Category Archive

Yesterday was hot and sunny and I could smell the ripe strawberries as I walked towards the Madrona farmers market. Man, it smelled good. About ten paces into the joint I spotted my favorite celebrity runner, vegan guru Scott Jurek, clad in a sleeveless biking jersey and sporting a chic new haircut. Alvarez was back with black beans, Scott reported happily, and he’d scored two kinds of cherries plus a big bag of pink lady apples, which were going for $2/pound at Lyall Farms of Mattawa, Wash. And he reminded me how much he loves Local Roots’ produce.

The Madrona market, at Martin Luther King and Union, started just last year but word has definitely gotten out; the place was packed. Amazingly, it’s one of three that we can access pretty easily on foot or by bike, if I could just get up the gumption to ride again after my recent spill. Anyway, in my wanderings I noted peas, carrots, bunched onions, even summer squash, alongside the obligatory squash blossoms. No way would I pay for squash, I thought, not after we could hardly give it away last summer. Still, how good was it to know I no longer had to eat every vegetable on offer, just to get some variety?

So life was good and the shopping was easy. I snapped up broccoli and bok choy and Alvarez’s last bunch of basil, my favorite harbinger of summer, and inhaled the intoxicating scent all the way home. Soon I’ll be restraining myself from buying every good thing that’s in season.

This morning Charlie went out on a 36-mile run in the Cascade foothills. Sometimes I run a bit with him but today I was happy just to meet him halfway, refill his water bottle, and relieve him of the muddy dogs. Conveniently, there’s a farmer’s market not far from the trailhead where I caught up with him.

And, well — the ambiance at this farmer’s market, in Issaquah, isn’t what you find in the city. There’s a jumbo Costco across the street. Vendors were selling homemade onesies, Kettle Korn, pansies in colorful pots. At the fringe of the market though were some actual farmer stalls, and these were the real deal. There were Asian families selling peony stems and lilies and and lettuces. There were folks from east of the mountains with peas and asparagus, both of ‘em going for $2 a pound. There were leafy greens, pea shoots, baby turnips, rhubarb, knobby garlic stems, and spring onions. The scarlet-hued cherries looked a week away from ripe.

The verdict? This market’s good to know about should you find yourself in the neighborhood.

How sweet is it that our little co-op is now selling produce from Full Circle Farm in Carnation and Nash’s on the peninsula? I can hardly restrain myself. Among recent pickings was a bundle of baby bok choy, with dense stems that looked downright puny compared to what you find in Chinatown, but I’m of the belief that most good organic vegetables come that way.

I set my sights on a favorite bok choy preparation, flat rice noodles with sliced beef and oyster sauce and chopped thai basil stirred in at the finish. It happened that we were missing some of the key ingredients, though, and then Charlie reminded me he was headed out to play hockey, prompting a swift relaxation of standards.

In short order I’d prepped a stir fry of baby bok choy with rehydrated Chinese black mushrooms, ginger, and ground pork, since we’ve still got about fifteen pounds of the stuff. It was great eat-alone food: speedy, great flavors, and a happy reminder to do something good for myself now and then. The bok choy was sweet and crisp with a hit of mustard, and so tasty I might just make it for other people someday. The recipe: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m driving home from work this afternoon when I pass a sign for the Capitol Hill farmer’s market. Forget it, I tell myself. I’m too hungry and therefore too grumpy, and besides the market is just about over. But because these places exert a certain gravitational pull, I sigh and turn back down the hill. Parking doesn’t materialize and instantly I’m muttering to myself and planning a hasty exit. Then a spot opens up.

First thing I’m aware of is the fresh air, the cool sunshine. I remember how much I like this friendly little neighborhood market, where everybody can bring their dog if they like. I take note of the bouquets of pink tulips on offer for Mother’s Day. I linger over bags of spinach greens, bunches of red radishes, oyster mushrooms. There are giant pallid tomatoes from a greenhouse grower; they’re tantalizing, but feel like a sleight of hand. My pickings include a bundle of asparagus, and salted peanuts from Alvarez Farms, which I eat straight from the bag. By the time I’m back in the car and pointed homeward, my global outlook is back on track.

My co-blogger Stephen and his wife Stephanie were coming to town. How about an all-local meal, he suggested. Super, I wrote back. Define ‘local’.

So we exercised some latitude in meal planning. For starters, there was the salmon pate he was bringing from Alaska, to go with a Port Madison goat cheese and homemade bread. I picked pork belly with lentils as the main event. And not just any local pork belly, of course, but a briny chunk that had marinated in juniper and bay laurel for two weeks, cooked down with a pot of vegetables, and finished in a hot oven. We rounded out the meal with roasted potatoes and a garden salad.

While we ate, we rehashed their visit to Full Circle farms the day before, then discussed local eating on the last frontier — how to cook elk, growing greenhouse tomatoes, how tired they are of chard and kale. Right now carrots and potatoes are the only game in town, Stephanie said, shaking her head. And I thought we’d just finished a record long winter.

Then it was time for dessert, custard with baked rhubarb that I’d recently sampled at my friend Alice’s house, a seasonal dessert that had been otherworldly. Things were on track: the rhubarb came out of the oven mostly sour with a little sweet, and a gorgeous bright magenta. But the custard, which was based on creamy milk from Sea Breeze Farm, wouldn’t thicken for me and in the end we pulled a carton of Double Rainbow ice cream from the freezer. Yeah, that’s Double Rainbow of San Francisco. How to define ‘local’ again?

Farmers markets are re-opening all over the city right now. My personal favorite, Columbia City, started up again today, so I headed south after work to get in on the action. When I arrived there was a terrific crowd on hand and plenty of foot traffic from the neighborhood. That friendly feel is just one of the many things I love about this market, though you would also have to count the unbelievable corn, peaches, and plums we found there last summer. And Columbia City just feels closer to the earth to me. A number of farmers were selling plant starts today, including giant tomato seedlings. No fewer than four different Hmong farmers were tying up big bouquets of their flowers at reasonable prices.

I circled the joint a couple of times getting the old feel back and taking gleeful note of the asparagus and snap peas on offer everywhere. Port Madison had already run out of their luscious Sea Stack cheese, a runny, creamy Camebert-like round that is just to die for. “We had no idea it would be so busy,” the nice young woman said. “This being opening day and all.” Personally I was thrilled for the variety, for the kale and raab and broccoli and cauliflower. One farmer even had big bins of peanuts. Who knew?

It was all so exciting that I couldn’t help adding a bunch of young, gorgeous chard leaves to my purchases. Riding the bus home I reminded myself how I couldn’t give away enough chard last summer, we had so much of it. How in February I’d pulled up the overwintered chard stumps for just that reason. I could be picking my own had I only practiced a little restraint back then, I realized. But I got over it. Because there’s just something so wonderful about the first of the season.

Yesterday’s visit could be summarized as follows: rain, hail, snow, sleet.

Nevertheless there were signs that the season is turning. The kale and collards were bunched with flowering stalks, signaling the end of winter greens. There were bags of nettles, tight fiddleheads, an arugula crop that was nearly sold out when I arrived mid-morning. No sightings of asparagus or spinach, though.

I wandered around contemplating the coming week, a busy one, and bought a fistful of tulips from a lovely Hmong woman. Ultimately my pickings included a chicken, some dried porcini, and the day’s last eggs from Growing Things. Sadly I ran out of cash before I saw the hazelnut folks, who grow their crop near the Canadian border.

On my way out I checked in with the King County Master Gardeners, who were huddled under an umbrella, dispensing earthly wisdom. The Gardeners advised a homemade cloche built from vapor barrier fabric available at the hardware store, to protect my broccoli and chard seedlings from the cold. I chatted a little more then mentioned my gnawed favas and the neighborhood rat; they hemmed and hawed and eventually suggested wire fencing, with the wire sunk just below ground level.

Not bad for a day’s take.

You’re at the farmer’s market. You pick up some nice-looking beets, some salad greens, some kohlrabi. You make a little conversation with the farmer. That’s part of the experience, right? You ask if they got time off during winter and comment on the warmer weather. As your order gets rung up, you wonder out loud how to cook a certain vegetable.

And the cashier says, “I stir fry it.”

Lately this annoys me. I’m not out in hot pursuit of interesting vegetables because my stir fries were missing something.

My gripe isn’t with the growers. These folks didn’t go into organic farming because of all the customer service opportunities. And they probably don’t have much spare time for hobbies like gourmet cooking. They devote eighty or a hundred hours each week to making stuff grow. I get that.

People talk about farmers markets like they’re some magical place. You start to believe in this myth because it really is wonderful to get your fruit and vegetables from the person who grew them. But not every answer can come from the farmers markets. It’s a good reality check, that there aren’t snap answers on how to learn to cook and eat well and with the seasons, no fast answers on how to do things right.

Once again I was delayed by work and rushing to hit the tail end of the farmers’ market. The late arrivals are killing me — it just feels like the best stuff is gone by the time I get there. Maybe someday I’ll become independently wealthy, with nothing else to do but stroll over first thing in the morning and soak in all the vegetable glory.

For now I’ll have to take what I can get, which yesterday was a market packed with local folk blinking in the sharp sunshine and perusing the relatively winter-themed pickings. Kale, cabbages and sunchokes remained the major forces to be reckoned with. But there was evidence that the season is starting to turn: piles of baby cabbages, baby kohlrabi, even baby turnips that Full Circle Farms claims are sweet as all get out. There were garlic greens and perky sweet pea starts.

I picked up a nice-looking goat cheese from the Port Madison people, who are back from a winter of tending to pregnant goats. And I was thrilled to see Tonnemaker Orchards occupying its usual post, selling bumpy, rugged winter squashes and a big spread of dried chiles. Their guy told me that the first fruit of the season, cherries, won’t be in until June. June? But … that’s so far away.

I had purple sunchokes and half a chicken, and I was feeling ambitious. Roasting the ingredients whole was one consideration — sunchokes become hot and luscious done this way, or so it’s said. Then I spotted Mark Bittman’s sunchoke saute and decided to fold it into a one-pan meal that started on the stove and finished in a hot oven, adding celery root and apple for interest, and because we had them on hand.

Dinner came out of the oven looking totally gorgeous. The chokes were crisp, with subdued artichoke flavor. The celery root added nice contrast, the apples a hit of sweet, and the pan juices a savoriness that tied it all together. Now I just need to track down some tasty local birds. Read the rest of this entry »

Seattle chef Maria Hines and her cozy restaurant Tilth, in the Wallingford neighborhood, were named in Wednesday’s New York Times as one of the country’s top ten new places to eat. Specifically cited was Hines’ inspired cooking and her meticulous sourcing of local and seasonal ingredients, which has earned the restaurant organic certification from the Oregon Tilth association.

Who knows whether the media’s intense fascination with all things local and seasonal is nothing more than coverage of the latest trend in luxury goods (this year: display your ethical colors), or whether they’re onto something more lasting. We ate at Tilth a year ago, a couple of months after it opened, and found the food to be creative, delicious, and considering the concept, reasonably priced. Meaning we’d eat there regardless.

Thanks to a pesky day job I’ve missed several recent farmer’s markets and yesterday didn’t get there until near closing time. But I was glad to be back. The weather was sunny and cheerful and there were more folks selling meats, fish, and cheeses than in recent memory. I picked through remnants of the day’s produce, basically the same stuff that’s been on offer all winter. Still, I got excited about some pretty baby greens from Willie Green’s farm, which is owned and run by a chef who sells thousands of pounds of his salad mix to local restaurants every year. I love being able to eat such good stuff at home.

I’ve been tricked by turnips. They’re seductive things, with flushed purple tops and creamy white bottoms and they feel substantial in the hand. When I spotted a crate at the farmer’s market my thoughts turned immediately to fried turnip cakes, those delectable dim sum eats flecked with dried shrimp and Chinese sausage.

So I bought a few, not realizing that turnip cakes are in fact made from shredded daikon radish.

Later that week my fresh turnips went into beef stew, added towards the end of cooking, and they transformed perfectly delicious food into pungent sludge. (Charlie, a New Englander, insists that he liked them that way.) But who can write off the mighty turnip after just one try? Act like that a few times during this stretch of winter and suddenly there’s not much to eat. Soon I was back at the farmer’s market, remembering that turnip cakes do taste sort of turnipy after all. Maybe the trick was in the frying, in that tasty browned crust.

At home I peeled and sliced the new roots and fried them in hot oil. I wondered if their bitterness could be balanced with a sweet, spicy glaze of hoisin sauce or honey and hot pepper. But we’d run out of hoisin at home and the world is running out of honey, so further improvisation was in order. The turnips cooked quickly, and after removing them from the pan I discovered that frying had attenuated their bitterness and lent a pleasing chewy texture. I put together a reduction of brown sugar, chili paste, and rice vinegar and roasted the turnip slices briefly in the reduced liquid. The end result was nice to look at and tasted tantalizingly of sweet, sour, hot, and bitter. It’s a good jumping-off point for further experimentation.

Please leave a comment if you have a favorite way to prepare turnips.

My first grown-up taste of brussels sprouts came some years ago at the hands of my friend Caroline, a serious kitchen-gardener who has transformed many a palate with her cooking. Caroline braises them in watery stock until they’re so savory that they melt, and her recipe sounds simple enough. But when I gave it a whirl I didn’t have the touch, and turned the whole pot to mush.

Well, brussels sprouts are at the farmer’s markets all winter long, so it was time to get back on the horse. I consulted my usual sources. One author suggested picking off every leaf (advice that some people are paying money for) then searing the whole pile at once. Others advised steaming then finishing in a frying pan with herbs, bacon, cream, or all of the above.

Eventually we settled on my sister-in-law’s easy and elegant method and haven’t ventured beyond because they come out so wonderfully when done her way. She slices them into coins and then sautes in olive oil until they’re nicely browned. The only seasonings are salt and pepper, if you don’t count the considerable flavor and slight sweetness that comes from caramelizing the outer leaves. This week I picked up a fresh supply of bright green brussels sprouts at Pike Place Market, thinking they’d look good on the plate with our strip steaks from the Methow Valley. And they did, but it was the bulgur wheat that combined best with the sprouts for rugged and tasty eating. The steaks were merely an afterthought. Here’s the recipe: Read the rest of this entry »

Of all days to abandon local eating, Superbowl Sunday would be it. We were bringing hors d’oeuvres to a friend’s gathering, and roasted beets and fennel salad weren’t going to cut it. Obviously. I considered a dip of caramelized onions whipped with cream cheese, sour cream, and mayo, a deadly concoction that sometimes gets licked right from the bowl, and salivated over the thought of hot wings with blue cheese sauce. Then I realized deviled eggs could be done local, with home-cured salmon and hot spice. I love the incandescent yellow of the yolks.

Recipe: Deviled Eggs with Cured Salmon

6 eggs / ¼ cup yogurt or sour cream / 3 tbls diced cured salmon / large pinch cayenne, or to taste / 2 large pinches paprika / 1 tsp parsley, minced fine / salt & pepper to taste

Cook the eggs to a medium-hard boil, about 14 minutes, then cool. Peel carefully, halve, and drop yolks into a mixing bowl. Add the remaining ingredients to the bowl, combine, and return a dollop of the mixture to each egg white half. Dust with more paprika if you like. Makes a dozen.

A few weeks ago, I noted that our humble state grows lentils by the ton and ships ‘em everywhere in the world except to our farmers markets, where there are none to be found. I’ve learned more about lentils in the interim, including that intrepid local eater and world-class vegan Scott Jurek sometimes purchases them from Mabton-based Alvarez Farms. If you’re so inclined, Scott thinks it’s worth asking Alvarez to grow lentils again this year, and all the better to ask before growing season begins.

Charlie and I probably won’t, though, because we’re very slowly eating our way through a large bag of organic lentils purchased from our trusty co-op, and there’s no danger of running out soon. By chance, our lentils seem to have been grown and processed in eastern Idaho, a different time zone but well within a day’s drive. Such proximity raises interesting questions about what qualifies a food as environmentally sustainable. Read the rest of this entry »

A week of hard nighttime freezes, and farmers were in sparse attendance at today’s market, though their dwindled ranks were obscured by the bustle of purveyors selling meats, fish, breads, jams, cheeses, and soups — one seller was even baking thin-crust pizza in a portable wood-fired oven. At Willie Green’s I picked over a crate of frosty brussels sprouts while eavesdropping on grower small talk about farm-to- market driving times, and stocked up on Full Circle Farm’s roots and tubers. I had every intention to get some of those beautiful black trumpet mushrooms from Foraged and Found, but got cold, forgot my list, and split. Lamentably, this week’s weather forecast for snow mixed with rain and continued low temps in the 20s and 30s means spring is still a long way off.

Potato hash is a weekend favorite, not least because we cook it when no one’s in a hurry to go anywhere. The technique is basic: fry the potatoes in a skillet and sprinkle with spices as they’re getting crispy, so the flavors caramelize. It’s the ingredients that can elevate the taste; this morning we opted for a mix of spuds from Full Circle Farms of Carnation, Wash. The three varieties of potato each contributed a rendition on the theme of how-a-potato-should-taste, making for a beautiful and delicious hash. The Blue Finns, purple in the picture above, added an appealing tang.

Recipe: Hash Spices, adapted from Emeril Lagasse

4 tbls paprika / 1 tbls cayenne / 3 tbls garlic powder / 1 tbls onion powder / 1 tbls dry oregano / 1 tbls dry thyme / 3 tbls salt / 2 tbls black pepper

Mix spices together thoroughly and season potatoes to taste. We use about 1 teaspoon of the mix for each cup of diced potatoes. Store in a tightly sealed container.

Sunchokes, aka Jerusalem artichokes, are this winter’s It food. Super trendy Seattle restaurant Tilth is serving organic sirloin with a demiglace of sunchokes and collards; the restaurant Lark, where no one can get a table, is doing veal sweetbreads over a ‘choke puree, just to name two. The knobby little tubers are everywhere at the farmer’s market these days, so I brought some home last week.

What’s funny about the fuss is that sunchokes are old as dirt, a tuber grown for food by native Americans. White explorers sampled ‘chokes in the New World and brought them home to Europe, where they gained some measure of culinary fame, and they remained in widespread use until sometime during the last century when they suddenly vanished from the table. Quite a feat given that ‘chokes are supposed to be impossible to kill in the garden. In fact, the U.S. government urged ranchers to grow them as cattle browse during the Great Depression, since the flower stems are apparently very nutritious and bovines eat ‘em up, but nothing doing.

Anyway, back home in my kitchen, I sampled the sunchokes raw; the taste and texture was like that of water chestnuts. Cooked in a bisque, they took on the lovely and subtle taste of artichoke hearts. There would seem to be plenty of alternate ways to prepare them; Farmer Mike of Whistling Train Farm told me that some people use ‘chokes in place of potatoes because they’re lower in carbs, and he advises cooking them as you would a spud. (I can’t confirm his claim about carbs, as the USDA database doesn’t recognize the vegetable, but some say the sugar content of sunchokes correlates with storage time.) I also came across a recipe for fried sunchoke cakes which I’d like to try next time.

That still leaves the mystery of why sunchokes fell off the face of the earth for about fifty years. Maybe it’s because they’re said to cause bad gas, which I’m pleased to report wasn’t an issue for us; I wonder if pureeing them enabled digestion. A more reasonable explanation for their disappearance might be their homely looks, and their tendency to dry up without proper storage, two qualities that don’t mesh well with contemporary food distribution systems. The good news is that you can grow your own without much effort; my sources suggest cutting up live ‘chokes and planting them 6 inches down in the soil; in early summer the plants will send up 6-foot flowerstalks, and after they die down the tubers can be harvested with a pitchfork. The bad news is that ‘chokes are banned from most Seattle community garden plots because of their tendency to invade; even the smallest bits of tuber left in the soil will grow new plants the following spring.

Check out a more recent post for more on cooking with sunchokes.

Recipe: Sunchoke Bisque

1 lb sunchokes, unpeeled / 2 waxy potatoes like Yukon Gold / 1 celery rib / 1 onion / 5 cups stock or water / 1 clove garlic, minced / bay leaf / milk or cream / salt & pepper / croutons / pumpkin seeds, hazenut oil or pumpkin seed oil

Chop sunchokes, potato, celery, and onion. Toast the pumpkin seeds (if using) at 350 degrees until fragrant, 6-8 minutes, then cool. Heat vegetable oil in a soup pot, add chopped vegetables, and cook on medium-high heat until browned, about 10 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook another minute. Add stock and bay leaf and scrape the browned stuff off the bottom of the pot. Season with about 1⁄2 tsp salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil, then cover and cook on low for 20 minutes, or until potatoes are tender. Pour soup into a blender and puree until smooth, then return to pot and stir in milk or cream to desired consistency. Adjust seasonings. Serve with pumpkin seeds sprinkled on top or drizzled with one of the nut oils, which really complement the artichoke flavor. Serves 4-6. Adapted from Deborah Madison.

Because I’m a food nerd, I sometimes like cooking with less conventional materials just to puzzle out how ingredients play off one another. These experiments rarely hit perfect. Mostly they’re learning experiences, with some good eating along the way. Like yesterday, when I surveyed the contents of our chest freezer, pulled out pork spareribs, and started a bisque made with sunchokes. Where this was going was not entirely clear.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’d picked up a celery root at last week’s farmers market, a gnarly, twisted mass that looks built for nuclear winter, and had kind of forgotten about it. Then my friend Justin called with a glowing report about a creamed celery root soup he’d fixed the night before. Here is a guy who has no use for mediocrity. It’s not that I’m competitive - not me! - but now I really had to do something with the thing. I opened cookbooks, studied an Alice Waters recipe for a celery root remoulade, another for a puree buffed up with potatoes. Both looked genuinely simple.

But then I ran out of gas. It was Friday night, already into the dinner hour, only the dogs interested in helping out around the kitchen. Better to experiment when there wasn’t such haste to get food on the table, it seemed. Better to cook on a day when things were moving at a slow putter and I could savor the kitchen smells. It’s a storage crop, anyway, and can wait another few days. So I picked two alternate recipes from Waters’ Art of Simple Food: pan-fried pork chops with a sauce of pan juices and mustard, and a potato gratin that baked ’til it was bubbling and browned. We rounded out the meal with a salad of carrots, radishes, and bell pepper. This is the first I’ve cooked from the (semi) new cookbook, and I like how it strips things down to the essentials.

Recipe: Alice Waters’ Pan-Fried Pork Chops with Mustard Sauce

salt & pepper / 2 thin pork chops, bone in /1 tsp vegetable oil / ¼ cup chicken stock / 1 tsp mustard / ½ tbls butter

Heat a heavy skillet over medium. Sprinkle salt and pepper on both sides of chops. When hot, swirl vegetable oil in pan and add chops, cooking about 4 minutes per side, until done. Remove to plate. Add stock and reduce somewhat then stir in mustard and butter, check seasonings, and pour over chops. Feeds 2.

Fully one of every three lentils in this country is grown at the eastern fringe of our humble state, in a region known as the Palouse. This rich and hilly patch of loess is a four to five hour drive from our doorstep, depending on how fast you take the town of Colfax, Wash., pop. 2700, reputed to be a big-time speed trap. It’s a fair drive from here to there, but one that some growers do on a weekly basis to get their meats and specialty goods to the Seattle-area farmers markets. And yet, you’ll never find lentils at these very same markets.

Why is this? We’re talking about a near-perfect protein, a legume that delivers tons of folic acid and fiber. And lentils are dry goods, which means they ship light and can store for long periods of time; they might just be the ideal national security food. But it happens that all in-state lentils are grown on a contract basis; large corporations provide farmers with their seeds and buy back the product. No doubt the system is efficient, but we pay a certain price; as of Y2K, for example, our state’s lentil growers had exhausted the efficacy of dithiocarbamate and organophosphate insecticides for their crops. See a newer post for additional details.

I bring up lentils at all because for dinner tonight I cooked up a pot of Melissa Clark’s lentil soup from yesterday’s NY Times. This soup was full-bodied, savory, and absolutely delectable with fresh bread, which I baked according to Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois’ 5-minutes-a-day method and ate hot out of the oven smeared with fluffy goat cheese. (Disclaimer: Jeff and Zoe suggest letting the loaf cool before tearing it apart.) It was filling enough for an entire meal, and I’m no bantamweight when it comes to eating.

Update: I made a modified batch of this soup for an herbivorous crowd and it was a hit. Here’s my adaptation of the recipe. The small, split red lentils are a key ingredient, as is the yogurt, which adds a nice hit of acid.

Red Lentil Soup

Vegetable oil / 1 large onion, minced /2 garlic cloves, minced / 1 carrot, diced / 1 tbls tomato paste / 1 tsp ground cumin / generous pinch ground chili powder or cayenne / 6 cups stock or water / 1 cup red lentils / salt & pepper / chilled plain yogurt / chopped cilantro and mint

Heat 1 tbls oil in a soup pot over medium-high. Add onions, garlic, and carrots and cook until soft, about 5 minutes. Add tomato paste, cumin, and chili powder or cayenne and stir until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add broth, lentils and ¼ tsp salt. Cook 45 minutes, or until lentils are tender. Puree half of soup and recombine. Season with additional salt and pepper if desired. Garnish with a scoop of yogurt and sprinkled herbs. Feeds 4. Stores well. Adapted from Melissa Clark.

Note: alternately use 1 tsp lemon juice, stirred into soup, instead of yogurt.

I love when an old kitchen standard translates smoothly using local ingredients. Even better is when it happens on the fly, like yesterday, when we cooked up a big platter of carbonara after Charlie’s long run. Yes, the pasta, parmesan, and olive oil came from who-knows-where. But the flavor and character of the dish depended on the bacon, eggs, garlic, and wine - all of which came from local sources - plus flat-leaf parsley from our herb garden.

I’m sure it’s possible to find local pasta, parmesan, and olive oil. Doing so would be relatively time-intensive, as would making the ingredients myself, another way to get uber-local. But homemade isn’t really an option for me in this case, at least on a routine basis. Even if fresh handmade pasta is so amazingly delicious.

Here’s something, though. My gourmet friend Alice just made her first batch of mozzarella, using whole milk procured at Saturday’s farmers market. She described the cheese as squeaky but tasty and said she thinks she took out too much of the whey. I have no idea what that means but she promises us a report on her adventures. Maybe we’ll even be able to talk her into home-crafted parmesan. A whole different meaning to friends with benefits?

Recipe: Spaghetti Carbonara

1 egg / 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese / 2 tbls parsley, minced / 3 strips bacon /2 cloves garlic, lightly mashed / 1/2 cup white wine / 1/4 cup olive oil / salt & pepper

Mix egg, cheese, and parsley in a mixing bowl large enough for pasta. Season with salt & pepper. Heat a skillet over medium-high and saute bacon until crispy, then drain on a paper towel. Pour most of the bacon fat out, saute garlic until golden, then add wine and reduce by half. Cook pasta for 2, drain, and quickly add to bowl with egg and cheese. Add wine mixture and stir everything together, watching for the egg to firm into curds. Adjust seasoning, if needed. Feeds 2.

There are about two dozen producers working in the damp chill when my friend Justin and I arrive at the farmer’s market this morning. The temperature is 37 degrees and it’s gusty. Right off Justin hands me a cloth bag, lest I embarrass him with plastic, and we take a hasty lap around the market. All evidence indicates that it’s the middle of the winter. The collard greens have a grizzled look, like lost hikers. The carrots are thinner and smaller, though there are huge piles of them, and bins of yellow and purple ones too. In fact there’s plenty from the root cellar: beets, onions, leeks, lots of winter squashes, gorgeous cabbages. I spot four varieties of kale, which account for at least one-third of the vegetable matter on display. There are baby greens, but no head lettuces, and apples are the only fruit today.

We split up to do our purchasing, but then Justin steers me over to the Wooly Pigs stall, where a ham steak is frying up. Wooly made its debut last month at the University farmer’s market; the growers are young folks who left the professional world to raise Berkshire hogs. They’ll be introducing their Mangalitsa breed later this month, having already sold one to the French Laundry restaurant this past fall. Very impressive. Check out their interesting blog narrative about pig ranching. Anyway, the guy cuts me a generous square of ham steak, I take a bite, and he gets all over me about needing to eat the fat. “Don’t worry about that,” I say. The ham is deeply meaty, with big flavor, and the last bite melts away on my tongue, a delicious little cloud of fat and smoke. Justin buys a pound of shoulder bacon. I’ll be hounding him for the report.

My haul for the day includes leeks and Jerusalem artichokes, an armload of potatoes, a big bag of carrots, celeriac. The farmer at the Full Circle Farm stall chats me up as he weighs my stuff, his gloved fingers moving en bloc. He’s selling dried beans by the register, small clear boxes of green-orange legumes that he says taste like black-eyed peas. “Put some onions on top, stew it, and it warms you all the way through. I’d like a bowl myself right now.”

We dipped into our supply of pinto beans from Alvarez for this hearty meal, and his tasted fresher and more toothsome than those from the grocery store, which lose texture while sitting in storage, sometimes for years. I’d bet good money that most folks could tell the difference in a blind taste test. In fact, the beans were the star of the meal, never mind my efforts to gussy up the rice with carnitas and roasted poblano chilies. A salad of greens, radishes, and carrots rounded things out. Mostly local, 100% deluxe.

Dead of Winter Pinto Beans

1½ cups pinto beans / 2 strips bacon / 1 onion, minced / ½ jalapeno, seeded and minced / 1 tbls tequila / chopped cilantro or scallions to taste / salty Mexican cheese or feta / salt & pepper

Rinse beans, place in pressure cooker with about 6 cups water, and cook under pressure until tender, between 20 and 30 minutes depending on freshness of beans. Cool. Alternately, cook beans for 1½ hrs in a regular stovetop pot. Crisp bacon in a separate 5-quart pot until fat is rendered, pour out most of bacon fat and drain bacon strips on a paper towel, then chop. Saute onion and jalapeno until soft, 8 minutes. Ladle pintos plus some of their cooking liquid into the pot with onions/jalapenos and cook until flavors are combined, about 20 minutes. Season with salt & pepper. Stir in tequila and garnish with cilantro or scallions and crumbled cheese. Serves 3-4 as a main dish served with rice and salad. Adapted from Rick Bayless.

Dead of winter equals tough times for local eaters. Fresh produce is scarce, and there’s the problem of cooking with what is available, inevitably stuff like turnips or kale and potatoes. Here’s a pasta dish that calls for standard winter ingredients and hangs together marvelously. You can substitute most types of winter greens for the kale and use shallots in place of leeks, if that’s what you have. We’ve tried a dozen iterations; they’re all tasty. And you’ll be sitting down to eat in twenty minutes.

Recipe: Pasta with Kale and Sausage

1 small leek / 2 pork sausages / 2 cloves garlic / 1 bunch kale / ½ cup stock / hot pepper flakes, optional / salt & pepper / cooked pasta for 2 / 1 tbl olive oil / grated parmesan cheese

Slice leeks and sausage and mince garlic. Remove stems from kale and slice into thin ribbons. Heat a large skillet on medium-high and swirl 1 tsp oil in pan when hot. Add leeks, sausage, and garlic and saute for 6-8 minutes, until leeks are soft and sausage is browned. Add kale, stock, and optional hot pepper, and turn heat down to low. Separately, heat a pot of salted water. Cook pasta according to package directions. Transfer pasta water to the kale in half-cup increments if the pan gets dry and adjust salt & pepper. When pasta is cooked, drain and add to kale, mixing everything together with olive oil. Sprinkle cheese on top. Feeds 2. Doubles easily.

It was looking like the perfect Saturday morning to roll out of bed, enjoy a cup of coffee, and stroll on over the the farmer’s market. Except! Thanks to my day job, I didn’t get myself there until an hour before closing time. Well, it is now clearly winter at the market. Growing Things Farm, one of my usual stops, was selling their beautiful soaps and jams, which we like to give away as gifts; they’d sold out of eggs much earlier. Willie Green’s, Stoney Plains, and Whistling Train Farm carried small lettuces and bagged salad, mizuna, radishes, collards, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, and of course, kale. The only stuff available in quantity were things that keep — potatoes, winter squashes. Still, it was clear that if you were really determined, you could continue eating just about 100% local at this time of year.

On my way out, I picked up a bag of Braeburn apples and some hot peppers from Tonnemaker Orchards of Royal City, Wash. Tonnemaker’s fruit has always been sweet, fresh, and reasonably priced. I know it’s frowned upon to invoke pricing when talking about local organic food; what we pay is supposed to reflect the true costs of growing, but I’m not against a little competition. I left the market lamenting over how many months it would be before Honey Crisp apples are back — and thinking of how lucky we are in Seattle to have rich, bountiful harvests locally for much of the year.

Check out this Everett, Wash. woman’s local foodshed page, which lists a number of her favorite growers.

OK, so I’ve never been a big fan of chili. It’s on a short list of foods that I never ate growing up, a fact that baffles a lot of people, especially Texans (who sometimes call chili “a bowl of red”). This response from the Lone Star crowd was the first clue that there was likely to be super delicious chili out there that I had yet to sample. I was finally inspired to cook some the other day when I came across this Rick Bayless recipe with ancho chilies, which we adapted to the items on hand. It has phenomenal flavor, especially after sitting a day or two, and makes good use of locally available stuff.

Charlie ate two bowls and offered none of his usual helpful cooking pointers. Of course, sometimes his tips provoke an offer for him to do a bit of his own cooking, but that’s another story. Here’s the recipe.

Recipe: Hot Chili con Carne with Anchos and Pintos

1 cup dry pinto beans / 1 lb ground beef / 1 onion, chopped / 3-4 assorted peppers such as poblano or bell / ancho chili paste to taste /2 chopped chipotle peppers, optional / 1 cup corn kernels / salt & pepper / shredded cheese to taste / chopped cilantro to taste

Cook the pintos until tender in a quart of water, 20 minutes in our half-busted pressure cooker, plus time for the pressure to release. Brown the ground beef in a heavy pot over medium-high heat, about 5 minutes. Add onions and cook until they’re translucent, another 5 minutes. Add ancho paste (we used a half-cup of homemade) and chipotles and stir in. Add enough water or beef stock to cover the beef and onions. Turn heat down and simmer for an hour or more. Meanwhile, chop peppers raw or if you prefer, roast them under a high broiler, remove skins and seeds, and then chop. When chili is done, add cooked beans, chopped peppers, and corn and cook 10 minutes to blend flavors. Adjust salt and pepper. Like many stews, this one is even better the next day. Garnish with shredded cheese and cilantro. Adapted from Rick Bayless. We served with tomato rice.

Ancho paste can be purchased in specialty stores. Or, blend together 4 rehydrated ancho chilies, some of the chili-soaking water, 2 cloves garlic, ½ tsp dry oregano, dash of cumin, dash of ground cloves, and a grinding of pepper.

Now that our local food project appears to be off the ground, I realize that we’re actually cooking the same stuff we always have. Somehow this comes as a surprise. Before the forty pounds of beef arrived, I felt certain we’d need special knowledge to cook with every part of the cow. Maybe that was part of the allure.

But if our cooking hasn’t really changed, what we’re eating has changed, thanks in part to the quality of the raw materials, and because we’re actually taking the time to think about what to cook. Eating local is reordering our lives in other ways, too. We don’t depend on the grocery store quite as much and we aren’t eating out as often, which also means that we’re driving less and spending less. It’s becoming routine to work a little local organic beef, pork or seasonal vegetable matter into our cooking — like with lunch today, which was pintos stewed with chilies and bacon grease, scooped up with tortillas. Or as with dinner the other night, a tasty rice casserole of roasted tomatoes and poblanos, jack cheese, and crumbled Wagyu.

What’s been equally interesting is reading about my fellow Eat Local blogger Stephen’s experience, and discovering that kids eat local, too. Stephen emailed last week to tell me that his girls devour their buffalo steaks. “It’s kinda scary,” he said. When your food news comes from the New York Times, you get the idea that kids these days will eat nothing but breaded foods. It’s time for a new paradigm.

Today was the last Broadway farmer’s market of ‘07, and there was still plenty of good-looking stuff in the crates: kales, cabbages, two kinds of broccoli, carrots, beets, apples, winter squashes, onions, potatoes, a variety of lettuces, and the usual spread of Alvarez Farm’s hot peppers, many of which are now bright red. We picked up some greens, a few poblano chilies, and enough pinto beans to squirrel away for a winter’s worth of Mexican cooking. The beans are gorgeous, a splotchy marbled brown color, and they seem taut and fresh.

Seattle now has thirteen neighborhood farmer’s markets, and several are open year round — Pike Place Market, of course, which has opened daily for many years, plus the weekly University District, Ballard, and Fremont markets. There’s so much variety even now, at low tide, that it probably wouldn’t be a huge stretch to live off local food all year. I’m not necessarily proposing this for Charlie and me; you’ve got to pick your battles. But I don’t think the day is too far off when many Seattle farmer’s markets will be open year round, when customers demand kales and strange squashes, when eating local will be less a statement of social consciousness and simply a way of life.

If you’ve ever hankered for your own organic farm, check out the Seattle P-I story about what it took to start Local Roots Farm, in Carnation, Wash., earlier this year.

The plan was to braise a pile of leafy, chartreuse-colored mustard greens using a Deborah Madison recipe, which calls for chopped onion, ginger, paprika, cumin, cilantro, and a handful of rice.* We’d crack open a couple of cold beers, eat the mustard greens alongside leftover black beans, and that would be dinner. But the greens stew for 45 minutes, plenty of time to agonize over whether they’ll turn out tasting weird, and with 40 minutes to go, I hauled a package of pork chops out of the freezer in case we needed the additional sustenance.

By the time the chops were thawed, the greens were looking considerably more edible but still had a strong mustardy hint. This seemed reason enough to pair them with pan-fried pork chops. I dried off the chops, which were a rich pink-brown color, bone in, a half-inch thick. They browned nicely in a cast iron pan and were more tender cooked than just about any commercial pork chop I’ve eaten, except perhaps brined. The combination of pork and mustard was spot-on, and the rewarmed black beans provided a hearty counterpoint.

Pan-Fried Pork Chops with Sage and Mustard

2 slices bacon / 2 pork chops / one-half onion, sliced thinly / ¼ cup chopped sage / 1 tsp dijon mustard / 1 cup stock / salt & pepper

Coat both sides of the chops with salt and pepper. Crisp the bacon over medium-high heat, then remove and slice thinly. Pour off bacon grease, leaving enough behind to coat pan. Reheat pan, brown chops about 2 minutes per side, then remove. Saute onions and sage for 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Add stock and mustard and mix to combine, reduce heat to low, then add chops and bacon pieces and cover, cooking until pork is just cooked, about 3-5 minutes. Remove meat to serving plates and reduce sauce on high heat until thickened. Serves 2. Adapted from Jerry Traunfeld.

*Look for specifics on mustard greens in Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors cookbook.

One of our favorite local eaters, Scott Jurek, reports that he snapped up fifty pounds of local organic grub during a recent visit to his neighborhood farmer’s market, then hauled it all home on his bike. In case you’re not up on your extreme athletes, Scott’s the world-class ultramarathoner with seven Western States 100 mile race wins under his belt, among others. Scott’s also a vegan and a phenomenal cook, and his post describes what’s he’s buying at the markets now, plus his favorite Seattle-area organic farmers.

We here at Northwest Eat Local have been agitating for a cookbook.

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year is locavore, a word invented by four Californians who sought to eat only foods grown or produced within 100 miles of their home. Locavore, or localvore, is now used widely to describe people who eat local and sustainably grown foods.

Locavore beat out such neologisms as cougar, an older woman who romantically pursues younger men, and social graph, a network of friends created on websites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Onward, local eaters!

We’ve been on the hunt for local pig.

In fact, we joined the Growing Things Farm CSA in fall ‘06, with the idea that if we liked their produce and eggs, we might get our meat from them as well. Growing Things is a thirty-acre organic farm in Carnation, Washington, run by a woman named Michaele Blakeley and her son, who goes by Blake. Michaele’s been farming for twenty years, and she’s widely recognized in the area for her innovations in organic agriculture.

Well, six weeks into our subscription, the Snoqualamie River flooded the farm, and Michaele and Blake lost not only their house and all of their fall/winter ‘06-’07 crops but some meat animals, too. They fought hard to make their way back, putting in sixteen hour days, seven days per week, and in spring they returned to the farmers markets with a limited selection of vegetables and fruits.

I chatted with Michaele a few weeks ago while I was buying some of her corn and broccoli. She said that they’d finally moved into more habitable quarters, a year after the flood, but that the business remains on rocky footing and they won’t be offering a produce or fruit CSA until further notice. Nor was she hopeful that they’d have meat in 2008. This was disappointing to hear. It’s a lesson in how a small, unconventional farm can just get wiped off the map, and how long it takes to rebuild, even with a devoted market clientele. Michaele said that she’ll be turning daily operations over to Blake, because her carpal tunnel has gotten so bad that her hands go numb every day. I noted how swollen and weathered her fingers look. She’s going to have to find something else, she said, because her injury has made it impossible to make a living farming anymore. And because she has no health insurance, there’s no way to get surgery that might fix her hands.

I still like the idea of getting everything from one farmer whom I trust, someone who grows a diverse selection of vegetable crops and meat animals within a totally self-sustaining system. But after hearing that meat wasn’t coming back to Growing Things I began looking around again for sustainably-raised pork. It was now past the end of the season, so the timing wasn’t ideal. Plus, I wanted to buy in bulk and the ranchers at the farmers’ markets were all selling by the cut.

Eventually I learned about Crown “S” Ranch in Winthrop, Washington, where the meat animals seem to be raised humanely and on grass pasture. Crown “S” sells in quantity, and they were about to deliver their fall harvest, so I ordered twenty-five pounds of their pork. The batch arrives tomorrow.

I’m hoping that Growing Things can restore its business to full health. Michaele tells a story about how in their darkest days after the flood, she opened an envelope containing an anonymous $10,000 check from a longtime market customer. She’s also gotten help from the PCC Farmland Trust, a local group that purchases and preserves organic farmland in the Seattle area. This level of support is a testament to the sense of community that local food can build — and a cautionary tale about how exposed our small-time organic farmers are.