Category Archives: food

Eating Local

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Eating Local

We have a little local farmer’s market – when I moved here last fall it was pretty much just one good vegetable merchant and a lot of crafts. Well, they’ve done a great job getting new vendors, and Wednesday there was a local family selling their own pork, raised naturally without hormones and allowed to roam outside. Mr. Miller told me they started because they thought the local 4-H kids were paying too much for their weaner pigs, so they raised some weaners, and then when the weren’t all sold, well, they were in the pork business. So I bought some pork chops.

Next to them was a woman with a card table and a couple of coolers selling lamb. Now, I am a big fan of lamb, if I had to choose just one meat, it would be lamb. Her lamb was a little expensive, but well, it was raised just up the road and as I’ve written about before, I’m willing to pay a premium to buy meat that I know where it was raised, and more importantly, where it was butchered (over in Big Timber, at the processing plant). So I bought some lamb chops from her. She also told me that if I need anything during the week just to call, she’s got a clothing shop in town (“Ewe and Me” wouldn’t you know) and there’s a freezer in the back. Which is good because I think leg of lamb is almost the perfect summer barbecue meat. So, I took her card.

I also bought some gorgeous baby turnips from another local gardener with a card table, and found out that the reason I have little bugs eating my garden is that the brassicae family just has trouble around here (chard, kale, broccoli, etc…). It’s not a tragedy — things are growing — they just have little holes in them.

So, last night I had turnip greens cooked a la Julie/Julia (saute some bacon, add a few hot pepper flakes and a big shot of chopped garlic, then the greens. Add 1/2 cup chicken broth, 1/2 cup vermouth, a couple of big pieces of lemon rind and cook until done — in this case, about 40 minutes. Yum Yum), some rice, and a delicious local pork chop on the grill …

So that’s my little tale of local dinner. I ate well. My neighbors made a little money. And we didn’t spend petroleum reserves trucking stuff all over the country.

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“You mean in America they eat dead fish?”

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This question was posed to my friend Wendy when she was in China adopting the darling Scott. Wendy had been describing something to one of her Chinese hosts about eating in America, and this woman just couldn’t believe that we bought fish dead in the grocery store. Who knows what you’re getting if you can’t see the whole fish — how can you tell how fresh it is if you can’t see the eyes or the gills? Better to buy your fish live, out of a tank, like sensible people, no?

I got thinking of this because my garden is ruining me for regular vegetables from the grocery store. How long has that zucchini been dead? What’s with that lettuce — it came all the way from Mexico and now I’m supposed to eat it? What am I going to do all winter (I sense experiments with cold frames ahead)? I know, again with the Swiss Chard, but it’s up and ready to go and having never really been a fan of Swiss Chard before, it’s a revelation. Cut it, carry inside, rinse in cold water, cut up and sautee with a little garlic until it wilts, add some chicken broth and a little wine and let simmer while the chicken cooks on the barbecue. Yum. Fresh greens from my very own backyard. And if you grow it yourself, you can eat it young, when it’s a little more tender than those enormous leaves you see in the store.

Speaking of greens, I went back to Seeds From Italy and ordered some more greens — some lettuces, a radicchio/chicory mix, and nice Bill McKay who runs the site sent along a packet of an escarole-like lettuce. I can’t say enough about these seeds — the arugula was fabulous, the basil is coming up really well (and I’ve had bad luck with basil in the past — which is odd as it’s supposed to be so easy), and I’m looking forward to more authentic Italian greens. Plus, he sends along some good cooking tips as well. Great site, great product, nice guy. Go check it out.

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A Plug for the Ruminator

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A Plug for the Ruminator Review

The latest issue of the terrific Ruminator Review arrived the other day and I’ve been devouring it. This issue is devoted to “Cultivation: Rural Lives, Global Issues” and contains interviews with such thinkers on the subject as Gretel Ehrlich, Verlyn Klinkenboorg, Scott Russell Sanders and Maxine Kumin. (This issue also contains a small review of a childrens’ book by yours truly.)

One of the unexpected pleasures for me of moving to this small town in Montana is how interested people are in food, in the origins of their food, and in eating close to the source of production. People eat a lot of meat here, but it’s meat that is known, that is, it’s not strange meat from the supermarket, meat that comes from who-knows-where. I was at a barbecue this weekend discussing how oddly comforting I find it to wander into Matt’s Meats, our local butcher shop, and see a pig up on the back counter, Matt himself taking a look at it before cutting it up. It’s the kind of sight that would have totally freaked out most of the people I work with in California, but I thought it was curious and interesting. The only startling thing about the dead pig was how raw his eye socket was, but of course, you don’t want any hair on your meat, and eyelashes are hair. But there it was, a nice small-ish pig, and Matt was taking the time to examine the cavity, and about to start cutting it up, it wasn’t being sped through some horror-show of a factory abbatoir being hacked at by frantic workers. This isn’t the kind of discussion you can have a lot of places, but you can here, and you’ll also get a lot of good info about buying a freezer, and about butchering and keeping wild game. Like I said, people eat a lot of meat here, but it’s meat we know.

And then there are vegetables. It’s early yet, but Deep Creek Gardens is harvesting, the Farmer’s Market is starting up, and I’m learning to like Swiss Chard because it grows really well in my garden. I’ve discovered how nice young Swiss Chard is, picked straight out of the garden, sauteed with a little garlic.

Anyhow, if you’re interested in these sort of issues that are central to the LivingSmall experiment, the Ruminator Review has some great essays, reviews of a lot of interesting books on the subject, a few of which I had to go order myself (as if I need an excuse to order more books).

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Breakfast of Champions

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Breakfast of Champions

Not to sound like an Alice Waters clone, but my breakfast these past few days has been local farm eggs (1 yolk, 2 whites, extra yolk makes dog very happy — it’s good to share), scrambled with some arugula out of my garden and eaten over toast with a little goat cheese crumbled on top. It’s so good that yesterday, when I was out of eggs, I found myself cranky that the local natural foods store (which always makes me grumpy because they seem way more concerned with supplements than with food — eat real food people!) was still closed, as was Matt’s Meats where they also carry local eggs. So I had to settle for diner breakfast at Martins, which was fine, it’s always the same, which is what one wants from a diner. But this morning, there are eggs, there is arugula straight from the garden, there’s a happy dog who liked his extra yolk, and glory be, there’s even a nice steady rain falling on my garden.

Vacation in the backyard was a spectacular success. My yard is really coming together … I mowed and weed-whacked the other day, and despite never having been a lawn person, I was quite pleased with how nice it looked. Although I’m sure lawn-purists would criticise the diversity of plant life that makes up said lawn — no weed and feed for me. If it’s green, and mostly grass, I’m happy. In fact, this fall I’m going to seed with Nichols Garden Nursery’s Dryland Ecology Lawn Mix which contains a mix of grasses, clovers and some tiny wildflowers like chamomile. I like a mix in a lawn, and anything that will allow me to mow less often is a good thing.

Eventually I’d like to get rid of much of the lawn and replace it with perennial beds. Now that the fence is up, I have a long bed to work with, a bed that unfortunately, thanks to the happy workers’ feet is sort of a tabula rasa, but six feet by thirty is a fun space to think about. I’m hoping the big scarlet poppies and the iris will recover, but if not, well, I’ll just plant some other fun stuff. And for the back corner, where the sacred rhubarb grows, I’m thinking about raspberry canes, and asparagus — things I’ve been wanting to grow but which I don’t have room for in the regular garden.

But for now, it’s back to the day job, back to trying to make progress on the new book, back to watching, miracle of miracles, things grow in my vegetable garden (gardening is good for those of us whose faith in things working out okay wavers … you put in those seeds, nothing happens, nothing happens, and then there are sprouts, sprouts that grow into real things. Amazing.)

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Weird but good. But mostly Weird.

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Weird but good. But mostly weird.
I had a lot of leftover chicken from The Week of Roasted Chickens, and it was all breast meat, which can be tricky to work with as leftovers because it gets dry and stringy and horrible. So last night, while gazing aimlessly into the fridge trying to decide what to do with said chicken, I noticed that little tub of Thai Green Curry Paste that I don’t think I’ve ever cooked with. I’ve used the red curry paste several times, but not the green. It was cold and rainy here and Thai curry sounded good. So, I sauteed some shallots, skimmed the solid stuff off the top of the coconut milk and fried the green curry paste until everything started to separate. So far, so good. I added a big squirt of fish sauce, and some dark brown sugar, and the coconut milk, then dumped in the leftover chicken to simmer. It needed vegetables though — I had some frozen peas, and some baby carrots, which I threw in, then I chopped up a bunch of scallions and searched the fridge fruitlessly for cilantro. I had no cilantro. I had some mint, so I chopped a little of that up. I stirred it all into the curry, and served it on a little rice.
The weird part was that it looked like the inside of a chicken pot pie. But it tasted like Thai curry. It wasn’t bad, but the vegetables were wrong, and it wasn’t really green but a sort of sickly green-ish color. There’s a lot left too. I hate to throw leftovers away, but this one may not make it to another meal.

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Everybody likes cake.

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Everybody likes cake.

Another dinner party last night — our friends Bob and Robin came over to see the new garden. Since my chi is still a little low, I made the same dinner that I cooked for Patrick and the Nice Girlfriend the other night — but I made a cake. People think making a cake is a really big deal, but it’s not. I made the Buttermilk Cocoa Cake out of Laurie Colwin’s fabulous book More Home Cooking. It could hardly be easier — in a bowl you mix together flour, cocoa, sugar, a little salt and baking soda, then add buttermilk (although since I didn’t have any buttermilk, I used yogurt and milk mixed together), half a cup of vegetable oil, and some vanilla. Mix, pour into a cake pan, bake for half an hour. This is a great cake because it’s not too sweet, and it has a nice cakey texture. I just sprinkled it with some powdered sugar so it looked festive, then served it with local Wilcoxin’s Ice Cream, and a little chocolate sauce dribbled over (heat cream in microwave, add chocolate chips, stir until it gets all runny and glossy). Everyone was happy and I felt very Nigella Lawson about it all. Something yummy, that wasn’t hard, and made everyone smile.

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Roast Chicken to Cure the Blues

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Roast Chicken to Cure the Blues

My darling brother has a new girlfriend, and of course, when you are no longer young, new relationships tend to come with some baggage. The Nice Girlfriend had a tough day yesterday, her baggage was all noisy with her about the fact that she’s moving on in life, and she was a little blue. She’s also renovating her house, and domestic disarray never helps when feeling blue. Plus, the brother has a cold, and was a little low himself. So late in the afternoon they came over and we sat on the new, comfy outdoor furniture, looking at the beautiful-if-still-empty raised beds, and had a restorative cocktail. Meanwhile, I’d roasted a chicken and some potatoes, and steamed some of the gorgeous big artichokes that have flooded our local market. We sat in the backyard for a while, then came in and ate artichokes, and chicken, and potatoes and salad, with a nice bottle of wine left over from the fiesta the other night, and everything was just a little better. When people are feeling a little blue, there’s nothing like a roasted chicken — so easy (poke holes in lemon, stuff in cavity with some garlic, rub outside with olive oil, salt, pepper and paprika or ancho chili powder, roast at 400 for an hour to an hour and a half). A nice dinner in my yellow kitchen and the world feels slightly less wobbly on its axis.

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Things you can do instead of planning Part Two of your new novel.

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Things you can do instead of planning Part Two of your new novel. I finished Part One the other day … well I didn’t exactly “finish” it but I do have a draft that seems sort of alive and is stable enough that I have to stop tinkering with it and go on to the next part of the book. I’m trying not to dwell on the fact that it’s taken me almost four years to get to this point, nor to dwell on the fact that I’m back at the edge of terra incongnita, that place where I have to make up a bunch of new stuff. Rewriting is way more fun than writing.

So, here are some of the things a person could do on a Sunday instead of diligently getting out the enormous sheets of paper with the post-it removeable stickum and outlining scenes.

Go to Mass. Hard to feel bad about that one. After all, it is Lent. Our priest was a little shook up, aparently he was felled after morning Mass on Ash Wednesday by an enormous kidney stone, and he choked up a couple of times during the homily talking about how even though we know we are safe in God’s love, things can get kind of scary sometimes. It was endearing. He seems like a pretty good priest, and we prayed a lot for peace in the Middle East, and even here in conservative Montana, people seemed really to be praying that we won’t go to war.

Walk the dogs. It is very very cold … one bank says it’s 6 degrees and the other bank, a block up the street says it’s 4 degrees. The dog park is out on a low bluff along the Yellowstone River, and it’s windy. None of the usual characters were out there this morning and the dogs were a little miffed that they got a short walk, but too bad, my fingers were frozen and there wasn’t anyone to talk to while freezing.
Read the New York Times. I get the Sunday NY Times by mail, so I actually read last Sunday’s Times this morning. I read the Bozeman Chronicle too, but that only takes about fifteen minutes, including Parade and the comics. It’s a pretty good paper, but Sunday is distinctly unsatisfying. My friend Hope who lives on a ranch in Colorado and I were talking about how much we like reading the Sunday Times a week late… it takes all the urgency out of the news parts of the paper, and since the Magazine and the arts sections aren’t particularly timely, it makes for a very relaxing reading experience. I was especially struck by Judith Shulevitz’s essay Bring Back the Sabbath (sorry, it’s now in the annoying NYT archive where you’re supposed to pay for content). For several years now, I’ve avoided committing to activities on Sunday. I haven’t been consiously thinking of this as keeping the Sabbath, but whether or not I make it to Mass (which was pretty much never in California, thanks to the recent scandals and the enormity of that parish. I guess I just don’t like big congregations), I like taking Sunday to be quiet, do some reading, cook something, clean my house, putter. Shulevitz traces how she gradually found herself joining a Synagogue and practicing the Sabbath again, as well as traces the history of the Sabbath in American history. It’s good to have some space in the week where you’re not all caught up in trying to accomplish anything.

Make a big pot of Lamb and White Bean Stew. Chop up an onion, a couple of carrots, and a couple of celery stalks into dice. Chop up the last of the prosciutto butt that was tucked away in the freezer. Saute the prosciutto bits in oil, then add the onions and saute until translucent. Add the carrots and celery with some red pepper flakes, a couple of cloves, a couple of bay leaves, some of last summer’s sage that happens to be hanging in the back of the pantry, and a generous sprinkling of herbes de provence. Smash and peel a bunch of garlic cloves (five or six if, like me, you like garlic). Throw them in with the vegetables. Add 1 cup of small white beans soaked overnight (or a can of white beans, or even unsoaked beans if you didn’t think about it in advance). Add the leftover 1/4 bottle of white wine, a good slug of vermouth (for that herbal flavor) and a pint of chicken broth. Add two lamb shanks. Bring to a bare simmer and let cook all day so it fills your house with a lovely smell and plan to eat it while watching Clinton and Dole on 60 minutes.

Blog
Stop blogging and suck it up and go try to figure out what these characters want to do next. Even if it is Sunday, nonetheless, it would be good to get this done before another work week begins and sucks me in.

Happy Sunday everyone.

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Even cafeteria Asian food tastes Amazing

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Even cafeteria Asian food tastes amazing after four months in southeastern Montana, which despite its many many charms is an ethnic food wasteland. I’m in San Jose for work this week, and today was something of an epic. I left Livingston at five this morning, only to run into whiteout conditions on Bozeman Pass. Who needs coffee before an early-morning flight when you can have a big old jolt of adrenaline? (Don’t worry Dad, I’m fine.)

So, by the time I got to Cisco, I was hungry, but I had a lot to do, and about fifty emails to answer, so I just popped down to the cafeteria in my building, where I had the “bento special”. This wasn’t real bento, it wasn’t even particularly great bento … it was just a plate with rice, a couple of potstickers, some fried tofu, and some kimchee … but after months in Montana, where even this very ordinary, not very good Asian food would be considered hugely exotic, well, let’s just say I was a happy girl and got through the afternoon just fine. If I have to leave Montana for a week, just when we’ve finally gotten snow, I guess staying in a hotel surrounded by two enormous malls full of Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants sort of makes up for it.

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Marion Cunningham…

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Marion Cunningham, one of my food heros, has a great piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle about the demise of family cooking and mealtime. I don’t get it. My family life as a kid was pretty chaotic, but my mother always cooked, and taught both my brother and I to cook along with her. Most of my happy memories of my Mom’s house revolve around days we spent cooking, either experimenting with new dishes, or cooking things we all knew we liked. I’ll never forget the first curry I ever made, with instructions from a woman I remember only as Ann-from-Iran. I’d never used fresh ginger before, and when I put it in the blender and chopped it up, well! I think of that moment, that explosive aroma, and turning to my mother and saying “Smell this!” almost every time I cook with ginger.

At my father’s house, we ate dinner together, at the dining room table, at least three or four times a week. We were expected to have good table manners, and to make conversation about the events of the day. Throughout most of high school my father and I debated politics at the dinner table, and I still credit him with making me feel comfortable enough with public debate that I was routinely one of the only women in my graduate school classes who spoke up. (And all these years later, when his political beliefs have taken a 180, it’s pretty entertaining to hear him rant about the Bush administration. I keep reminding him that when I made the same argument in high school, he was on the other side.)

I don’t understand my friends with kids. I know life is hectic, but I have almost no friends whose children are capable of sitting at the table for the length of a real meal without complaining about the food, making a mess of something, or just making polite conversation. I mean, even when I was a nanny, for a four year old with Down Syndrome, we went to lunch on Saturday afternoons to practice manners. Her mother wanted her to have good manners, because this would make her life easier in the long run. Are all these sports and after school activities really more important than family life? I wonder. But go read Marion Cunningham’s article. For one thing, she’s more articulate than I am and she makes a very salient political point that in a world of scarce resources, “convenience” foods, with their excessive packaging, their expense, and the way they undermine family life are a corrosive force.

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