The Local Food Report: dust to dust

Strawberry season, in my family, is a religious thing. We pick strawberries in late June and early July the way other families watch Wimbledon or take Saturdays at the beach—every year, all together, no matter what. 

We wake up early, at seven or even six, and we drive out to Bowdoin, a few towns over from where I grew up in Maine. We bring our stained green quart containers from last year and our sunscreen and our hats, and we haul flats of empty boxes down the rows at Prout's field until they're picked full. We pick until our fingers are stained and our lips are red, and we make sure to get forty quarts at the very least. 

Then we haul the berries back home, lay them out on the kitchen counter like checkers, and everyone takes their spots. My father pulls the greens from the berry heads, my sister washes, I chop. My mother pulls out the big pots for jam—the jars in a water bath on the back burner and the sugar and the berries bubbling up front. We make pint upon pint of jam, to last all year on toast and peanut butter sandwiches and stirred into plain yogurt sometimes.

But not this year. 

This year, between the rain and the hail and the grey fruit mold—between those three, the strawberries were done in. There were some berries at the markets, certainly; they were big, plump, and juicy, and they had hardly any taste. They could have been California strawberries for all we knew.

I talked to Tim Friary about it the other day—Tim from Cape Cod Organics Farm in Barnstable who sells the berries at the markets in Hyannis and Orleans. He said he'd lost 150 cases by mid June, $6,000 down the drain. He said they just melted—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But it was the terrific lack of sunshine that got them the most. The strawberries come in June for a reason, he explained: they rely on the longest days of the year, on the peak of light and loads of sunshine to get that sweet, signature taste. Needless to say, they got hardly a single day.

Still, we've eaten a few. We've brought home a quart here and there from Tim, or from Andy Pollock in Provincetown, and we've doled them out on tip-toe. Mostly, we've been stretching them out on salads.

That one right up there is one of my favorites: butter lettuce, basil, and balsamic with just a sprinkling of strawberries. They go on a long way on salad, strawberries do—you only need two or maybe three to make the whole thing jump. The basil doesn't hurt, of course—it's been thick with strawberries since ages and ages ago—and the balsamic makes an excellent third wheel. But the strawberries are the ones that round up the troops, bringing together crisp and peppery and floral into one big, ecstatic bunch. 

It may not feel like a big, ecstatic bunch sort of season in general, I know. But for this last week—before the berries disappear until next year—I plan to revel in the possibility all I can. 

STRAWBERRY BASIL SALAD

There might not be enough strawberries for jam, but there are certainly plenty to top a salad. Basil and strawberries are a well known pair, and the balsamic in this recipe compliments both. Look for a mild lettuce without too much of its own personality—that way the basil and berries won't have anything too strong to compete with.

1 pound sweet, mild lettuce, washed and dried

1 bunch basil, leaves picked, washed, and dried

3 tablespoons sweet balsamic vinegar

3 tablespoons olive oil

salt and pepper 

1 pint strawberries, washed and sliced

Toss lettuce and basil together in a large serving bowl. Dress with oil and vinegar, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Add the strawberries last, sprinkling them on top, so that they don't disappear to the bottom too fast. 

P.S. This year, I planted my own strawberry patch. Luckily, I wasn't counting on any berries just yet, but the plants sent out runners all over the place, and from just six plants they've nearly filled in a 10 foot space. Spring and August are the two best times to plant, so if you have any interest in getting a patch going, I recommend doing some research over here first. There are all sorts of tid-bits about choosing varieties and how to mulch and what not. Good luck!

The mint stands alone

I hope you had an excellent Fourth of July. I hope it was filled with sun and burgers and pickles and mojitos, and maybe even a swim in the bay. I also hope it got you ready to dive into summer full-gale, with a bang, because that's the sort of recipe I have to offer you today.

I want to talk about white sangria today, specifically about the recipe I clipped from last month's Gourmet, the one that spent an entire four weeks begging for a sunny day before I finally dug it out on Thursday. If that was the editors' idea of a joke—if they thought it was funny to taunt the entire northeast with their gorgeous-men-and-women-drinking-on-a-river spread for a whole four weeks while thunder, rain, and hail pounded down from the sky—well, ha. ha. I like to think I have a pretty good sense of humor about these sorts of things, but that was simply not funny Gourmet. 

Happily, as of Friday at least, we have decided to move on. We are full-sun ahead, and we have some serious make-up work to do in the realm of beach fires and pond swims and Sunday barbeques. 

The hosting rules for any of these sorts of outdoor festivities—at least at my house—clearly state that they ought to involve a pitcher of sangria or two. And this white sangria—this white sangria is just the thing. It's actually more minted than white—with just fresh mint leaves and sugar and brandy and a bottle of dry white wine—and it goes down crisp and smooth with just a little hint of tang. It is a sort of cross between sangria and a mojito when you get down to it, and for a hot day in July, it is just the thing.

Originally, the recipe debuted in the July 1991 issue of the magazine as Minted White Sangria. The editors brought it back this summer with green grapes and green apples to jazz it up a bit, but between you and me, those new fruits didn't add much. They were just a lot of noise in comparision to the mint. I tried making it both ways when the sun came out Friday and I have decided to stand staunchly beside the mint-stands-alone 1991 version as my permanent pitcher of choice. 

Of course, now that the sun's out, there's plenty of time to try sangria any-old-which-way. You'll have to let me know what your favorite version is, so that we can give that a swing.

MINTED WHITE SANGRIA

This is best served freezing cold from a pitcher and poured into mint julep cups over ice. If you don't have the silver cups, chilled glass beer mugs work well too. Garnish each glass with a sprig of fresh mint, or, for a lighter sangria, add a splash of soda water. 

adapted from Gourmet, July 1991

1 cup packed fresh mint leaves

1/4 cup sugar

1 750-ml. bottle dry white wine 

1/4 cup brandy

In a mixing bowl, combine the mint, sugar, and several tablespoons hot water. Stir with a wooden spoon until the sugar is dissolved, using the spoon to muddle the mint. Add the brandy and the wine, stir well, and let the mixture chill for several hours. Strain the sangria into a pitcher just before you're ready to serve it, then pour it over ice into individual glasses and garnish with a sprig of mint. 

The Local Food Report: no taste like home

Imagine, for a second. Imagine you've left the house you grew up in, the soil, the land. Imagine you've left tias and tios, a language, a country, the garden out back. You've left behind plates of feijoada, a burning sun, kitchen spoons and mixing bowls, the memory of okra and maxixi and a hundred other tropical plants not found under the waning New England sun. Imagine you have left Brazil—Maranhao maybe, or Minas Gerais—for Martha's Vineyard, imagine you have exhanged the equator for this tiny wind-tattered arc in the midst of the North Atlantic.  

Imagine remembering each time you sit down to eat that though the island is beautiful and busy and the work is steady, there is no place like home, no taste like home on a dinner plate. 

That's what Frank Mangan, a professor at UMass Amherst, imagined when he started working with ethinic crops. He went to give a talk on agriculture to a group of Puerto Ricans living in Holyoke fifteen years ago, and he's been imagining that same feeling ever since. He's worked with people from the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nigeria, Honduras. He's started researching food plants that are culturally important to people from these countries, asking farmers here to try growing them, and then connecting the crops with the immigrants. Just imagine heading downtown to the farmers' market one day, expecting English peas and tennis ball lettuce and finding a table of this:

That taioba plant would be a sight for sore eyes, indeed. 

It's not that there aren't substitutes for taioba—there are, spinach for one—but just like Swiss chard is no kale, they aren't quite the same. Taioba is a staple in many parts of Brazil, the kind of leafy green you chop and cook up alongside a bowl of rice or maybe a hunk of bread. It has broad, sloping leaves that sprout out like sun umbrellas, a patch of shade for the spiders and the ants and the cabbage worms of the world. Some people call it malanga, or yautia, or even cocoyam, just as they do its cousin taro, but taioba's the most common name.

It got to the Vineyard through Island Grown Initiative,  a non-profit that Ali Berlow started. (Ali, in case you don't know her, is the brilliance behind A Cook's Notebook and, along with her husband Sam, the new Edible Vineyard.) IGI works to connect local people to local food, so connecting the roughly 4,000 Brazilians on the island with familiar crops was a big no brainer once they heard about Mangan's work. 

Beyond taioba, the collaboration is bringing other Brazilian crops to the island, too. There's also maxixi, a lemony, cucumber-like fruit, jilo, a member of the Solanaceae family that has fruit sort of like a green eggplant, and okra, with its long, spindly lady finger fruits. The hope is that not only will Brazilians be excited to see a taste of home, but that other islanders will catch on, too. We could all do with a new salad or two. 

The taioba plant I brought home is still pretty small—only a foot or so high—but to tide us over, one of Mangan's students, Zorraia Barros, offered up a recipe for Taioba Sauté. Once the crops start coming in, taioba should be available at the West Tisbury farmers' market on the Vineyard, and a few markets in the Hyannis area, too. 

So keep your eye out, and don't be afraid to step outside the lines. Taioba might not taste like home, but I'm betting once you take a bit, that won't matter much.  

TAIOBA SAUTE

Many thanks to Zorraia Barros of the University of Massachusetts Amherst for this recipe. Zorraia works with Mangan on his program and specializes in nursing and marketing little taioba plants. She developed this recipe in both English and Portuguese, which seems very appropriate to me, so I'm going to offer both versions here. The English one is a bit edited, but the Portuguese—well, let's just say I thought it best not to mess with that. So without further ado, meet taioba—in print now, and one of these days, at a farmers' market near you. 

1/8 cup onion, washed, peeled, and chopped

2 cups taioba, washed and chopped

1/2 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon garlic, crushed

a pinch of salt

In a large black-bottomed skillet, heat up the olive oil. Add the onions when the pan is hot, and sauté for about five minutes, or until they begin to get translucent and soft. Turn down the heat and add the garlic, stirring constantly for about 30 seconds or until it is just on the cusp of getting too brown and burning, and then throw in the taioba. (The green, Zorraia says, is very delicate and will cook down to about a quarter of its original heft.) Stir it around for about five minutes, until the leaves are wilted and soft, sprinkle with salt, and serve. 

TAIOBA REFOGADA

1/8 xícara de cebola, lavada, descascada, e picada

2 xícaras de taioba lavada

1/2 colher de azeite de oliva

1 colher de alho amassado

1 pitada de sal

Lavar e perparar os vegetais. Numa frigideira grande aquecer o azeite de oliva. Adicionar o alho e a cebola, refogar por 1 minuto. Adicionar a taioba e refogar por 5 minutos ou ate ficar macio (a Taioba é muito delicada para cozinhar, no inicio temos 2 xícaras de folhas frescas e termina com 1/2 xícara de taioba refogada). Adicionar o sal e servir.

Pick the pieces up

This has been 

a whirlwind of a week. 

One plane

one rental car

and four trains.

(Thirteen

if you count the Subway.)

I promise I'll be back

on Thursday

with something good

once I've had time

to pick the pieces up.

Until then, 

enjoy your week

and the never-never-ever-ending

rain.

The Local Food Report: personal lettuce

I visited a farm the other day devoted entirely to lettuce. It was Veronica Worthington's garden, the Herb Farm in West Dennis, the sister to her Pleasant Lake Farm in Harwich.

Veronica tried her hand at a lettuce checkerboard a few years back—you know, the sort with carefully measured one foot squares and perfectly spaced heads of Lola Rosa and Lola Bionda in zig-zags of green and red—and by the end of June, she'd fallen in love.

She'd haul her stepladder out from the garage every few days or so, set it up in the backyard and get up high to admire her work. When the heads were ready to harvest, she threw a party in the garden, a benefit for the library downtown, and everyone milled around ooh-ing and ahh-ing and snapping pictures of her work. Finally, they pulled the lettuce from the ground, shook off the dirt, and sat down in the yard to eat. 

The checkerboard has been getting bigger every year since. These days, it's an acre on the outskirts of town, 3,000 heads of lettuce in perfect squares. She says the pattern has sort of gone out the window, because every time she picks a head to sell at the farmers' market, she stuffs another one back in. There might be a tiny icebery next to a huge, leafy romaine, or a whole row of full size black-seeded Simpsons.

All in all, she grows 35 varieties of lettuce, but she's heard there are over 800. That's her next goal—to try growing every single one.

But for now, she's focused on miniatures. Personal lettuces, she calls them, miniature icebergs and miniature romaines and miniature Boston heads. The icebergs are her favorite—plain green, and tight-knit heads that change from burgundy to jade. Partially, this is a matter of appearances; the minis are a charming size, perfect in their pressed little heads and closely held drapes. But it's also about taste.

The miniature icebergs are crisp, cool, watery—the antitode to humid June afternoons and sun burnt ears, the prelude to Hendrick's and tonics in chilled pewter cups. Veronica imagines a world where we all return to the Russian and iceberg pairing of the 1960s, housewives across the country filling up their shopping carts with mayonnaise and ketchup, minced pickles and dill. She remembers that era well—the time when iceberg was all we knew, after the Boston lettuce of the 1800s and during the reign of California as the salad bowl king, before we discovered mixed greens and nutrients. The wedge is in vogue these days, but somehow, by some trick, the Russian dressing didn't reappear with it.

Except on my table. Veronica made Russian dressing sound so good, so just the thing for miniature iceberg, that when she sent me home with a head, I had to whip a batch up. I dug through the refrigerator for ingredients: homemade mayo, one of my mother's pickles, a bundle of dill. I have no idea if the results are anything like the Russian dressing of the 1960s, but if they were, well, I'm a convert. I'm still not sure about platform shoes or Pocahontas headbands, but I think—I'm quite certain, in fact—that Russian dressing deserves another spin. 

RUSSIAN WEDGE

I didn't turn up any ketchup when I went to make this dressing, so I used rosehip jelly instead. I remembered thinking when I made the jelly last summer that it smelled a lot like tomato sauce, and it made a fine substitute. Any of the following three—ketchup, tomato jelly, or rosehip jelly—would work well in this recipe, I think.

2 heads miniature iceberg lettuce

1/2 cup mayonnaise, preferably homemade

equal parts white vinegar and water, to taste

1 tablespoon ketchup, tomato jelly, or rosehip jelly 

1 dill pickle, minced

1 head dill, finely chopped

salt and pepper to taste

Pull any bruised outer leaves from the lettuce heads, and remove the stems from the bottoms. Place whole on two plates. 

In a small mixing bowl, whisk together mayo and ketchup or jelly. Add 1 teaspoon white vinegar and 1 teaspoon water to the mayo mix, and continue adding the two liquids in equal parts until the mixture reaches a consistency you like. Stir in the pickle and the dill, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Pour the dressing over the iceberg heads, and serve at once.

A top-notch marriage

June can be an awfully trying month. Between the rain and the gray and the false-summer feel of it all, some days, it can be tricky just to get out of bed. Especially in a week like this, when it's raining for the—I dunno, 15th? 21st?—day straight. In fact, the only reason I'm up right now is the lettuce. The lettuce just about drags me out of bed. 

It's been doing this for a few weeks now, since we made it through most of the spinach and then the tat soi and the broccoli rabe, and even the kale. It makes a racket when you go out in the morning to weed, carrying on about how wet it is, and how cold and how windy, and golly, wouldn't it be nice to be inside, wrapped in paper towels and dishcloths in the safety of the crisper. Eventually, of course, once it has made its way into the cripser, it starts wining about that, too, hinting at what a drizzle of olive oil could do for its skin, how a pinch of salt might perk it up, or how maybe, just maybe, it might like to hit the grill for a bit of color here and there. 

We cave at least once a day, usually twice, and we can still hardly keep up with all its demands. Half a row sits outside as I type, wilting away in the garden like so many red-speckled cheeks. 

But the other day, I discovered a new way to get ahead. It's called petit pois, and it polishes off a full head of four-season lettuce, Merveille des Quatre Saison, in the blink of an eye. In fact, the heads hardly have a moment to complain—one minute, they're in the garden, full and fresh, and the next they've simmered down into the sweet drapes for a bowl of steaming English peas. 

I don't know how I first heard about the dish—maybe online or paging through some old issue of Gourmet—but as soon as I did, I knew it would be marvelous. For starters, there's the poetry of the name, petit pois, which conjures up old, faded photos of French country farmhouses and tumbling stone walls and outdoor markets just brimming with spring. Then there's the concept of the thing—a one pot supper, light and rich all at once, hot yet delicate—just the thing for a June drowning in rain. It's too hot for steak and potatoes, but a bowl of fresh peas with steaming lettuce and chicken broth, a pinch of salt and sugar and peppered a bit—now that I can do.

If you're feeling a little cooped up tonight, what with the rain and the wind and the fact that you can hardly see through the clouds, well, petit pois might be the trick. It's a top-notch marriage of spring and summer, and on a wet Monday in June, it just might be the best we can do. 

PETIT POIS

When we made this the other day, (when it was, ahem, raining, if you can imagine that) we ate it with a few crackers as a warm, light lunch. If you're serving it as a side, say alongside rice or with a tuna salad sandwich, you could probably stretch it between at least three people, maybe four. It works best with very fresh English shelling peas and a rich, buttery lettuce like Boston or Merveille des Quatre Saison. You could try another leaf lettuce, but I wouldn't recommend anything too stiff like Iceberg or Romaine. You want something that will wilt down and sort of drape itself around the peas, which should be tender and sweet in their pool of chicken broth.

1 head lettuce, bottom cut off and leaves cleaned

1 cup peas, shelled 

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon salt

a pinch of pepper

1/2 cup chicken broth, preferably homemade

In a medium heavy-bottomed pot, arrange the head of lettuce so that it forms a sort of nest. Pour the peas into the middle and dot them with the butter. Sprinkle the salt, sugar, and pepper over top, and douse the whole thing with the chicken broth. Cover the pot and cook everything over low heat for about eight or ten minutes, until the peas are bright green and tender and the lettuce has wilted into just about nothing. Cut up the greens and serve them hot with the peas and a bit of broth in small, shallow bowls. 

The Local Food Report: life before cod

There are some foods we can do without around here. I can't be sure, but I think there was life on the Cape before bananas and avocados and mango mojitos, though that last one might be up for debate. There was not, however, life before cod.

At least, no human life. Every population that's lived on this strip of sand has owed their survival, in some manner at least, to codfish. There was codfish before agriculture, before Stop n' Shop, and certainly before the Europeans arrived. In fact, if you've read Cod or Salt or any of those other fascinating edible histories of New England, you know that cod is why the Old Worlders came over here in the first place. They were looking for fish to dry and turn into salt cod and ship home, and they found it in the New World in droves. It was only later that they decided to stay.

These days, the big codfish that used to be so common are getting harder and harder to find. So are the cod fishermen, as their livelihood slowly gets eaten away.

Thankfully, a group of ground-fishermen in Chatham decided they were ready to do something about it. After all, avocados are good and all, but they can't really compare to a panko-crusted fillet. So about four years ago, they came up with a plan. They asked fisheries regulators if they could manage their catch as a community, the way harvesting cooperatives in the Pacific Northwest did, putting together their catch history and agreeing to take a fixed amount of fish from the sea every year. 

This way, they could avoid fishing under the days-at-sea regulations, which allow fishermen to go out only a fixed number of days, and take so many pounds per day. As one fisherman said, if you put your net in for twenty minutes too long and catch 1,000 pounds of extra fish, you have to throw them back. Since they're already dead, this doesn't do much for the whole plenty-of-fish-in-the-sea objective.

The regulators went for it, and in May of 2004, the Georges Bank Cod Hook Sector was formed.

Participation was voluntary, and the sector took applications and put together a board of directors and a manager and based on how many fishermen applied and their catch history, a quota was assigned. The quota was a percentage of the Total Allowable Catch—how many pounds of groundfish (cod, haddock, and flounder) can come out of the sea every year—and was monitored carefully. Today, this sector has twenty-five fishermen on board.

The Georges Bank Fixed Gear Sector came next, in May of 2006, and today it has nine fishermen involved. 

As other groups of fishermen have watched these Chatham sectors manage their own catch—cutting down on how many days they have to fish, working as a community to run the business of the sea, not wasting a single fish—they've decided they want to make the switch, too. Seventeen groups from Connecticut to Maine put in proposals this year, and depending on what the New England Fishery Management Council decides next week, there could be new sectors in Martha's Vineyard, Boston, New Bedford, and the South Shore by 2010. And that's just around here. Imagine if the whole system switched over—no more dumped fish, business and finances aligned with conservation. Maybe, just maybe, cod would have a chance.

This is thick stuff, I know. If you want to keep reading, I recommend heading over here, or over here, or grabbing this pdf. It's hard to say what the right way is to keep the fish in the sea, but this seems like an awfully good start.

Oh! and the New England Fishery Manangement Council votes on the new proposals next week. If you have anything to say before it happens, you can get in touch with them over here, or you can let your governor know over here.