle.

While the mainstream media often discusses local and organic foods as if the two were in competition with each other--or suggests that the choice to buy one's food from anything but a supermarket stocked with the products of conventional agriculture is most basically a romantic one, as Time magazine does here--there may be even more reason for consumers to question the significance of their choices if the USDA continues to relax organic standards. I share grocery industry analyst Kevin Coupe's rejection of such actions, even in the face of the complications he acknowledges, like the shortage of organic feed crops relative to rising demand for organic dairy products. If giants like Anheuser-Busch want access to the lucrative organic market, they should be the ones funding the full conversion of their suppliers to legitimate, 100% organic farming practices. Smaller producers are doing it.

And, if we apply the analogy a little more personally, if the wealthier citizens of the wealthiest nation on earth want access to quality food, we have to be willing to put our dollars into the farmers and systems that can deliver it to us. And we have to use our brains to navigate the choices we may encounter along the way.

I had an interesting conversation about this the other day with my brother-in-law, a Denver area chef. His wife's family owns and operates a crop and dairy farm in southern Missouri. While still not convinced it is worth it for him to go for organic certification, B's father-in-law routinely pastures his dairy herd and is committed to many of organic farming's basic aims. It might make more sense both from an environmental and an economic perspective for consumers in the Ozarks to buy their milk from this or a similar local family farm than from a big organic producer like Stonyfield, which is located in New England.

An earlier draft of this post ended with a chirpy story intended to show how the organic or local question is often a false dichotomy. I wrote about laying in a small supply of ground beef for my party on Saturday from the meat guy who sells his wares at our CSA pickup each week, and who I believed was both a local and organic farmer. Make no mistake; the beef was good. One guest came up and asked me what we'd done, because that was about the best burger he'd ever eaten. That inspired th'usband to make a funny about my "college-educated cow meat," which I've gone on to repeat, smugly, several times.

But a conversation yesterday with the man also cited by the NYTimes for his incomparably delicious all-natural hot dogs revealed a stance very similar to that of my sister-in-law's dad in Missouri. Dines Farm is a 100% natural operation: that is, the cows (and lamb, pigs, chickens, ducks, and turkeys) are pasture raised on 120 acres without antibiotics or growth hormones, and their grass-fed meat is leaner and more complex in flavor than the cloyingly buttery corn-fed feedlot stuff. It is also fresh, very fresh: they have a processing plant on site, and do most of the cutting for the week on Tuesdays. But Dines is not an organic farm. "No need," said Mr. Dines. "I've got a top-quality product. I've been doing this for 20 years. But with 15 new plants going up to produce biofuels, the price of feed is already going through the roof, let alone certified organic feed. It would mean a lot of paperwork and a lot of expense, and it wouldn't make the meat any better."

Honestly, I was a little bummed to hear this. Like the well-trained, prestige-driven consumer that I am, I am drawn to the word "organic" on a label as to a favorite brand. But I'm going to use my brain here, as I exhorted everyone else to do just a couple of paragraphs back, and stick with Dines Farm meats. I'm persuaded of its quality and value, including its value for the community I live in and the reduction of our local dependence on fossil fuels. I do find that my confidence in the superiority of organic agriculture has clouded over a bit in the last couple of days, however, and for the first time I'm seeing the organic label as something of a gimmick.

If it is, then at least it's a gimmick I am happy to see succeed on a national scale. By all means, let big processed foods concerns pay for the right to stamp the word "organic" on their cheese doodles and salsa verde. Let Anheuser-Busch pour money into Yakima Valley to support the organic conversion of hops farms, and let Frank Purdue create a huge & compelling demand for organic corn. My freshly-minted feeling, though, is that until changes of this magnitude occur (and they can and should and will occur rather quickly, I do expect) to our systems of agricultural production, it is best for me to make a distinction between local and organic, and to choose local in every possible instance.

What's fresh now: CSA week 1

For those of you not into brewing, knitting, or Dutch novels about Mexico, I bring you a new feature: what's fresh now.

That's right, our first CSA delivery for the year was yesterday. Farmer Bill makes the drive from Water Mill to the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn 26 times a year, each Tuesday from June to December. This is our second year of participation. Last year, I attempted to keep a personal record of what we got each week and what we did with it; but without anyone reading or reacting to this journal--or more importantly, getting on my case when I let yet another batch of mystery Asian greens go dank and unexplored--I got sloppy.

To me, the single best part of belonging to a CSA is the really concrete awareness it brings about what's in season. We still have to supplement our weekly take with trips to the grocery store (though this year I've also made a personal pledge to buy local, pasture-raised meat each week from the Dines Farm guy who parks his cooler at the CSA pickup point) but I find myself less tempted to buy tomatoes when we should be eating asparagus, or mangoes when it's strawberry season. It's a start.

And then the weather report takes on a whole new level of interest. (I'm told it's not really normal for someone not yet in her 80s, but I love the weather page and have been known to make mix tapes of songs that sing to this passion, from 'The Only Living Boy in New York' to 'Weather with You.') Our April monsoon, for instance, has had me a little stressed about the strawberries, which were the juicy red-to-the-core highlights of the first deliveries last year. Word from the farm says they're still on their way, though, so that's exciting. In the meantime, look at the gorgeous haul we started with this year:

• lettuce (two kinds)
• herbs (curly cress & oregano)
• jerusalem artichokes (in bowl; also known as sunchokes & are completely unrelated to artichokes or the middle east)
• radishes (ever eat them with really salty butter & a baguette? yum.)
• black beans (which I shelled, to th'usband's great annoyance, as we watched a movie)
• asparagus

We had a salad last night with some of the lettuce, radishes, herbs, and sunchokes, dressed only with lemon juice (to help the sunchokes keep their color) and a little olive oil. Th'usband also put some of the oregano into the lasagna he was making. I'm going to have to dry a bunch of that, because there's no way we can go through that much in a week. Further uses to come.

you can get paid for that, you know

Wow. I really, really need to market myself better. Just got word from my friend J about Sweet Deliverance, a new business piggybacking on the CSA boom.

[A quick aside to all those editors who passed on my CSA diary pitch, apparently unconvinced that CSAs were poised to be the next Tickle Me Elmo: I told you so.]

Here's the deal. You sign up for a CSA share. Heck, sign up for the Mega Combo Share, which includes weekly fresh-from-the-farm vegetables, fruit, eggs, and flowers. You can afford it, you New Yorker, you . . . and that's the part that I really have to learn, because while it might cross my mind to offer a service like this, it would never occur to me that anyone would pay for it.

Now start writing checks. The first one for $925 is for the farmers. The subsequent $250 per week is for your own private chef to pick up your produce for you, wash the mesclun mix and make a vinaigrette, whip together a strawberry rhubarb cobbler, and deliver it to your door. Later it will be baba ganouj and pasta sauce, but it will still be $250. I have a hard time imagining that someone of your means eats too many family-style dinners at home, but it could be a nice change of pace. And you'll feel virtuous--not just on account of all that organic goodness coursing through your veins, but because you'll be providing an income for a chef who might otherwise be cooking 100 covers a night at $10/hour to pay off her culinary school debt.

The funny thing is that this whole national food moment we're in is about shortening the distance from the farm to the table, and here this woman comes with her enterprising little self so that you can have your cake and keep your oven clean, too.

God bless you, Chef Kelly Geary. I really hope it works.

What's on your exceptions list?

I have to say, I'm really excited (because I love it when the world spins the way I want it to) about the increasing degree to which our national conversation about food is one about ethics and politics and economics and conscience. I know that I can't go to the grocery store without a cause for soul searching. This latest time, though my cart was filled with unprocessed virtue from some angles, from where I was standing almost everything in it came from too far away. Mangoes. Coffee. Fresh raspberries (for the husband, who otherwise almost never asks for fruit), fennel.

I know you've read them too, the articles about the melamine, the formaldehyde in our tofu, the vanishing honeybees. "I'm not a vegetarian," my old friend N. said the other day, "I just don't really eat meat anymore." Even my neighborhood listserv is in a huff, the soon-to-be Fresh Directies defending their desire for canned goods and paper towels (and hey, they do have a 'Local Foods' category) from the disapproval of new CSA recruits.

The question is, what are you going to do? One option that I am close to adopting as my incremental paradigm shift for the summer is to take this year's Eat Local Challenge for the month of September. It will come as no surprise that the original organizer of this and like minded events hailed from the Bay Area, where they could probably define their foodshed in such as way as to include mangoes, avocados and lemons. But they also encourage people to make reasonable exceptions (coffee & spices are common, but anything you can't imagine living without qualifies) rather than dismiss the challenge out of hand. And by September we'll have our own fennel, tomatoes, and if not raspberries, at least apples and peaches.