Piquant pickle plans for 2010

After months of sitting on my shelf, some pickle alchemy has finally occurred with my green bean pickles, a.k.a. dilly beans. I hadn't even planned on pickling green beans last year, but thanks to One Seed Chicago, I had a glut of blue lake pole beans in my garden come fall. I decided to put up a few jars of dilly beans -- I love dill pickles, and I didn't feel like blanching and freezing my whole bean harvest. Dilly beans look particularly nice when canned, especially when neatly arranged in an upright but slanted pattern around the edge of the jar.

I opened a jar for company around Thanksgiving and one taste made my eyes smart: very vinegary and harsh. I was tempted to get rid of all the jars right then and there, but decided to let them mellow for a few more months and recheck. Just this weekend I sampled them again, and am happy to report that the flavor has rounded out nicely. Now, the beans are tangy and garlicky with just an edge of dill. Because the beans are raw packed prior to canning, they remain surprisingly crisp. They surpass any dill pickle you can buy at the grocery store. I have decided I need to grow dill again this summer, just to have the heads to stuff into the pickle jars. As I sit here munching on my latest culinary coup, I am pondering what pickling projects to slate for the upcoming garden season.

Last year, I canned three different vegetables: cauliflower, green beans and brussels sprouts, the latter two from my garden. In addition, I fermented a small amount of sauerkraut and a few big jars of napa and radish kimchi. I will continue on with the sauerkraut and kimchi, as well as the dilly beans, but I must be a ruthless culinary editor and nix the sprouts and cauliflower in the upcoming canning season. The sprouts were more a novelty than a real treat, and after surprising friends with a bloody mary cleverly garnished in locavore style, I ran out of uses for them. They do seem to be popular though - I recently saw a jar of pickled brussels sprouts being sold as an artisanal local product for a heart stopping 8 dollars. The cauliflower turned out better, a decent sweet and sour pickle recipe from Eugenia Bone, but if I'm doing sweet and sour pickles this year, I'm going to revive my old habit of pickling watermelon rinds.

My other definite pickling project for 2010 is going to be a foray into poor man's capers, otherwise known as pickled nasturtium seed pods. I've had my eye on this thrifty gourmet project for a while, and thus had been planning to grow nasturtiums this season. I also wanted to have a taste of the 'spicy' leaves and flowers of the nasturtium (disconcertingly, referred to as "nasties" on many a blog). Still, the main motivation was to grow a source of homemade capers. I was, then, pretty excited to hear about the seed GROW project, a communal growing project for garden bloggers, featuring no less than the mighty nasturtium. Every blogger who signed up received a packet of seeds from Renee's Garden, and will post monthly updates on the nasturtium's progress in their gardens. Stay tuned -- any post relating to the seed GROW project will be tagged with this signature:

"I'm growing Nasturtium "Spitfire" for the GROW project. Thanks, to Renee's Garden for the seeds."

Capers will definitely make it into more cooking projects in my kitchen than the brussels sprouts. I use them in pasta, mainly, and sometimes with fish. However, the single best use for capers, in this East Coast girl's opinion, is for a New York Sunday brunch: bagels with cream cheese, lox, red onion, tomato and plenty of capers on top. Real bagels! Not frozen ones. And definitely not the hamburger-buns-with-a-hole-in-the-middle I have seen passed off as bagels in certain parts of the Midwest. My personal nasturtium project for 2010 is this: a completely homemade Sunday brunch. Homemade bagels, homemade cream cheese, homegrown tomatoes, onions and "capers" and, finally, salmon I've cured in my own kitchen. Catching the fish myself is out of reach at this point. I'll settle for making gravlax.

The small pleasures of bread baking

Most Saturday mornings, I make a loaf of bread for weekend snacks. The recipe varies, as does the shape, but my loaves usually have a neat series of straight parallel lines or a large criss-cross slashed into the top. A few quick runs with a razor blade just prior to baking yields a nice finished pattern that I always admire. This morning, I turned the dough into a blazing hot cast-iron dutch oven, and forgot my usual ritual of slashing. The happy surprise was a gorgeously cracked crust. It reminds me of a watershed map, a giant river branching into ever smaller streams and brooks.

Ah, the small pleasures of bread baking. A loaf like this gives me the same grateful feeling as finding a new flower or pulling the first radish of the season.

I also made this bread look quite "artisanal" with a technique I learned from Jim Lahey, via Mark Bittman: flouring a cotton dishtowel and using it to wrap the dough during the second rise. The flour thus clings beautifully to the surface of the finished loaf, in a way that I have never been able to achieve by just sprinkling flour on the dough prior to baking.

The New York Times recently published a great bread making article by my favorite kitchen scientist and food nerd, Harold McGee. He examines the benefits and downfalls of the new-fangled wet doughs and no-knead techniques being promoted by folks like the aforementioned Lahey. McGee hits on some critical issues in bread making and they are sadly ones that I have only learned from hard experience and disappointing loaves. First, when it comes to flavor, salt matters - a lot. Romanticize the salt-free Tuscan loaf all you want, it just doesn't taste good unless it is dipped in a heavily flavored sauce or smothered in garlic and tomatoes. Second, wet doughs can lead to gummy loaves. More importantly on the topic of dough is his advice on shape: for the best loaves, stick with baguette style or small rolls. A good boule or round loaf is very hard to achieve in the home oven: the heat, moisture and air circulation just can't get close enough to the conditions of professional bakeries. The cast-iron dutch oven method that Lahey developed is the only way I have ever made round loaves that don't come out like a dense foccaccia.

Oh, to have a bread oven! I wish I had the space and zoning permits to build an outdoor adobe oven for bread and pizza. Maybe one day I can find a house that has a built-in bread oven: check out the kitchen in this New Hampshire home recently posted for sale in the Times. For a 1790's hearth like that, I would be willing to sacrifice bedrooms, bathrooms, and location. I could live anywhere! Well, as long as it had space for a garden. A garden and a hearth....what more could a girl want?

My favorite grain

One of the more welcome trends in food magazines of late has been a genuine emphasis on recipes featuring whole grains. In years past, many magazines would have but one or two such recipes, usually relegated to the diet or healthy living column. Either that or they were designated as the token vegetarian option amidst recipes for braised pork belly, grilled steaks and their ilk. Too many of these older recipes were reminiscent of earnest 1960's melanges of minimally seasoned nuts and grains that sprang from such books as Diet for a Small Planet and The Moosewood Cookbook. I forget where I read this but it is true: look at any of the recipes from Moosewood and mentally add bacon. It would taste much better, wouldn't it? So here's to the mainstream culinary press, who are finally putting out whole-grain recipes that can actually compete in flavor with a platter of pork belly.

I also am relieved to see the introduction of more variety in the whole grains featured in the recipes. No longer is the emphasis solely on brown rice or barley. Quinoa has stopped being presented as an undiscovered "exotic grain" and spelt is popping up with increasing frequency. But my absolute favorite whole grain is farro. Food editors too have seemed to recently discover that farro adds a rich nutty flavor to any dish. Farro has a very pleasing texture, the ideal of "al dente". Farro prepared risotto-style is far more flavorful and satisfying than than a true risotto made with arborio rice. Indeed, it boosts the texture and flavor of the dish so much that I find it unnecessary to trick it out with the usual risotto finishes of butter and a huge handful of parmigianno.

Farro's exact definition is murky and controversial. In a few recipes it is presented as another name for spelt, which adds to the confusion. Everyone agrees farro is a type of wheat, but beyond that, disagreements abound. According to wikipedia, this confusion arises from regional differences in Italy as to which type of wheat is grown and labeled as farro: emmer, einkorn or spelt. The type I use is emmer wheat, as best I can tell. It is hard to find, even in a big city like Chicago. I haven't checked Whole Foods, they must have a box somewhere on their shelves. I know I can reliably purchase farro from Caputo's, the independent Italian grocery chain to the west of the city. I make sure there is always a bag of farro on my pantry shelf.

I first tasted farro in Siena, Italy, where it was served in a thick vegetable-grain soup. It was a stick-to-your ribs meal --classic peasant fare -- and I thrilled to the depth and flavor of the dish. When I finally found farro stateside, I tried to recreate the soup. It tasted so-so, not at all living up to the intoxicating memory. Of course, this was likely because even a humble soup tastes better when you are newly married and sitting in a rustic osteria in a gorgeous medieval Italian town. Martha Stewart, as usual, came to the rescue and published a recipe for farro risotto so delicious that it has become one of my special "company" dishes. I have found it to be a hit with small children as well, if they are adventurous and willing to taste something that doesn't look like buttered pasta.

More recently, I found another winning farro recipe, a warm salad of farro and red cabbage, redolent of thyme. In the picture is above, it is the dish on the left. The other dish is a platter of roasted root vegetables tossed in a mustard vinaigrette and sprinkled with homemade feta. This was a real late-winter vegetarian feast! My weak photography skills do not capture the real color of the farro dish -- thanks to the cabbage, the whole platter of food had a gentle purple hue. This pleased my son to no end, who asked for seconds and thirds of the "purple pasta". My husband was a little more wary -- especially as the purple color deepened as the dish cooled. But it was hard for him -- even with the reservations about the color palate -- to deny that it was filling and bursting with flavor. I made both the root vegetables and this dish because I was afraid neither one would "be enough" to serve on its own. What folly! Both were incredibly filling and we are still eating the leftovers days later. And I didn't even think about adding bacon.

Tomato experiment

Last year, two men at work were locked in a no-holds-barred race to have the first tomato of the season. Every day they discussed at length the walls-o-water, the cloches, the coddling. I found it all a bit tiring. I felt this macho race to be first had little point, since shortly we would all be up to our necks in warm-season crops, with coworkers carefully avoiding us lest they be handed another bag of cherry tomatoes or zucchini. I employed none of my colleagues' soil-warming techniques and wound up only a few weeks behind them....in the mean time, I had radishes.

I'm sure botanic journals are bursting with scientific reports on various approaches to starting tomato plants on a large scale. I like to read nerdy science stuff as much as the next garden geek, but sometimes I wonder what these carefully controlled professional garden trials have to do with my little home plot. I'm not trying to produce acres of productive, disease-free plants, or bring a sturdy fruit to market. I just want my lazy August bowls of insalata caprese. While we're at it, I wouldn't mind enough tomatoes to meet my spaghetti sauce needs for the winter months. Beyond that, is it just production for production's sake? Can you actually ever have too many tomatoes?

Moreover, can you ever have them too soon? By the beginning of September my family has usually tired of the salsas and tomato salads that we were savoring a few months prior. We are looking forward by then to winter squash, root vegetables and fall greens. By starting the season early, am I just creating an early start to the tomato ennui of late summer?

I saw a package of walls-o-water on sale last month, and decided to give them a try. My husband snickered, reminding me of my professed disdain for these contraptions last season. But I bought them, and hence the first tomato seeds were started a few days ago. I am not desperate to be the first with tomatoes on the snack table at work -- I'll leave that to the boys -- so why did I buy the walls-o-water? Mostly, I am just curious. I love to learn new techniques in both the garden and the kitchen. Do they really work so much better than plain-old "transplanting when the soil warms"? Maybe I just don't know what I'm missing out on. I sneered at salad spinners until I tried one, and was immediately converted. I suspect that a few extra weeks of tomatoes will probably not alter my life significantly, but at least the next time I roll my eyes at my competitive colleagues, I can do so from experience. And if my family ever goes deeper into local and sustainable eating, this season extension technique may be the difference between a new salad or yet another bowl of dried beans!

Since I was doing a head-to-head trial of walls-o-water versus my usual transplanting practice, I figured I'd throw in another branch to my research study and wintersow the same seeds. I just placed them in wintersown containers outside. While the wintersowing folks make no claim to earlier harvests, they do argue that the technique yields sturdier, healthier plants. I've never had much problem with tomato plant vigor (knock on wood). Usually, it's the opposite -- they seem to grow into every corner of my garden as soon as I turn my back. By the end of August, I can't keep up with all the tomatoes. Even if the wintersown seeds end up maturing later than the other plants, they can act as replacements should I lose a plant to pest or disease. Somehow I suspect all will do just fine in the end, and I will wind up with even more tomatoes than I usually harvest. Fortunately, I am trying out Opalka paste this year, and a surplus should just mean more days in the kitchen making sauce. Remind me how nonchalantly I wrote that last sentence when I am complaining about a weekend-long canning extravaganza this summer.

Supermarket gardening

Is there a bigger racket in supermarkets than the herb section? Tiny little plastic boxes filled with a few wilted sprigs go for two or three dollars, sometimes more. With large herbs like sage or basil, that price can break down to over 10 cents a leaf. For anyone who gardens, even on a windowsill, it is shocking to do the math on the retail value of your herb plants. I look at my ratty, overgrown thyme patch and realize I've got close to a hundred dollars of culinary gold!

I carefully save my summer herb harvest in the freezer. I do like the look and smell of drying herbs. If fresh herbs aren't available, however, I prefer to cook with frozen. For tougher plants -- sage and thyme - I just freeze them in ziplocs with as much air pressed out as possible. The more tender leaves -- basil and parsley -- I freeze in oil as pesto. There is one herb, rosemary, that I can always use fresh, since it is growing away happily in my guest bedroom. I plan to try more of this windowsill culture next winter.

Sadly, I miscalculated with my sage this year. I ran out of frozen leaves a few weeks back, thanks to several dishes of chicken saltimbocca. I have some dried crumbly sage in a jar, which would probably do okay in a poultry stuffing. The recipe I planned to make this weekend is a parsnip risotto and, for taste and aesthetics, fresh or frozen leaves would be best. I guess I could cook something else, but I have a big stash of parsnips, so I really want to make the recipe. And, yes, I can be a resourceful cook and substitute ingredients. But on the first go at a recipe, I like to follow the prescribed method. Finally, sage is sage. If I use rosemary, it's not like I'm substituting yogurt for buttermilk.

I stood at the grocery store this morning, a sorry little box of sage leaves in my hand, eying the $2.99 price tag. I weighed my interest in the parsnip recipe against the shame of paying that much for something I grow for pennies in the summer. My son, always observant, remarked to me that he had found a "match" for my box. I expected this to mean he'd found other boxes of sage, but actually he had found a nearby shelf with organic herb plants on it, including sage. They are the earliest "gardener trap" plants that I have seen set out this year, luring the rookies (or the experienced but desperate) into buying plants way too early in the season. Many looked leggy and root-bound, but the pot of sage didn't look half bad -- a salvageable salvia, if I repotted right away. There were at least double the leaves on the plant as there were in the box. Price? $2.99. Even if I stripped all the leaves off the plant and killed it, I would break even. I only need a few leaves, though. So the rest of the plant can be nursed on the sunny windowsill alongside my rosemary. Score one for the supermarket: their gardener's impulse purchase trap worked. Is it just coincidence the plants are priced the same as all the herb boxes? How many other shoppers have done the same mental calculation this weekend?

My son must have really caught the supermarket gardening spirit, since after his apple at lunch he carefully presented me with 5 seeds that he wanted to plant. He insisted he had to grow a tree. They must have been talking about Johnny Appleseed at daycare this week. Now, apple seeds are tricky. I know they can be home sprouted, but, from what I've read, they won't grow out to be like the actual apple from whence they came. And, it will take a very long time to discover this -- years and years, in fact. Not the ideal toddler project, but my son was insistent. I surfed the Internet and came upon some charming stories -- a family who has an apple tree they rescued after it sprouted in their compost pile, a 30 year old whose grandma still has a tree he planted from a seed as a little boy. It couldn't hurt to try. I tried to convince him we should cold stratify and sprout them in a wet paper towel like many sites instructed, but he wanted a cup of soil, just like the other seeds we are starting. So now he has a little pot of apple seeds on his windowsill.

I suspect he may kill the seeds with the ferocity of his love....if they ever even sprout, given no stratification. He has already asked to water them three times, insisting they are "thirsty to grow". If this project doesn't work, I know there are other supermarket garden activities we can try, well beyond the standard 1970's avocado pit. In fact, we bought a pineapple this morning, and I had an inkling of a memory that the top could be rooted. I found many websites with instructions and several referenced the book Don't Throw It, Grow It! The Chicago Public Library system will have it in my hot little hands in a fortnight, so stay tuned. This is likely the beginning of a long gardening relationship with my supermarket.

Invasive plants

My main winter project, the cold frame, is finally built and waiting for a layer of paint. With the Winter Olympics on full-blast, I have stayed away from my cold workshop in the basement in favor of a cozy spot on the couch and good view of the speed skating relay semifinals. The paint can wait for another day, or at least until I have finished analyzing all the men's figure skating costumes. The amount of actual athletic content in the programming is slim compared to the commercials, emotional back story segments and commentary, and it would take a more patient viewer than I to sit uninterrupted in front of the TV for this many hours each night. Fortunately, my laptop comes in handy while enduring yet another credit card commercial and I have frittered away the time between half-pipe runs surfing the gardening Internet universe.

I stayed away from the seed selling websites for a few nights, but eventually I could no longer resist -- I wanted more information on what I already have and even started noting seeds that I will plant in a few seasons, when I -ahem - have more space. Visiting any garden retailer, be they virtual or brick-and-mortar, is, of course, a dangerous business for a woman with limited real estate and too many seeds as it is. Over on Garden Rant, Amy Stewart posted on the agony of a tempting nursery catalog despite a garden already bursting at the seams. I feel her pain. Though there are many seed sellers who I love to click on, Summer Hill Seeds is by far my favorite -- the owner (Illinois-based by the way!) favors the rare and unusual. Tidbits of interesting trivia are scattered throughout the plant descriptions, like this one, for Prickly Caterpillars, scorpiurus muricatus:

"In days past, caterpillars were added to salads to surprise unexpected diners, but not meant to be eaten mostly because they are so hairy."

I had to have them, and I am already deciding which honored guests will get this this unexpected salad surprise. Oh Summer Hill, you always manage to open my wallet.

But then -- oh, the horror! -- I stopped dead in my web surfing tracks when I saw climbing nightshade seeds on my beloved website. What? My new favorite seller is actually asking folks to pay money for these seeds? The description tells the unwitting gardener that this is a "desirable" vine with "loose clusters of beautiful star-shaped blooms". Not only is this plant potentially toxic to young children, who inevitably will be drawn to the bright red berries, but in my experience it spreads with unmatched aggression here in Chicago. Apparently, it is invasive all over North America, if one is to believe the hate mail posted in Dave's Garden forums. It is difficult to uproot and smells bad when ripped out. No matter how hard I try to eradicate the vine, my permissive neighbor always ensures that more seeds will spread my way. I have never photographed my own backyard specimens of this weed in full bloom. As I am not a poster of others' photos, the image above is all I can offer. I pulled this corpse of a climbing nightshade vine out of my neighbor's chain link fence this morning.

I know that one woman's weed can be another woman's undiscovered European heirloom, but really it is just too much to bear for me to think of my garden nemesis being intentionally planted by other gardeners. Based on the message boards, I know several folks to the south would feel the same shock and disgust that I am growing maypops, Passiflora incarnata. At least maypops are native -- and the flowers look far superior to the nightshade's. Here in Chicago, the most visibly vilified invasive plant species is buckthorn -- there is a movement afoot to get rid of it. At a Garfield Park Conservatory event, they even had crafts for kids featuring buckthorn that had been ripped out of North Park Nature Village. Yet, for those not in the local area, the king of all invasive species here in Chicago is fauna not flora. Yes, I am talking about the Asian carp. It even has its own "kill zone". I'd like to start a Climbing Nightshade kill zone, with my back yard being ground zero. As I won't resort to herbicides, its me and my garden gloves against this marauder. Come to think of it, my son might be strong enough to help me rip it out this year...as long as he doesn't snack on the berries.

When plants and food are better store bought

While I do always appreciate the handmade and homegrown, I am a sucker for florists' plants in full bloom. I love coaxing plants into blooming, but there is such a thrill when someone else does all the work under professional plant-growing conditions, and I get to enjoy the fruit, or blossoms rather, of their labor. For me, this red florists' cyclamen is a far superior gift to a box of Valentine chocolates. I spent my morning sipping coffee and appreciating the gorgeous leaves and flowers. My house is cool, so it may do well, though humidity is an issue. I'll put it near my fern, to remind me to mist.

I have also learned the hard way about certain store bought products being superior for cooking. The lesson came last weekend, when I decided to cook ahead and freeze some dumplings to eat on Chinese New Year. Yesterday was our Valentine's party and it went off quite well, if I do say so myself. Here's a picture of the sweets I made:

Of course, I overcooked and spent most of last night packing away all of the cheeses, roasted vegetables, cookies and candies, desperately trying to shoehorn one last container into the fridge. After an epic day of cooking, hosting and cleaning, I knew I would be left with little desire to dive in to my usual Sunday cooking projects. If I hadn't thrown the party, I would have probably spent all day making the insanely delicious Shanghai soup dumplings that I wrote about a while ago. Yet I knew I would not have the energy for dicing aspic. So last weekend, when I came upon a Fine Cooking article on traditional foods to celebrate the Year of the Tiger, I decided to make these dumplings and freeze them for a quick heat-and-eat meal in my haze of post-party fatigue.

The article waxed poetic on the authentic way to make dumpling wrappers, complete with instructions for fashioning a small rolling pin from a wooden dowel. To me, instructions for projects like this are nearly irresistible. I am a moth to the flame. Make a recipe harder and more intricate, especially in the name of authenticity, and I must cook the dish, no matter what hurdles are set before me. Obscure ingredient? Who cares! I have a toddler who loves quests of all sorts and gladly hops into the car seat for "dinner adventures". He has ridden with me to the ends of Chicago in search of specialty products. This particular dumpling recipe involved no such quest, but rather a time-consuming and generally unnecessary process of rolling my own wrappers. I could understand this coming in handy, especially when one lives in a region that has few supermarket options. But I live within short driving distance of multiple Asian supermarkets. They all sell locally made dumpling wrappers in generous stacks for less than two dollars. And, to be honest, Chinese cooking is popular enough that even my Grandma who lives in a small town in Wyoming can pick up won-ton wrappers at the local Albertson's. This general accessibility was yet another enticement for me to kick it up a notch on the DIY difficulty level and roll my own wrappers. I had a spare dowel, and all it took was a saw and some mineral oil to fashion the proper tool.

It will come as no surprise that the wrappers took hours to produce. Even with careful rolling by an experienced cook, they were uneven, misshapen and prone to tearing. Additionally, the recipe yielded about twice the filling necessary for the amount of wrappers provided by the dough. A reasonable person would have called it a day and made meatballs with the rest of the filling mix, but of course, this was just a siren call to try the wrapper-production process all over again. Sadly, my rolling skills showed no measurable improvement during the second attempt.

Eaten on the day of, the dumplings tasted great and held up okay when boiled, but did better when pan-fried pot sticker style. Most of the dumplings, though, were carefully frozen for today. This morning, I inspected our planned lunch and found that the dough had done something odd: each dumpling was encased in a fragile mosaic of frozen dough shards. The shards seemed held together by a thin web of dough, with the surface of each dumpling sporting a museum-quality craquelure finish. I freeze dumplings all the time, and I have never seen this happen with store bought wrappers. Nor does it happen with my frozen homemade ravioli, although, with an egg base, that dough has more structure. I tested a few of these morphed dumplings on the stove top and the filling promptly oozed out and made the water a chunky, greasy mess. I would post a picture of the dumplings except that I quickly threw them out in a fit of disappointment. So much for planning ahead -- at least we have tons of party leftovers! From this day forward, dumpling wrappers are a thing better store bought. Complicated recipes be damned! The year of the tiger has started inauspiciously from a culinary standpoint.