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!
   

Guest post: summer in Denver

My brother- and sister-in-law, B. & B., live in Colorado where they work as a cook and pastry chef, respectively. This spring, they vastly expanded the garden plot in their yard; since my own attempt to foster a modest herb garden in pots on my fire escape were foiled by one cheeky, persistent squirrel, I garden vicariously through reports like this one from B.

Disclaimer: our mother-in-law M. would like it to be known that her only involvement in the referenced drug bust was as a disappointed landlady. Those kids seemed like they were going to be great tenants....

The vegetable garden has been more of a success than we could have hoped for: we have an abundance of squash, yellow & green cucumbers, squash, cherry tomatoes, squash....I planted the yellow squash with the intentions of harvesting the blossoms. We soon found that squash blossoms are better when prepared by someone else's prep cook. We also learned that B. doesn't care for radish more than once a summer, S. can make radish flower arrangements, broccoli stems are for the cows, broccoli flowers are a waste of time (they rot quickly in salads), and Home Depot hybrid corn contains too much sugar and gets mushy.

My mother-in-law M. recently gave me some fertilizer leftover from her marijuana bust, so I dumped it around in the garden. I thought it was pretty tame stuff 5-4-3, until we returned from our camping trip to find squash and cucumbers the size of my thigh! We have been forced to eat our vegetables, at home with our friends or each other. This has be a pleasant by-product of gardening.

10 Ways to use Yellow squash:
- roast with tomatoes and toss with pesto for a quick side
- Grill
- sliced raw with hummus
- grilled blossoms with herbs and goat cheese
- gifts for neighbors
- alternative peg leg
- Leave it as a surprise gift over the neighbors' fence so they cannot refuse it [ed. note: This was my own dear mother's standard solution when we were little, but she always made us kids actually carry and dump the bags.]
- Saute with tomatoes, toss with pasta, pesto and fresh corn
- use it to scare off birds or neighbor children
- Bocce squash

The garden has had to go vertical. Due to first-timers planning problems, the cantelope, cukes, watermelon and tomatoes have taken over the walking paths. Tours are canceled. So I took an idea from the botanical gardens and have trained the vines to grow up trellis. The watermelon is also using the expired corn stalks as upright support. The unintentional overgrowth has its good points; I find a surprise bounty every time I weed. Just today I found another watermelon fruit, a radish, and a snap bean. We also had a surprise in the front flower garden. We used our compost dirt to fill in the new area, a patty pan squash seed survived and is invading the poppies and snapdragons.

Have any extra gardening stories and pictures of your own lying around? Send them to the huisvrouw! There are city folks all around who are starving for the experience of dirt under their fingernails, the stink of earthworms, and all other suchlike pleasures of summer in the exurbs.

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 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.

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!

What's for dinner?

It's been a good week for cooking. Word of the cherry pies spread to friends and neighbors, so those are disappearing fast. Last night, I threw together dinner more or less on the spot--but with so many good, fresh ingredients to work with, my rhythm was on from the start. I even managed to take some pictures.


I began by chopping up some greens and reds--specifically, another bunch of mizuna, that sort of peppery Japanese salad & stirfry green that has been in each week's CSA share, and radicchio, aka Italian chicory. The bitterness of radicchio lends itself well to risotto, a creamy rice dish that is much easier to make than you might think. It's easy to tend to its modest needs when you've got faster, flashier preparations going on other burners. Just get it started about 30 minutes before you plan to eat.

To do so, I wilted my greens in butter in a wide, shallow pan over medium heat for 2-3 minutes, then added about 2 cups of arborio rice, stirring for a few minutes more to toast it and coat each grain with butter. Then I threw in about a cup of wine. Ideally, you'd use white, so as not to discolor the rice; but we didn't have any open, and the radicchio was going to give it a pinkish tinge anyway, so red it was.


Meanwhile, I'd filled a two-quart pan with water and tossed in a handful of frozen stock cubes. You can use bouillon cubes if you aren't in the habit of making, concentrating and freezing your own stock, and either chicken or vegetable flavor is fine. What you want is a nice hot liquid to add bit by bit to your rice. The simmering stock will gradually dissolve the rice's rich starchy coat and combine with it to produce a creamy sauce, then soften the grain within. You have to take it slow, though, so lower the heat if it starts to boil or you'll lose too much stock to evaporation.


I started adding stock to the rice about a cup at a time while I began thinking about what else would be on the dinner menu. With each addition, I gave the rice a quick stir and sprinkled it with salt. If I'd been using commercially made bouillon, which is already pretty salty, I wouldn't have needed so much, but you'd be surprised how much salt it takes to season a skillet full of rice. Each time that the liquid was nearly absorbed, in would go another cup. Beyond this, though, risotto just kind of makes itself.

And as for the what else part, I remembered that we still had a couple of Belgian endives in the fridge that I'd bought at the farm stand.


We also had two lamb loin chops, purchased on CSA pickup day from Dines Farms. I heated up a cast iron skillet on the stove while I rinsed the meat, patted it dry, and sprinkled it with salt and pepper. Simple preparations are the best way to show off quality ingredients, so all I did was brown it for a couple of minutes on each side on the stove top, then put the pan into a 400 degree oven to finish cooking for about 7 minutes. I let the finished chops rest on a plate on the countertop for a few minutes while I finished the rest of the meal.

Taking a cue from epicurious, I quartered the endives and browned them in butter for about 5 minutes total before drizzling them with balsamic vinegar.


I also grated a nice little pile of parmesan cheese while I waited for the final addition of the stock to absorb into the rice. When it was close, I dumped in the cheese and stirred it well to melt and distribute the cheese evenly into the risotto's sauce. I probably could have been a bit more aggressive with the stirring, but I like my risotto on the soupy side.


Et voila!...we had a meal. Th'usband, who normally isn't much of a lamb fan, said that it was the best he'd ever tasted. That's because it was pasture raised, and if all that running around made the meat slightly less tender, it also made it much more flavorful. Myself, I was grooving on the overall balance of flavors, and the fact that with the exception of the rice, the parmesan, and those few drops of vinegar, all the ingredients were bought straight from the area farms that produced them. Provecho!