A Letter to the next president

By Michael Pollan. So good.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4&ref=magazine

October's Beginning

I think that October is marking a very positive time for me. The growth in the garden is mirrored by my increasing excitement over things to come in my own life. First of all, it's fall which means really exciting things in the realm of root vegetables, my favorite things ever. The carrots, turnips and exotic radishes are doing so well, and I got a new area all ready yesterday to plant some more. I will have to pull out the tomato plants soon, and while this seems to mark an end to some sort of era, I am happy for the space to plant new and different things.

Also, it means sweaters, and soups, and trees changing color, blankets, bundling, and reading. Also writing more. It means I finally feel like doing things, and really loving a lot of the things I'm doing. Oh, and sweet potatoes. Maybe an outing into the mountains, and a cabin weekend. Music. Also apples! The real stuff, not that stuff found in grocery stores. I am hoping to delve into the unexplored realms of pastry, and hone my bread baking. In one of my more momentous moments, I just bought two tickets to India for next February, which marks the start of a new sort of life that I will be so happy to live with my companion.

One of my first culinary homages to the fall came last week, inspired by a visit to the Williamsburg, VA farmer's market. I was down there to visit one of my best friends who decided to move a little further south. The market was so great. It had everything I could have wanted but without all the alienating bustle of the Washington DC markets. I came away with so many treasures: goats' milk soap, delicious cheeses, spelt bread, orchard apples, and 3 pounds of sweet potatoes. My first sweet potatoes of the year! I bought the apples and potatoes together, and new instantly how I wanted to handle them:

Whiskeyed Appled Sweet Potatoes

3lbs Sweet potatoes

2lbs Apples

2/3 cup brown sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1 pinch nutmeg

1 Cup cheap whiskey

1/2 Cup butter (1 stick)

Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Start out by piercing the skins of the sweet potatoes, and then microwaving until they are softened slightly. I had two large ones, and it took about 6 minutes each. Slice them into a good eating size. Then, core and chop the apples, placing all this into a 9 X 13 baking dish. Sprinkle the brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg on top, mixing it in a bit among the slices. Pour the cup of whiskey over the ensemble. Dot with slices of butter. Top with salt and pepper to taste.

Cover the mixture with tin foil, and place in the oven for about 20 minutes. Take the foil off, and bake for 15-20 minutes more, until everything is soft and done looking.

Bear in mind that the quantities here are very general, and can be changed according to taste. The most important aspect is having good base ingredients. I find there is a huge difference between store sweet potatoes, which are pretty bland, and locally grown ones raised on a smaller scale. In fact, I hated sweet potatoes until I started digging them up for myself on a farm. I wish I had gotten my act together and started planting my own sweet potato slips this year. The farmer's market product made a fine replacement though, and made a really simple dish that evokes so much of the goodness of fall.

September's End

My little turnip sprouts have turned into big leafy plants. I rode my bike to the garden straight after work today to give some much needed care to my garden by the metro. While I continue to visit the garden frequently I have been finding it harder to spend good solid chunks of time there. This might get even more difficult as the light leaves the day sooner. At the same time, I love the fall and I love being outside in it so much, so I'm sure I will continue to spend a significant amount of time in the garden. Today I thinned the different seeds I planted early in September: turnips, radishes (red and black), mesclun, oakleaf lettuce, arugula, and mustard greens. I made a lot of progress in this, though I will probably need to go back and do a final thinning in another few days. I came away with significant amount of the leafy greens, just from the thinnings. I think I will never buy lettuce from a store again.

Also, I accomplished some weeding, and more harvesting. I have another crop of bush beans going strong that I was finally able to harvest. A lot of eggplant, some of which I roasted for dinner tonight. A lot of peppers that I will begin drying. More basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano. I also picked a handful of tomatoes, though the plants are in the final throws of fruiting.

I just planted some kale and some more lettuce the other day, which is already starting to sprout. In a rather sad moment, I decided to finally pull out some of my squash plants. It was a very final sort of action, but I am excited about putting new things in their place, and

the gradually changing landscape of the garden. I started to prepare the former squash bed for another planting, getting some hummus and manure into the ground. I am going to start a second crop of mustard greens, turnips, and radishes in their place. Maybe some more carrots.

There was a row of radishes I planted a few weeks ago, that was refusing to grow. I found this strange and frustrating, because all the other rows have come up so well. I though that maybe I had simply forgotten to plant anything in there at all. Well, today I discovered that I had planted something, not radishes, but carrots. That made for a nice little surprise. I do hate waiting for carrots to germinate though... they seem to take forever, especially next to the turnips and radishes which provide such instant sprout gratification.

In the plans for the near future is a really good go at my herbs. I need to pick some serious quantities to dry and have ready for the winter months.

Basil to Pesto

One of my consistent summer activities has been using the handfuls of basil I take home with me from the garden, and food processing up mass quantities of pesto.  I can look forward to the fall and winter months, knowing that I have a stash of frozen pesto blocks taking up the shelves of my freezer. 

To make the best Pesto, I have heard that one should really use a pestle and mortar to grind the mixture up.  I, unfortunately, do not own either of these things.  I do, however, have a small food processor type machine that works just fine.  While traditional Pesto is composed of basil, pine nuts, Parmesan, and oil there are numerous variants for experimentation.  Any green, hard cheese, or type of nut is pretty much fair game.   I'm currently growing Arugula, and plan on trying that maybe with some Asiago cheese added to the mix.  

Making pesto is one of the easiest and most worthwhile things you can do in a kitchen with a delicious pay off that can easily be stored for a long period of time. There are only a few ingredients, and the process is terribly easy.  The quantities I give in the recipe below are pretty approximate.  I think I measured everything out the first time I made it, but the mixture has never been the same since, and the results are always just as good. 

Pesto:

2 cups fresh basil, packed

1/3 cup pine nuts

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

3 medium garlic cloves, minced

Salt and black pepper to taste

Combine the basil and pine nuts in the food processor, mincing it up.  Add the garlic and mix a bit more.  Add the olive oil, a bit at a time, and mix again.  Add the cheese. Mix.  Salt and pepper. Mix.  You probably want to have a spatula near by to scrape the edges during this whole process.  This should make about one cup.

If you want to store it for more than a few days, do so in the freezer in an airtight container.

Harvest

So, today is the first day of fall and I just want to express the fact that I am really, really excited about this.

While I've spent a lot of time thinking about my new plantings, and how good the sprouts are looking, fall is really the time of harvest, when you feel like your summer long labors are exuberantly expressing themselves in the fruits and vegetables that make a steady stream into the kitchen.

In early September I had the pleasure of attending a Heritage Harvest Festival, sponsored by Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, just outside of Charlottesville, VA. It was a Saturday full of heirloom plants, workshops, seed swaps, music, tastings, and camaraderie. All this despite the torrential hurricane rains of the morning. While I learned a lot at the workshops and tasted more varieties of tomatoes than most people think even exist, one of the most satisfying aspects of the festival was the purchase of 3lbs of plums, and 3lbs of some of the first really good apples of the season. These came care of a family run orchard called Vintage Virginia Apples run out of North Garden, VA nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. They are really friendly people who love to talk about good fruit. They are just beginning a really exciting venture into cider making, and offering some workshops on that soon. (http://www.vintagevirginiaapples.com/)

I felt like I wanted to do something special with the plums. I spent time conjuring different ideas as they sat in my kitchen coming to their fully ripened state, and finally settled on the idea of making a plum crisp. Its a straightforward way of baking fruit without having to delve into the complicated realm of crusts. Going into the project, I wanted to make something that allowed the natural sweetness and goodness of the fruit to carry the dish. Most crisps or cobblers or tart like things are filled with butter and sugar, and while this can be delicious, I felt like I owed it to the goodness of the fruit to try and rely a little less on these additions. The sugar I did use was brown, though I can imagine good results from Turbinado, Sucanat, honey, or any alternative to regular old white. To cut back on butter, I used some yogurt which gave the topping a moisture and a smooth consistency.

Plum Crisp:

2lbs plums (or a mixture of stone fruits; i stuck a peach in there as well)

1/4 Cup brown sugar

1 T. Cornstarch

3/4 Cups rolled oats

3/4 Cups flour

1/2 Cup brown sugar

1 tsp. Cinnamon

A pinch of salt

1/3 Cup butter, melted

1/3 Cup yogurt

The oven should be 400 degrees.

Cut the fruit into small pieces, getting rid of the pits, and place into a bowl. In another bowl, mix together the brown sugar and cornstarch. Sprinkle over the fruit, then dump the whole mixture into a baking dish. I used a regular pie plate, though a tart pan or a 9-inch square baking dish would work well.

For the topping, mix together oats, flour, sugar, and cinnamon. Next comes the butter and the yogurt. Stir until well mixed, then just apply over the fruit mixture by hand.

Put it in the oven and bake 20-25 minutes. I suggest a few more sprinkles of brown sugar on the top while its cooling. Also, serve it warm with some vanilla ice cream.

Aubergine

While its sitting in some olive oil and roasting in the oven, I thought I would take a moment to pay a little homage to eggplant. I learned through some wikipedia research that the plant is native to India where it is called "brinjal" and the European name "aubergine" is derived from this Sanskrit origin. From India is was propagated throughout south and east Asia, and then the Middle East, making a major impact in the cuisines of all these regions. In the West, it started being called "eggplant" the 18th century when someone came up with some white cultivars that look, quite literally, like large eggs hanging off a plant. I still remember my epiphany, working on an organic farm in southern Maryland, looking out on rows of white eggplant, when suddenly it all made sense.

There is a very limited variety of eggplant available in a conventional grocery setting that belies the tremendous diversity of the vegetable. There is a much broader range of shap

e, size, and color grown on smaller scale farms and gardens in North America, but even more so in the various regions of Asia where it is popular: pink, purple, white yellow, stout, long, thin, fat. I'm growing a basic home depot variety, along with a few Ping Tung plants.

The Ping Tung has been so good to me. I spent so much of the summer anticipating the first fruits of the plants. It took a while for them to fully mature, but when the little baby eggplant pods started to appear, I can't tell you how excited I was. The shape and color are so good! Ping Tung eggplant are long and slender, with a different sort of purple shade to them, and this white accenting at the top. I have seen pictures where it appears almost pink. They can grow to be quite long, I read up to 18 inches, but I haven't left any of mine on the plant past 10 or 11. Ping Tung, named after the village in Taiwan where they are from, also particularly high yielding, and disease resistant so they make a solid addition in practical terms, aside from their novel appearance.

(BTW: The seed, and pretty much all the seed I use, comes from http://www.southernexposure.com/, from the good people at Southern Exposure Seed Exchange/Acorn)

Saucey Tomatoes

So tonight I found myself in the position of really wanting to make something, but having next to nothing in the refrigerator or the pantry. I've been aching for a while now to make another batch of tomato sauce, and the only thing I have plenty of are tomatoes. It's getting down to the tail end of the harvest, though, so I figure I should take the chance to make some sauce now while I can. I just started making my own sauce from fresh tomatoes this summer. I started from a very basic Joy of Cooking recipe, and have adapted the general principles to every new batch based on my mood and supplies. The backbone of the sauce is this: Sauteed onions, carrot, celery, and garlic with a selection of herbs, be it basil, rosemary, thyme, sage. My personal favorites are the rosemary and thyme. Then add 2 or so lbs of tomatoes, and a dash of salt and pepper, all simmered together for 10 or 20 minutes.

Tomato sauce can start out with butter or olive oil. I tend to like butter better, but that's in part because I find onions easier to saute in that than oil. I like to put a lot of herbs in, and I usually let it simmer for closer to a half an hour so that all the flavors from the herbs can be fully released into the sauce. On general principle, I think the more variety of vegetables you can include the better. I also almost always use a little bit of brown sugar at the very end of the process: a lot of times the tomatoes I am using are really ripe, and can be a little acidic which is tempered by the sugar. You can peel your tomatoes, but I prefer the texture of the skins, and also it's a lot less work in the kitchen. To get the seeds out I've developed a method of simply cutting my tomato in half and then squeezing the seeds out. This can be a little messy, but if you're willing to take a minute to clean up after, the process is actually quite satisfying. Other fun additions: wine, whiskey, hot peppers, olives, cream (added after the sauce is cooked, and just before serving), and any variety of adventurous herbs, maybe curry or old bay.  What I made tonight was very simple, and thrown together with the few remnants of food left in the house. Just a note, I didn't have any onions, so didn't use them and the sauce was fine. If you have them, though, use them.

Spontaneous Tomato Sauce
3T. Butter
1 stalk celery, thinly sliced
3 large cloves of garlic, minced
4 big mushrooms, coarsely chopped
A few large pinches of fresh rosemaryPinch of dried sage
A few sprinkles of salt
2 lbs. fresh tomatoes, coarsely chopped with some of the seeds and liquid squished out
1 cup of red wine
2 T. light brown sugar

In a large saute pan, start melting the butter. Add the sliced celery, cooking for a minute. Then add the garlic, cook for 30 seconds to 1 minute. Then, pile in the mushrooms, along with salt, and herbs. Let cook for a few minutes (maybe 5) until everything turns brown and fragrant. Then add your tomatoes. I let them sit and simmer for 10 minutes, then added the red wine. I let the mixture sit again for another 10 minutes, covered, to get it well stewed; then a final 10 minutes uncovered to let some of the liquid escape. In these last 10 minutes, add the brown sugar.

To get the sauce really smooth, I run it through a food processor or use a hand mixer. First, though, I dump the sauce in a bowl and have it sit in the freezer for a bit until it comes down to a workable temperature and the splatters won't burn me (learned that lesson the hard way). You can serve it immediately, but I've been making the sauce and freezing it. You can keep it in the refrigerator for up to 4 days, or frozen up to three months.