Bogus "seasonal" recipes

I went to a Barnes and Noble for the first time in a long while and was shocked by the rack of newly released cookbooks -- nearly two prominently displayed shelves of glossy hardcovers emphasized local food, seasonal produce and kitchen gardening. Snark all you want about trends and recession-era fashions, but it warms my heart to see this ethic become mainstream. There was even a thick stack of one of my favorite recent books, The Seasons on Henry's Farm. A decade ago, this book would have been sold only in health food stores and garden catalogs. Three cheers for it holding it's own next to the table of teen vampire novels.

I flipped through the books and, as with most genres, they were of varying quality. They were uniformly beautiful, with close up shots of garlic scapes and oil-slicked greens. The recipes are what separated out the wheat from the chaff. Clearly, some authors knew what they were talking about and others, well, had jumped a little too quickly on the locavore bandwagon. One book that proclaimed an ethic of "growing your local community" featured pineapple salsa. Unless your local community is Hawaii, that ain't local, baby. I have nothing against recipes featuring fresh fruit, and love a good pineapple now and then. But pretending that you can march over to the farmer's market and pick-up a pineapple to go with your grass-fed pork chop is a little silly.

More subtle, but entirely more irritating to me as someone who truly sweats out the season in her vegetable patch, were some of the garden-based cookbooks. The authors nailed the basics: tomatoes in summer, kale in the late fall. Their lack of gardening chops -- or even their lack of a keen eye for farmer's markets week in and week out -- was shown in the many of the dishes featuring combinations of produce. Apricot and rhubarb marmalade? My rhubarb is long past harvest when the apricots ripen. Corn and melon salad? My corn was picked this week, and my melons are just the size of baby's fists. Most annoying to me are the "summer" recipes featuring greens and tender lettuces. By the time tomatoes are ripe on the vine, any lettuce left in the garden will be bolted and bitter. I just planted my fall lettuce seed in the shadow of tomato plants, heavy with ripe fruit. That's as far as these two garden products will come to each other in my house, unfortunately.

Even my current favorite food writer, Francis Lam of Salon.com, is not immune to "seasonal" gaffes. He wrote a column last week waxing poetic on the powerful flavor of local eating but then gave a recipe for a tomato and arugula pasta. My arugula peters out in early May, and I get another crop in late September. Even the farmer's markets are low on greens this time of year. My list of examples goes on and on, but I am starting to feel a little too grumpy. After all, if these books get someone to plant their own flat of lettuce or raise a tomato or two, that is a good thing. And, as my husband observed after I concluded my bogus-garden-recipe rant, most of the real hard-core gardeners are too busy weeding to sit back and write a cookbook.

The savory side of canning

With apricots and cherries in season, I am up to my ears in jam, despite the unavoidable fact that my family prefers salty preserves over sweet ones. It was time to put up some more savory treats, so I turned to a newly released book: Homemade Living: Canning and Preserving with Ashley English (I received a review copy from the publisher). Ashley English writes a blog, Small Measure, that will certainly be of interest to anyone who has found their way here to K-Town Homestead -- it is chock full of posts about a sustainable, homemade life. I am always a bit wary of books by bloggers -- all too often the books seem little more than printed-out posts (case in point: The Foodie Handbook). English's book comes off as a stand-alone effort, much to her credit. A blogging sensibility does infuse the book, however; like the best of the blogs on the web, it is carefully designed, with lovely photos and an appealing and accessible layout.

The book is full of information for beginners, as well as challenges for old hands. I put myself somewhere in the middle skills-wise, and was intrigued by most of the recipes. I say most because she includes a "classic" recipe for canned corn -- seriously? Canned corn? Freezing wins out on this one for me. I tested three recipes that worked with what was available at the farmer's market this week as well as spilling out of my own overflowing summer garden. Alas, the Cardamom Apple Cider Butter will have to wait until fall!

I jumped in with a refrigerator pickle recipe for Persian Cucumbers. Spicy, snappy and redolent of cloves, they made a good accompaniment for my hummus. I must caution that these pickles are for true clove-lovers. The next time I make them (and there will be a next time), I am cutting down the cloves at least by half. It is a gutsy recipe and I appreciate the bold spicing. So many canning books keep everything mild enough for a ninety-year old Midwestern grandma.

I moved on to the tomato-basil sauce, using a combination of two varieties from my garden: mortgage lifter and peiping chieh. Now, I know mortgage lifter is a slicer, but they are low-seed and meaty, and frankly we can't keep up with the output (how many two-pound tomatoes can a family eat?). I had to do something with them, so they went into the canning pot. English's recipe and my produce yielded a thin, bright sauce -- not mind-blowing, but better than any canned "pizza sauce" you buy in the store. I will probably use it as a base for a more complex pasta sauce, rather than just dump it on pasta all by itself. I am going to try this one again with a true sauce tomato, once my opalkas ripen (if I don't lose them all to blossom end rot!).

Finally, I canned up a recipe for fennel relish (pictured at the top of the post). English organized a lot of the recipes by season and filed this one under "winter". Hmmm...peppers in winter? The late-July farmer's market today had fennel, onions and red bell peppers for sale. So, it seems like a summer recipe if you want to make it from locally-grown produce. This recipe yields a product that needs a month or two to mellow in the jar, letting the spices meld before taking a true sample. So I cannot speak to the taste, but the recipe was straightforward and easy to follow. These jars are easy on the eyes too -- I love the red pepper slices and black peppercorns against the pale green fennel. If I have a quibble, it is that the book assumes the reader will generally know how to put the preserves to good use. While English does offer some quick suggestions before the recipes (i.e. "slather on a ham sandwich"), folks might be left scratching their heads at 4 pints of fennel relish. A few actual recipes for the use of each preserve (as are offered in Eugenia Bone's book or the Williams-Sonoma guide) might help home cooks realize the full potential of their efforts.

Overall, this is an excellent book and an especially good choice as a gift for someone who wants to start canning. This is not an encyclopedic effort, but rather a well-edited collection of interesting projects. Those huge textbook-sized canning manuals can be intimidating! While it is ideal for the beginner, especially given the clear step-by-step photos, there are enough challenging and unique treats for the master canners in our midst. This definitely earns a place in my canning library and, come fall, you can expect a post about that apple butter!

Dandelions on the table

The annual torrent of curses is now pouring forth from my usually mild-mannered husband as he digs the first crop of dandelions out of our lawn. Weed though they are, I can't say I begrudge their presence. Dandelions bring a bright, cheery punch of yellow to otherwise neglected lots in our neighborhood. My son is having great fun following his father with the "compost wagon" and collecting the yanked plants for our various piles.

Had we been a little earlier in the season, my husband's efforts could have been directed towards the kitchen rather than the compost pile. All of our recent travel made us lag in the lawn foraging and by now, in full flower, the dandelion greens are bitter. The new rosettes are the tastiest, but even they are an acquired taste in the era of the mild tasting plastic-packed "spring mix" available at the supermarket. Last year, I collected enough rosettes to make a filling for Greek hand-pies, basically a fried turnover oozing with a feta, onion and dandelion greens stuffing. Even tricked out with the onions, cheese and fried dough, the greens were a tough sell for my dinner guests. I admit I ate them mostly on principle and with a copious amount of wine to wash them down.

On a more palatable note, I made dandelion wine long ago and am pondering the manufacture of another batch. There is a dilemma, however: the recipe I used came from the king of all foragers, Euell Gibbons, and calls for a large bucket of blossoms. Even without my husband's manual war on weeds, our paltry lot would hardly yield enough blossoms for a quart jar, let alone a bucket. But where should I turn for more? I am pretty skittish about urban foraging in these parts....who knows what pesticides and heavy metals and residues lurk in the vacant lots and fields. I watch my neighbors pour large bottles of chemicals all over their yards courtesy of Home Depot. The wine may be a project stowed away until I have the time to access a more reliably pollutant-free area of land.

So, I have made a note to try to catch the young rosettes in time for eating next year. This time, forget the feta. I'm going with bacon. As most chefs have tiresomely proved in every restaurant I've visited this year, add bacon to anything and people will order it in droves. In her excellent memoir, Little Heathens, Mildred Kalish recalls the bacon-drenched dandelions of her childhood in Depression-era Iowa. Though now eighty years have passed, she still recalls with relish the first Spring days with new dandelion greens on the table, braised in a hearty amount of bacon fat. They surely tasted ambrosial to her hungry six year-old body after months of canned- and dried-food drudgery. Be you gardener or cook, if you have yet to read this book, I suggest you immediately place it on the reading list. It is full of such gentle wisdom and kind judgement that one leaves the pages almost jealous of the deprivation Kalish suffered, dandelions and all.

Let the garden scrounging begin!

There is a tipping point every year when the garden saves me, and I know that -- from a culinary perspective -- Spring has truly arrived. Last night, I came home late from work and I looked at my hungry family and then at my sparsely stocked pantry. I realized the only thing between us and a restaurant was the garden and -- joy of joys! -- the garden saved us. Hooray for the seasonal miracle of the first garden scrounge!

Now, I cannot pretend that a garden scrounge means the difference between eating and not eating. It's not like we are old-time pioneers or dogmatically self-sufficient homesteaders earnestly eating the stored pinto beans and sauerkraut until the first of the dandelions spring up in our yard. In a charming passage in their beautiful book of essays, Our Life in Gardens, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd tell an old Vermonter neighbor that the scorned barberry bush was once a plant of great medicinal and edible value to early Americans. The neighbor scoffs "Well, in those days they had to eat just about anything they could find". Barberries are indeed a true garden scrounge.

For me, a garden scrounge just means the difference between eating well and eating indifferently (PBJ at home), or between eating well or eating expensively (restaurant food). But it is a wonderful thing to face the prospect of takeout pizza or jelly sandwiches, and realize that by your own gardening efforts you can scrounge up a tasty dinner. So last night, armed with a sharp knife, I crept around the garden in the waning light. I found a good handful asparagus as well as the first of the mint, and with the help of some butter this became a quick pasta sauce. I sprinkled it with finely sliced chives to finish, and the whole dish tasted bright and green, just like Spring itself. The tarragon is in full leaf, and I took a good amount of leaves to make a dressing for the tired old romaine lettuce wallowing in the vegetable bin. I thought about using the cold-frame lettuces (tom thumb and little gem) but we already had thinned out the first round for a nibble last weekend, so I let them alone. The romaine leaves almost tasted fresh with the delicate anise flavor of the tarragon clinging to every bite.

All in all it was a successful garden scrounge. Had it been a lazy Saturday instead of a tired Tuesday night, I could have even scrounged a dessert: stewed rhubarb. And if I wanted to put on airs, I could have garnished it with mint.

Garden book round-up

The seeds germinating in our upstairs bedroom have let me live in a dream state of near-Spring for the past week. I woke this morning to another thick blanket of snow, and the heavy flakes have brought me to back to Chicago's wintry reality. There are few ways, at this point, for me to get out my gardening ya-ya's. The seeds have been purchased, the catalogs thumbed through until pages have started ripping from the binding staples. The seeds that should be started early have been started. Last weekend, I even prowled the local garden stores, looking for clearance shelf bargains prior to the imminent 2010 restock. I am restless. This mild state of gardening desperation is, I suspect, a boon to nursery retailers everywhere. Isn't it the anxious itch for Spring that makes otherwise thrifty gardeners impulse purchase gloves, trowels, and inappropriate plants on the first day the sap starts rising?

In this same prowling and restless state, I went to the nearby Barnes and Noble to check out their stock of gardening books. The offerings were disheartening, mostly coffee table landscape books, second-rate container gardening guides, and marijuana growing manuals. While I do concede that a few familiar gems were mixed in (like Our Life in Gardens and the Guide to Illinois Vegetable Gardening) in general there were few real classics or even hot new books, like the bulb one everybody was crazy about at Christmastime. I really should know better than to expect more from the big-box bookstores, although I do suspect the more suburban North Shore bookstores might have a larger selection. If I ever buy books these days -- and I rarely do -- it is from Amazon. Online browsing, however, does not have the same therapeutic heft as standing in front of a shelf of real books.

So where does the literary gardening woman go in Chicago? In New York, I had the Strand, my favorite used bookstore. In New Jersey, there was the annual College Women's book sale, a dusty treasure trove of -- among other things -- gardening books. For every outdated 1950's gardening manual, there was a 25 cent copy of one of Euell Gibbons' guides or an out of print edition of Living the Good Life. I have not found an equivalent to the store or the sale here in Chicago. Yes, there are some used book stores, but their garden related stock is scant, and pricey. The Chicago Reader book swap had slim gardening offerings last I went. Maybe a local blog reader can point me in the direction of some yet-undiscovered source. But for now I have only the Chicago Public Library. And trust me, I ain't complaining. The library has an astounding array of garden books spread out over its many branches, available to me at the click of the mouse, and delivered rapidly to my local branch for pick up. For all of the downsides of living in one of America's largest urban centers -- the crime, the pollution, the stifling bureaucracy! -- I can crow that I have access to one of the most excellent public library systems in the country.

The online hold system at the library is indispensable, but still it is basically a borrower's Amazon -- a click-and-ship, minus the supersaver shipping. But even Amazon is more conducive to browsing, with its suggestions and "list-mania". With the library website, you need to do a directed search for specific authors and titles. The library holdings are so vast and varied, and the keyword search function so limited, that I find it difficult to genuinely browse. So all this lead-up was to announce that this is why I go directly to different branches, to lurk among their shelves, nosing out books I have yet to find online. This habit has acquainted me with the quirks of the various branches: the collections in other languages, a particularly excellent librarian at one location, and, much to the delight of my two year old sidekick, the goldfish in certain children's sections. So, after the disappointing visit to the bookstore, and in the full throes of garden Spring-itch attack, I headed to a new branch this weekend and found two books I have been meaning to read: The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch and Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times by Steve Solomon.

The Garden Primer, from what I can tell, aims to be the equivalent of an all-purpose cookbook, like my beloved How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. It covers nearly every topic in home gardening, from shrubs to vegetables, from tools to composting. Each topic has a brief yet sensible entry. I did, overall, find the primer a bit unsatisfying. The entries, though well written and succinct, usually sent me to the computer for more information. Additionally, anything aiming to be a general primer necessarily sacrifices a certain regionality and charming sense of place that interests me as a reader. I know she is a four-season gardener in Maine, so I would have preferred to hear more about that, rather than Zone 9 invasive vines. My favorite aspect of the book is that Damrosch seems to have actually done and tried everything she writes about in the text. I have leafed through one too many garden manuals only to find the same worn advice, the same diagrams, the same "facts". How many of these garden authors have actually built and used the insulated, vented root cellar that I see recommended in every manual of vegetable gardening? How many of these authors have actually tried to till under green manure without a rototiller? Have any of them really tried vermicomposting? Now that I have started a worm bin myself, I read their few paragraphs on the topic with a skeptic's eye. It all seems to be recycled from some big gardening wiki in the sky. So here's to Damrosch for writing with the authoritative voice of actual experience.

The authoritative voice is certainly present in Steve Solomon's book, Gardening When it Counts. The pages are bursting with highly opinionated and occasionally cranky tidbits of advice. I don't mind a crank when they are actually speaking from experience, so I read Solomon's wise words with joy and amusement. He also writes with refreshing skepticism on well-worn gardening topics, questioning some "truths" about composting, eviscerating the garden and seed industrial complex, and acknowledging some of the genuine limitations of homesteading. Almost every homesteading manual I have read -- and believe me, that's a lot of them -- blithely, nay almost smugly, lists the benefits and joys of living off the grid. It all looks so easy on the page! Few acknowledge the drudgery of months of winter greens. Solomon makes me laugh out loud with surprise when he predicts likely tooth loss from soil calcium depletion if one was truly living off the land. I was expecting, however, a more "survivalist" mentality, especially given the subtitle of the book. On the topic of soil amendments, while Solomon does offer advice on how to use compost and manure exclusively, he is pessimistic about long term soil quality with such a plan, and endorses a mix of homemade fertilizer using bulk products from the agricultural store. He also stands firmly against intensive raised-bed gardening. While I applaud him for bucking a trend, and agree with many of his critiques of this method, this makes his book of little utility for the urban gardener. His method requires two tracts of land (one active and one fallow) around 3,000 square feet in area. Just one of these tracts is larger than the entire footprint of my city lot (on which, mind you, sits a house and a garage). So I recommend this book for its grumpy, grandfatherly wisdom, but it is certainly a text that makes me wistful for a larger swath of rural real estate. For now, I am forced by my environs to go with the intensive potager method.

So, dear reader, if you too are suffering from Spring itch and need to get your garden ya-ya's out, these two books may sate your appetite for a while. While the flakes fall, I will sit with these two experienced dirt farmers and plot out my own follies. Perhaps, one day, I will speak with the same optimistic wisdom as Damrosch or the bemused skepticism of Solomon. I will have my own failures and successes to report, and --who knows?-- maybe I will actually have built that oft-diagrammed root cellar.

Food writing and France

I picked up some local cream this week from a farm in nearby Wisconsin. I am astounded how thick and rich it is compared to the usual "ultra heat treated" cream I find at the grocery store. This local product is close to the consistency of yogurt. Just a few spoonfuls have added a silky richness to my sauces that I can usually only achieve with a beurre manie. This thick, intense cream brings to mind M.F.K. Fisher's writing on the cream of France. Her books no longer live on my shelves -- they were long ago loaned out to kindred spirits -- so forgive me if I am short on details. In one of the most charming passages in her long body of work, she recounts cooking with French heavy cream in her first humble kitchen in France. For a quick lunch for friends and family, all she needed to do was pour a few cups of the rich cream over a pan of cauliflower, bake it, - et voila! -- she had an unctuous, full-bodied gratin. Even 50 years ago, she was lamenting how the cream had changed since her first youthful culinary adventures. She complained that the cream of yore had been replaced by a liquidy light cream that required careful reduction over a low flame prior to use in a gratin, lest you be left with a soupy mess (as an aside, Marcella Hazan echoes a similar lament about Italian cream in her Classic Italian Cook Book).

I adore M.F.K. Fisher. Along with her memoirs of her early French experiences, her essays on wartime scrounging and hunger - "the wolf at the door"- rank among my all-time favorite food writing. Other Francophile writing also has much to recommend it; I always enjoy returning to Waverly Root's exhaustive Food of France, Peter Mayle's first Provence book, and the recent Julia Child memoir My Life in France. One can hardly discuss the food writing of France without mentioning A.J. Liebling and Hemmingway, but I find them less compelling than the aforementioned writers, perhaps because these two men are so intensely focused on the consumption, rather than production, of food. But my "desert island pick" of French food writing is The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin. If you enjoy cooking and writing, I urge you to run, not walk, to the nearest library, and get a copy of this book.

I generally have a low opinion of celebrity chefs, who are more focused on promotion than actual innovation or authenticity. Everything this breed of chef puts out seems to have been shellacked into a carefully edited product that promotes their ever-expanding brand. I approached this book with trepidation, yet after a few pages was completely enthralled. Who knew Jacques Pepin was such a marvelous writer? And he is writing in his adopted language, no less! Putting aside the evident technical skills of the author, the narrative itself is so engaging that the reader turns the pages with an alacrity usually reserved for guilty-pleasure books like Lee Child mysteries. Pepin shares the often painful details of his harsh childhood, yet writes with such a generosity of spirit that the reader almost wishes to be fourteen and poor and working 16 hour days in a resort hotel kitchen.

After befriending Jacques on the pages of his memoir, I sought out his cookbooks and TV programs. The PBS series that he put together on the basic techniques of French cooking is probably the best set of instructional programs I have ever watched. My favorite episode involves Jacques breaking down a side of salmon with deceptive ease. His gentle guidance changed my entire approach to preparing fish. Jacques' rigorous training in thrifty kitchens always bubbles through in his teaching: he has a suggestion for little dishes based on almost every scrap and discarded morsel he generates in the production of the main meal.

After smugly proclaiming my disdain for celebrity chef culture, I must now admit that my favorite show on television is Top Chef. If you are unfamiliar with the series, it is essentially Iron Chef meets American Idol. And if you somehow have escaped all knowledge of American reality TV, then I will tell you that it is a contest wherein young chefs are given culinary challenges and they are eliminated one by one until the finalists meet in a three-course all-out kitchen battle. The series has gone through many seasons, but my favorite moment ever on the show involves none other than Jacques Pepin, invited to participate in one episode on a panel of celebrity guest judges.

The scene: Carla, an eccentric Southern caterer, is facing an uphill battle against more traditional chef contestants. The battle: each celebrity guest judge picks the food they want for a hypothetical "Last Meal". Jacques picks squab and peas and Carla is assigned to prepare this "last meal". In a bold move, edited by the producers to foreshadow guaranteed elimination, Carla simply roasts the squab and serves the peas with tarragon. No risottos, no foams, no gelees. Just a plain preparation that most decent home cooks could crank out on a weeknight (albeit with chicken not squab). Jacques, master technician, takes a bite. He tells Carla that, if this were his last meal, he would die happy. Can one ask for more than hearing that from Jacques Pepin?

Perfect peas bring me back to another treasured passage from M.F.K. Fisher, in which she documents her quest for ideally cooked peas. On the hillside of a French -- or is it Swiss? -- farm, she has the water boiling in an outdoor pot prior to even picking the peas. Fisher recounts in hurried paragraphs the rush to get the new-shelled peas cooked and buttered and on the table prior to losing their ephemeral garden freshness. The whole event is written with a breathlessness and suspense normally reserved for tales of Olympic-level athleticism. She wrote this at a time pre-Alice Waters, when most gourmet recipes still involved processed and packaged ingredients. What foresight! What simplicity! As a gardener, cook and writer, can I ask for more inspiration than to read these pages prior to planting my spring pea seeds? Which reminds me...who did I loan those books to? I need them back before April.

Olives for the holidays

Fresh olives recently appeared at Caputo's, the Italian market a few miles from my house. I can't overstate my commitment to this store -- it is the only place in Chicago I have found reasonably priced and delicious prosciutto and fresh mozzarella. It also carries "hard to find" (read: available for a small fortune at Whole Foods) Italian staples like dried porcini, farro and salt-packed anchovies. Their produce, both in terms of price and selection, is second to none. You have to be choosy with it -- it is often sold on the edge of over-ripeness.

For several weeks, I have noticed ancient West Siders, who still greet each other and chat in Italian, picking over a wooden bin of these fresh olives. These are the same people who I regularly observe sniffing fennel and tossing iffy specimens aside with disgust, berating the butcher for a poorly cut piece of beef, and wheedling with the deli guy for a few extra scoops of the house-made ricotta. The olive-gathering intrigued me: how could I ignore anything meriting the interest of this group of well-aged foodies?

I walked over and began to talk to them. From kindly Korean grandmas at Chicago Food Corps to young barbacoa aficionados at Cermak, most folks are excited to have anyone ask their advice on the purchase and preparation of beloved foods. These guys were no exception, and I got a long, increasingly animated didactic on the correct way to cure fresh olives. One guy pulled me aside near the parsnips, out of earshot of the others, and confessed he had a three year-old batch still "working". If I wanted a taste, he'd bring some next week. I demurred, but bought a small sack of the olives.

Elisabeth Luard, the food writer and historian, offers a recipe for cured olives in her book The Old World Kitchen. She gives instructions to smash each olive with a hammer, which I'm sure would have delighted my toddler. I opted for the less dramatic approach: a clean slice with a paring knife down the side of each fruit. I packed the olives in brine (1 cup salt to 1 gallon of water) and left them in a jar, weighed down, to mellow for 6 weeks. At this point, I am supposed to taste them and see if they are ready. If so, I am to dress them in spices and lemon and serve them up, along with a nice glass of sherry, to transport my guests to Andalusia.

Olive season is late October to November, so six weeks of curing usually corresponds to readiness at Christmas time. My grandma always served a small dish of canned black olives as a snack before holiday dinners, so this will be my update of that tradition. Luard described these olives as "a pleasure to be savored under the silvery leaves of an ancient grove". Alas, it will be winter time, and unless tennis-shoe-and-plastic-bag-decorated power lines count as an ancient grove, I'm out of luck for finding the proper setting in which to munch these.

Living Seasonally

It seems like cruel and unusual punishment towards fellow gardeners to enthusiastically review an out-of-print book, but I cannot help myself. A kindred spirit with better Internet shopping skills found a used copy of Living Seasonally by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. He generously loaned it to me, and I have been enthralled by their writing and their vegetable gardening ideas for the past week.

The two men have a large property in rural Vermont, on which they raise almost everything they eat, including veal and poultry. While this is clearly beyond the reach of a novice urban gardener with an --ahem -- smaller plot of land, so many of their ideas translate well to any edible garden. Most of their growing tips and enthusiastic endorsements of certain plants will be tested in my own garden in the months and years to come. The two men are at once enormously sensible and deliciously romantic: how can I resist Egyptian tree onions or home-forced endive after reading of their experience?

I most enjoyed their discussion of the tension between sustainable living and seasonal eating. Anyone with homesteading ambitions, be they urban fantasies or rural realities, looks forward to "Independence Day": the day when everything that you put in your mouth --from sunrise to sunset-- has been produced from your own land. In the drive towards that goal, there is always the troublesome possibility that seasonal eating will go by the wayside. The two men discuss how one year they cut, blanched, and froze twenty or so heads of cauliflower to stuff their freezer full for the winter. Did that enhance the self-sustainability of their enterprise? Perhaps. But frozen cauliflower is frozen cauliflower. Eating this product in late March is not strictly "seasonal" living. I had the same feeling as I canned my tenth jar of grape jam this fall. We are a family who at most goes through two or three jars of preserves a year. Were my jars of jam an act of living off the grid or just useless overproduction?

The two men eventually decided that there would be no freezing of produce, and that preserves (i.e. oil packed tomatoes) would be made in the reasonable quantity that would be consumed the course of a season. While this might mean a few duller days in late winter, they felt that it enhanced the small moments of celebration when, for example, two perfect weeks of cauliflower were available from the garden. For that time, and only that time, they would feast, and then be sated with their fill of that vegetable.

This whole idea gets back to my concerns about overproduction. I am so used to the idea of a "good" vegetable garden being one in which there is row upon orderly row of heavily producing plants. But we are three people only! We just don't need a whole row of zucchini. If I can mentally break out of the row mentality, I still struggle with the need for multiple specimens. For example, I planted three Brussels sprout plants this year -- what a folly! The plants thrived, and put forth a huge amount of sprouts. We happily ate them for a few meals, yet a few did suffice, since none of us are true aficionados. Then I was stuck with quarts of sprouts in peak form. I gave some away, and pickled others in a spurt of ridiculous thriftiness. One jar of pickled Brussels sprouts is interesting. Five become a bit of a chore to slog through. I am not growing this produce to survive the winter. I can have my sprout feast one weekend and be done with it. I can revel in the luxury of a small celebration, versus the grim mentality of sustenance.

As winter closes in, and visions of 2010 seed catalogs dance in my head, I am meditating on my goal of producing delicious, unique seasonal tastes. I want my family to have fleeting celebrations, all the more poignant for their short duration. The one we have already effectively established is breakfast radishes. I always plant a row as soon as the soil can be worked, and for a brief two week period, we load baguette slices with radishes, butter and salt. It is our harbinger of spring and we devour our treat, but never try to extend the experience with a second planting of radish seed. Eck and Winterrowd have only steeled my resolve in this matter. Note to self: reread in the spring, right before I look at my packet of radish seed and decide, "lets just plant all of it -- I have a pickle recipe, somewhere".

44 days

I mentioned in my first post that I was testing two recipes for a French cordial called Liqueur 44. The "44" refers to the number of coffee beans and sugar cubes that are added to a a quart of vodka or rum, along with an orange. It also refers to the number of days that the concoction should sit and infuse prior to sampling. So, forty four days have past, and my two brews have been decanted and strained into decorative bottles.

Lest you think I have hopped on the trendy train with home-infused cocktails, this is a traditional European recipe. And while food magazines like to present cordial-crafting as some new idea originating in the far reaches of Brooklyn, it is a time-honored peasant tradition (see the first post of this blog). I will admit this is my first foray into crafting an aperitif with ingredients that do not originate from my garden or a local source. Having just nipped at the results, I can't say I am persuaded to abandon my favored recipes for Thyme Liqueur and Quince Eau-de-Vie. Is it terroir? Likely not. These recipes are just more earthy and more interesting than the flavors of of Liqueur 44. Liqueur 44 is jazzed-up Grand Marnier.

The lighter colored bottle is from a recipe from Saveur. This recipe is the more straightforward of the two -- rum, orange, coffee and sugar. The darker bottle is from Susan Hermann Loomis' essential French Farmhouse Cookbook. It is vodka-based, and adds a vanilla bean and a peeled banana to the infusion. Both are a little cloying, as is store-bought Grand Marnier, if I must be honest. If I make it again, I will cut the sugar. There is not a pronounced coffee flavor in either, but there is indeed something taming the citrus notes in both. If I didn't know it was coffee, I would have guessed chocolate. Loomis' has an additional odd but not unwelcome undertone -- funky, overripe -- probably from the banana that slowly blackened in the vodka over the past month. I don't taste the vanilla bean at all.

I'll give the Saveur bottle away as a holiday gift - it is pleasant, beautiful and likely more welcome than another tin of cookies. Loomis' recipe will stay in my cupboard -by Thanksgiving or Christmas, maybe the funky character will be more prominent. My quince liqueur is still "working" as they say, and this is the recipe I would encourage you to try. Your guests can taste orange flavor anywhere, but quince flavor --pineapple and roses? lets just say quincey-ness-- is special. This drink is called a ratafia, an after-dinner drink, which according to Loomis, comes from the Roman tradition of ending a business deal with a drink -- rata fiat, "deal concluded". I'm not sure how many business deals I will seal with this drink, but many a cheery holiday celebration will be the more so for concluding with it.

Quince Liqueur

2 quinces, grated (including peels and seeds)
1 cup sugar
2 cups white rum

1. Put all ingredients in a jar, close tight and shake hard. Place in a cool, dark place.

2. Shake the jar every few days for five or six weeks. Strain into a bottle and discard the solids. Tastes better after several months of storage.

Sauerkraut for the winter

For the past 10 years, I have lived in profoundly urban settings: Manhattan and Chicago. It is has been virtually impossible for me to survey my land and living space and imagine how the area looked when it was wild, or when it was pastureland. My trip to New England reawakened my historical imagination. Hiking through the woods, surveying old stone walls and foundations, finding old apple trees in overgrown land, the past history of the land bubbled into my consciousness. It was easy to feel what the the land looked like before Route 4 and gas stations. My heightened sense of history also brought a heightened sense of the anxiety one must have felt at the onset of winter. I imagined being a European settler, standing in the root cellar, surveying the stockpiles of vegetables, preserves, and cured meats and thinking "Well...this is it. Hope I have enough to get to late springtime". What fears must mothers have had looking at their young children and rationing portions early in the winter, just to be sure there was enough to last through March.

For all of my commitment to slow food and local eating, in the end I know that the store is just a quick walk away, and there is a vast hinterland systematically shipping food to my urban center all through the winter. And who am I kidding? I don't just shop when supplies run low, but when gastronomic boredom sets in. It is one thing to have enough sauerkraut and salt pork to survive, but it is another thing to eat it every day for 4 months. Seasonal eating often means months of the same food. Even in that bountiful month of August, my family tires of basil and tomato salad every day. Of course, nutritionists might argue that there's an upside to gastronomic boredom. We then tend to eat what we need, and no more. Studies show that the more we stray from seasonal eating, and the more we have access to what we feel like eating whenever we want, the higher the rates of obesity. A little bit of winter rationing and gastronomic boredom might go a long way to improving our overall health. And, the benefit of a seasonal diet is that those tomatoes are going to taste amazingly wonderful when they finally arrive, a stark contrast to old potatoes and spring greens. The changes of the season will be more exciting and more vivid than anything we experience now.

These historical musings made me return to one of my favorite cookbook writers, Elisabeth Luard, and specifically her classic reference The Old World Kitchen. For anyone who is half-cook, half-anthropologist, the book is a must-read, filled with treasures that I have never found elsewhere, despite a lifetime of voracious recipe gathering. My particular favorite is her recipe for a barrel of sauerkraut -- a recipe she herself tested. This woman is a kindred spirit. What did she do with all of that sauerkraut? She wasn't facing a cold, resource-poor Bavarian winter. Her kids must have rued the day that barrel was first rolled out.

On much a smaller scale, I just put up 4 pints of sauerkraut from a single head of cabbage I bought at the farmers market 6 weeks ago. Sauerkraut is easy to make: shred fresh cabbage, salt it with pickling salt and stuff it in a clean crock. The next morning, inspect the crock and see how much brine was formed. If the cabbage is not completely submerged, than mix more pickling salt in water and add to the crock (precise ratios and measurements can be found at http://www.freshpreserving.com/ ).Traditional recipes call for weighing the cabbage down with a plate, but the more modern solution taught by Eugenia Bone appeals to me: fill a gallon ziploc with brine and use it as a weight. Leave it in a cool place, and slowly over 3 to 4 weeks it will ferment. You will see bubbles rising to the top. When the bubbles stop, it's ready to be eaten or canned. I used a raw-pack method and processed my pint jars for 20 minutes in a boiling-water canner. My husband is already concerned about our 4 pints. We'll do a hot dog night at some point, and maybe a German party: sauerkraut, sausages and wursts, beer. "And then what?" he asks, "What will we do with all of this?". He's lucky I couldn't find a barrel.

New England bound

I'm off to Vermont and New Hampshire for the next week and will not be posting until I return. In the spirit of my trip, I wanted to discuss my current favorite garden writers, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. These men design and care for a garden in southern Vermont called North Hill. I have never seen it in person, but I have walked the landscape in my mind for hours while reading their beautiful prose. To call them garden writers seems a little silly, like calling Anne Lamott a religious writer, or M.F.K. Fisher a food writer. They are all simply good writers, who happen to have a specific subject. More interesting to me is that Eck and Winterrowd write together and their shared voice is amazingly fluent and crisp. I have never come across their equal in this regard.

Each man has written separate books: Mr. Eck is the author of the essential Elements of Garden Design, and Mr. Winterrowd wrote the definitive American reference book on annuals. My favorite books are those that are co-authored, A Year at North Hill and Our Life in Gardens. They have another book about cooking seasonally from the garden that has become my great white whale....I persist in searching high and low for a reasonably priced used copy. I have a feeling that once I stop looking for it, a copy will bubble out of the universe in an unlikely place, like a book swap in a bar or a garage sale in my neighborhood. Until then, I return with alarming frequency to the works that are available in the Chicago Public Library.

Their books are almost impossible to read straight through. It would be like eating my favorite French chocolate torte in one sitting: too rich and too indulgent. That being said, see the recipe below. I am a fast reader, blazing through books in a night or two, but these are books that make me slow down. I savor them, rolling their words like wine on my tongue. I first read their books while I was nursing, and each chapter lasted just about as long as my baby's appetite. These two fed my mind in the same way.

I have a short list of books that I read every year or two, each reading a homecoming to a kindred soul: Lolita by Nabakov, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, The Art of Eating by M.F. K. Fisher, Angle of Repose by Stegner, Jane Eyre by Bronte, Pride and Prejudice by Austen and The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos. To this list I have now added both A Year at North Hill and Our Life in Gardens. Eck and Winterrowd inspire not only the gardener's imagination, but also the creation of a life lived exactly as you want, mud and all.

French Chocolate Torte

10 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1 cup unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
5 large eggs
1 1/4 cup sugar
5 Tbsp flour
1 /2 tsp baking powder

1. Preheat oven to 325. Butter and flour a 10 inch spring form pan

2. Melt chocolate and butter in a double boiler, mix until smooth and put aside to cool slightly. Beat eggs and sugar in a large bowl until light and fluffy.

3. Sift flour and baking powder over the eggs and fold in. Fold in chocolate, and pour batter into the prepared pan.

4. Bake cake 20 minutes. Cover pan with foil and bake another 30 minutes. Remove from oven (cake will be slightly underdone) and remove foil. Let cool in pan. Cake will fall as it cools. Serve in slim wedges with some whipped cream.