Local rye, day 1

Let's start a project. Ready? Ok. Take two cups of all-purpose flour, two cups of warm water, and a tablespoon of yeast. Shake them all together in an old yogurt container or a big Mason jar, put the lid on tight, and set them on the counter. Now walk away.

We'll be back with the next step on Wednesday. In the meantime, if you happen to have some local rye kicking around, say from a grain CSA, grind it into flour. You'll need that for what comes next—that, and some poppy seeds and caraway. See you then!

Organic grain CSA

Hi friends,

I just wanted to pass along this link to a new organic grain CSA in Belchertown, MA started up by a Falmouth native. This will be their first year and and grains include wheat, rye, spelt, flour-corn, and dry beans. Yum!

It isn't the CSA we're part of, but it's in the same area and the first year we were members some of the grain in our CSA (Pioneer Heritage Valley) actually came from White Oak Farm.

Let's hope another one pops up next year! The way I see it, the more local staples, the better.

A lot of breads

Uh, hi! I know we've been doing a lot of breads around here lately, but I'm not ready to stop. I'm sorry. If you're in more of a vegetable mood, I won't be offended if you go over and poke around over here, or maybe over here. It's just that with all the local grains from our CSA, we're on kind of a bread kick around here. There's something about grinding our own grains and then baking with them that we can't get enough of. Next up, oatmeal sandwich bread, from Good to the Grain.

This is a truly multi-grain bread—part whole wheat, part all-purpose, and part rolled oats. It's amazing—you put a cup of oats into two loaves of bread, and when you bake them, you get all of their sweetness but none of their texture. Do they just melt? Does the yeast eat them? I have no idea. But I like the fact that even though they dissolve, their essence is there. It reminds me of the feeling I get when I look at recipes written out in my great-grandmother's handwriting. We've never met, but I know she's in there.

Anyway, it's also a fairly easy bread. Like all bread this one takes time—a half hour rest, an hour rise, another rise and forty minutes in the oven at the end—but this time of year, between the cold and the dark, time is what we've got. And the end result—two loaves that actually bloom up, out of the pan—is well worth any scrimping and pinching you might have had to do to come up with the window.

OATMEAL SANDWICH BREAD

This recipe is adapted slightly from the one Kim Boyce lays out in Good to the Grain on page 130. As you might guess, it is a nice soft loaf, and perfect for sandwiches. I find it also makes excellent toast.

E.H. note 11.26.12: I made this bread yesterday with all spelt flour, and it turned out beautifully. 

2 cups warm water

1 tablespoon (1 package) active dry yeast

3 tablespoons honey

2 and 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup rolled oats

4 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled

1 tablespoon kosher salt

Grease a large bowl and two bread loaf pans. Set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, stir together the water, yeast, and honey with a wooden spoon. Let sit for 5 minutes to proof.

When the yeast is bubbly, use the spoon to stir in the flours, oats, and butter. Cover this mixture with a damp dishtowel and let it sit for 30 minutes.

Attach the bread hook to the mixer. Add the salt and mix on medium speed for 5 minutes. Stay close-by and watch the process carefully; you want the dough to slap the sides of the bowl, not stick to them. If it starts to stick at any time sprinkle in a few spoonfuls of flour.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface, knead it a few times, then transfer it to the buttered bowl. Cover the bowl with a damp dishtowel, put it in a warm place, and leave the dough to rise until doubled in size, about an hour.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and divided it into two balls. Gently shape each ball into a rectangle, and place it in the buttered pans. Cover the pans with a damp dishtowel and let the bread rise in a warm place a second time, until doubled in size.

Near the end of the rise, preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Sprinkle the tops of the loaves with rolled oats and bake for 40 minutes, or until the top of the loaves are a deep golden brown and sound hollow when tapped.

The Local Food Report: Rein's Real Rye

In 1973, Rein Ciarfella found the perfect loaf of rye bread. It was round, boule-shaped, with a thick, leathery crust and a chewy, toothsome crumb. It had a deep rye flavor with subtle undertones of caraway, and it was excellent plain, and with butter. Toasted alongside a bowl of soup, it took his breath away.

It was from a bakery in Guildford, England, just south of London, where Ciarfella was living at the time. He bought a loaf every day for two years, but then it came time to move home. When he came back to the states, he couldn't find a similar loaf of rye anywhere. He thought about the bread all the time—for thirty-five years, he thought about that bread—and finally, last May, he decided to do something about it.

He found a recipe online—a deli rye bread from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois—that he thought looked pretty similar. He played with the flour ratios—rye to all-purpose, even adding a little high-protein flour in, toyed with and abandoned a sourdough starter—in his attempt to get a loaf that was perfect. It took three months—three months of recipe testing and not-quite-up-to-snuff breads—but finally, he got it right.

When he did, he was ecstatic. He was so pleased with his bread, in fact, that he decided to start selling it, as a business: Rein's Real Rye. He bought a 20-quart Hobart mixer and two mini fridges and started mixing up big batches every few days. The bread he developed was a wet bread—one of those no-knead breads that develops its gluten through moisture and time, rather than the stretching action of your hands—and so he mixes it in the afternoon, then leaves it overnight in the fridge.

In the morning, he pulls out the dough to cloak it (a process that involves sprinkling the surface of the dough with flour and stretching it and tightening it in order to give it a strong crust and hold the moisture in), slash the top of it (this helps the loaf expand in the oven), and finally, place it on a cornmeal-covered stone to bake. Then, while it bakes, he uses an expertly jury-rigged steaming system that involves ice cubes in cast iron pans and a hand pump spray system. This helps the loaves get good oven spring, that final rounding rise that takes place in the oven.

It's a lot of work for each loaf, but after thirty-five years without a good rye, Ciarfella thinks it's worth it.

You can find Rein's Real Rye at the Sandwich Winter Farmers' Market, Cotuit Fresh Market, and Amber Waves Natural Foods in Falmouth.

NO-KNEAD RYE BREAD

Ciarfella sent me the link to this recipe, which is the recipe I mentioned above that he started his quest with. Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure I did not make this recipe the way the author intended, but I do not care. It was WONDERFUL. The directions were somewhat confusing, but I think the original idea was to divide the dough up into four parts and bake one part per day over four days, keeping the other chunks in the fridge. I misunderstood that, though, and baked it all at once. It formed a massive country-style loaf, the kind you can buy at PB-Boulangerie & Bistro as a "Farmhouse Loaf," and it lasted us a week. It was fantastic.

3 cups lukewarm water
1 and 1/2 tablespoons yeast
1 and 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
1 and 1/2 tablespoons caraway seeds, plus more for sprinkling
1 cup rye flour
5 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
cornmeal for sprinkling

Mix together the water, yeast, salt, and caraway seeds in a large bowl. Let sit five minutes. Whisk together the flours and mix them in until completely combined. Cover the bowl with a wet dishtowel and set aside to rise at room temperature for two hours.

Sprinkle a baking sheet with cornmeal. Form the dough into a ball and dump it out onto a floured surface. Roll the surface of the ball in flour so that it is very well coated on all sides. Transfer the ball to the prepared baking sheet and let it rest, uncovered, for about 45 minutes.

In the meantime, preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Fill your oven's broiler tray with water and have it ready to place on the bottom shelf when it comes time to bake. Slash the top of your bread diagonally three or four times—making about 1-inch deep cuts—with a very sharp bread knife. Bake for roughly 30 minutes, refilling the steam tray as needed, until the crust is golden and sounds hollow when tapped.

My mother's standby

I'd like to talk about cornbread today. And I'm guessing, based on last night's showing between the Jets and the Patriots, that most of you would also like to talk about cornbread today. Or chili. Anything, really, besides that game. I try to be accommodating.

The cornbread in question is from the Moosewood Cookbook, and it's my mother's standby. She used to make it a lot when my sister and I were younger, I think because it was a way of getting something quick and healthy and homemade on the table, and she always baked it in an old scalloped cast iron pie plate. That was key, because it meant every slice—every wedge, that is, since it was a round pie plate—got a piece of the middle, right on the first bite. The middle was invariably the best part, the most moist, and if the cornbread hadn't been cut this way, I have a feeling there would have been a lot of hair pulling and pinching.

Anyway, I pulled the recipe out for the game last night. My mother annotated my copy of the Moosewood with all of her old notes—things like "Always simmer, never boil!" next to the Russian Cabbage Borscht recipe (the beets will lose their color, apparently)—but curiously, there's no note next to the cornbread. It's one of those recipes, she must have decided, that didn't need explanation or praising.


And really, she's right. It's simple—the secret, I think, is in the cup of buttermilk and the three tablespoons of honey and the quality of the cornmeal you use. Grinding down the dent corn from our grain CSA was still on my to-do list (isn't it gorgeous?!), so when I finally got around to it yesterday, our cornmeal was only minutes old for the bread.

And the bread came out beautifully. The color was a little different—it wasn't so yellow as I remember it, since our corn was also equal parts blue and red—but it had a kind of pale, wintery beauty. And most importantly, it tasted good. So good, in fact, that despite my square pan, it got us through the game—without any pinching, or hair pulling.

STANDBY CORNBREAD

What I like about this recipe is that I'm always almost certain to have all the ingredients on hand. It also takes only about 10 minutes from start to oven, and bakes in about twenty minutes, making it an ideal just-before-dinner recipe. I've made it with both all-purpose flour and whole wheat, and I like both in their own way.

butter to grease the pan
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup all-purpose or whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk, yogurt, or sour cream
1 egg
3 tablespoons honey
3 tablespoons melted butter

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease an 8" x 8" square pan or a 9" pie dish and set aside.

Whisk together the cornmeal, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the buttermilk (or whatever you choose), egg, honey, and butter. (I like to mix the honey into the butter first in order to help it dissolve. It also cools the butter down, which is nice for the egg.)

Fold the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the top starts to get golden around the edges and the center is firm to the touch. It's better to undercook this recipe than to overcook it; the bread tends to dry out when overdone.

I could lie

I could lie to you. I could tell you that we've been roasting Truro pork chops and using the bones to make big batches of broth for homemade Pho and lingering over fresh pumpkin muffins, or apple spice cake. But the truth is we have a leaky pipe and a flooded basement and no water, and since Saturday we've been relying on take-out and the generosity of friends.

Not that it's been bad, really. We had a nice lunch at Wellfleet Town Pizza on Saturday and our friend Gui grilled us prime rib from Northeast Family Farms that night, and we even contributed the box of just-picked Chinese cabbage you see up there, from the Mac's Shack garden. I could hardly believe the greens were still lingering, without any covering or attention.

Then yesterday we went over to Alex's brother's to sample cheeses from a new place called Robinson's Farm in Hardwick. The Robinsons started raising grass-fed cows in 2006, and this year, they just released a line of artisinal raw milk cheeses. Alex and Mac are thinking of selling them in the restaurants as part of a local cheese plate, and by the pound at the markets.

The Swiss was good with pickles and pepperoncinis, and a there was a buttery melting cheese that was top-notch over pan-fried potatoes. I'm hoping that Alex will pick up at least the melting one, so that I can make an all-local French onion soup.

In the meantime, of course, I'll take running water. When that happens, here's what's on my to-cook list:

1. this penne with garlic and kale
2. Stacey Glassman's squash with olive oil and garlic
3. cream of beet soup from James Peterson
4. buckwheat pancakes with the flour I ground down the other day from our grain CSA
5. deb's cranberry upside-down cake
6. more simple breakfasts like this
7. and maybe, just maybe, a batch of homemade pop tarts to use up our astounding supply of raspberry jam
   

Happy cooking, everyone.

For the new year

Hi! Happy New Year. I already said that, I know, the other day, but I mean it. And besides, saying it now, I hope, will make things feel a little less Monday.

It was nice, these past few weeks, to be on holiday. I went to Alex's family's, in Wellesley, and then up to my own parents' in Maine, and then came back home for champagne and singing and fireworks on New Year's Eve. We did a lot of cooking, and a lot of eating, and to balance all that out, a lot of walking and a very hard yoga video that my sister found on Netflix. I also got a new camera, a Canon Rebel XS with a EF 50mm f/1.8 lens. Eeek! Here it is saying hello, with a plate of the roasted butternut squash and farro salad we made yesterday.


You'll also find it over here, where it's part of a new project I'm starting for the new year. A digital camera means easier (way easier!) uploads, and I want to make the most of that. My mother and sister and I are always swapping recipes and cooking ideas via email, and for a while now, I've been brainstorming how to get that same sense of community and participation going online, here.

This Tumblr page has everything I've been looking for. I can post photos—big, plain, food photos with recipe links and local sourcing notes—and most importantly, you can too. You just have to scroll down to the bottom, click on submit, and upload a photo of whatever it is with local ingredients you've been cooking recently. You can add notes if you like—links to the recipe if it's online and a little something about where you found the ingredients, and then once I give the okay, it's up! I'm new to this, so we might have a few hiccups, but between all of us here I think we could bounce some pretty cool local food inspiration around.

I'll start. If you head on over, you'll see the farro salad picture up there along with notes about where the ingredients came from, and a link to the original recipe. I made a few changes—halved the farro and swapped out kalamata olives for toasted walnuts—but otherwise, the dish is pretty much the same.

So go ahead and check it out, and I can't wait to hear what you think. I'm not going anywhere, just to be clear—I'll still be here, but I'll also be there. I have a feeling it's just one of the good places 2011 is taking us. I hope to see you every step of the way—with more good food and good cheer.

Loud and clear

If today doesn't scream Kim Boyce's Chocolate Chip Cookies! to you, well, then, I don't know what to say. I heard it loud and clear when I woke up this morning, screeching in through the windows, up from my slippers, out from the pile of baking sheets and pattering in the rain.

Not that I believe anyone needs an excuse to bake chocolate chip cookies, mind you, but if we did, today would be the perfect day. I have about a million things on my to-do list—wash the whites, vacuum the car, weed the garden and plant the spinach for the winter and fall. But it's raining and whooshing and blowing outside; it's too wet for the laundry, for the vacuum cleaner to be hauled outside. It's too rainy for my seed packets, the weeds, too muddy and windy to bother mucking about in the yard.

And so instead, I am in Good to the Grain, spending the morning with Kim Boyce, page 41. I am reading about thick, chewy edges, nutty whole-wheat, high quality bittersweet chocolate and dough eaten straight from the bowl.

Soon it will be time to go to work—time for black pants and bobbypins and the rain jacket slung over the door—but for now it's just cold milk and cookie dough, and the oven to keep me warm.

WHOLE WHEAT CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

This recipe, from Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain, has become my go-to. It's about as healthy, straight-forward, and delicious as chocolate-chip cookies can get.

3 cups whole-wheat flour
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 and 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 pound cold butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
12 ounces bittersweet chocolate chips, such as Ghiradelli's 60% Cacao

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease two baking sheets, or line them with parchment paper.

Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a mixing bowl and whisk well.

Combine the butter and sugars in another mixing bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer. Beat until they are just blended, about 2 minutes. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then mix in the vanilla. Add the dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Add the chocolate and stir until just incorporated.

Form the dough into balls—I make mine a little bit larger than golf balls. Arrange the balls evenly on the baking sheets, leaving about 2-3 inches between each one. Bake for 15-18 minutes, or until the cookies are evenly dark golden brown. Transfer the cookies to a rack to cool, and repeat the process with any remaining dough.

Note: These cookies are best eaten within a day or two of baking. I like to make a big batch of dough, bake off about a third, and keep the rest in the refrigerator to bake over the next week or two. Of course, some of it usually gets devoured as is—without any heat at all.

Pay dirt

Julie from Brunswick, are you out there?

I hope so, because this post is for you. A while ago, when I told you about the grain CSA we joined this year and the New York-grown spelt that came as part of our share, you wanted to hear more. I promised you that I would look into it, and I know it took a while, but this week, I did. I looked right into the face of a spelt flour, olive oil, homegrown rosemary, and dark chocolate cake, and Julie—we hit pay dirt.

This particular cake comes from a book I've mentioned a few times around here, Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain. It isn't a book that I fell instantly in love with, but the more I've used it, the more I've liked it. And after this cake, I like it even more.

The cake comes from a whole chapter dedicated to spelt flour, because according to Boyce, spelt can be substituted for plain-old whole-wheat flour in just about anything. It does especially well in cakes and muffins, she says, because it has a sort of inherent sweet, cinnamony-ness that bakes into a fine, sturdy crumb and is good at complimenting spice. The spice for this cake—rosemary—might seem odd, but somehow, with the chocolate and the olive oil, it's just right.

The key is to use fresh rosemary and top quality dark chocolate. The first time I made this I used Baker's chocolate, semi-sweet, because it was the only thing we had on hand, and I regretted it with every bite. Semi-sweet turned out to be too sweet—it was 54% cacao—and Baker's turned to out to taste, in big chunks, just the slightest bit like chalk. The second time around I went with two bars of dark chocolate chunks from the Chocolate Sparrow and was much, much happier with that choice. We also put down a dying rosemary plant with the first go-round, and the second time, with sprigs from a fresh pot I planted for the deck, that flavor was much better, too. Last but not least I'd say don't use too strong of an olive oil—something subtle and slightly fruity, maybe, but definitely not the fresh, green kind with bite.

Beyond that, it's fairly hard to go wrong. Boyce said to bake the cake in a tart pan, but since I like nice, moist centers, I made it into a Bundt round instead. I also added a bit more milk than the recipe calls for—spelt cakes tend to be dry, and again, I like mine moist—and I was happy with that tweak, too.

So Julie, here you are: a whole-grain spelt cake and—maybe if we all cross our fingers at once—an afternoon to cozy up with a slice of it in the sun.

ROSEMARY, DARK CHOCOLATE, & SPELT CAKE

The thing that I love about this recipe—which, as explained in the post above, is adapted from Kim Boyce's Olive Oil Cake in Good to the Grain—is how easy it is. It's the type of thing you can whip up in minutes, without any beating or special steps or fuss. I made it the other night in the midst of dinner preparations, and it took only 10 minutes, from thought to oven.

3/4 cup spelt flour
1 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
1 cup olive oil*
1 scant cup whole milk
1 and 1/2 tablespoons fresh rosemary, finely chopped
10 ounces bittersweet chocolate (about 70% cacao), cut into irregular but roughly 1/2-inch pieces

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and grease a Bundt cake pan. In a large bowl, whisk together the flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs to break them up, then stir in the oil, milk, and rosemary, and mix well. Mix these wet ingredients gently into the flour mixture, stirring until just incorporated. Fold in the chocolate pieces, and pour the batter into the prepared Bundt cake pan. Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until the top turns golden brown and begins to crack and the center is still moist but cooked through.

*Note: To make this cake even more local, I thought about using butter instead of olive oil, but decided against it in the end. Substituting butter in recipes that call for oil tends to make things a bit drier—some people say this is because the butter solidifies at room temperature, whereas the oil remains liquid—and since spelt already has a tendency to dry things out, this didn't seem like a good idea. That said, however, I think it might be a risk worth taking. If you decide to experiment, just be sure to melt the butter so that you can mix it in rather than cream it.

Hang on

You might remember the fuss I made over our caterer in the months leading up to our wedding. I declared finding her almost as exciting as meeting my husband, not to mention almost as trying. And so in the same way that I decided when I met Alex not to let go, I also decided with Katy to hang on. And so these days, when my mom or I write each other about a new recipe we tried, or one we'd like to find, we email Katy, too. We're still talking about food, only now that we're done with silverware rentals and napkin colors, it's lot more fun.

What you see up there—that simple combination of steamed wheat berries, torn fresh basil, a little bit of spinach, shaved Parmesan, and a sprinkle of pine nuts—is one of the recipes Katy sent along. She made it for Easter, tossed with olive oil and balsamic and sprinkled with salt, and she told us about it afterward, in the emails we were sending back and forth about Meyer lemon tarts and hot cross buns. I finally got my hands on a bag of fresh basil at the winter farmers' market last week in Marstons Mills, and this afternoon, it was the first thing I made. (For the record, Alex and I took our first ocean swim at LeCount's yesterday, so although we are still shopping the winter market, I think we can officially welcome the arrival of spring. If the basil doesn't prove it, I don't know what does. Hip-hip, hooray!)

At any rate, the salad was perfect: tangy balsamic with fresh basil, toasted pine nuts and crumbling Parm, and an excellent way to go through a fair amount of wheat berries from our grain CSA. If you aren't too busy watching out for thunderstorms or planning a wedding or waiting on your own basil to get big, I highly recommend you head into the kitchen and give it a try.

Thanks, Katy, for everything.

DECONSTRUCTED PESTO AND WHEAT BERRY SALAD

Katy warns against making too much of this at a time; make what you can eat, she says, but not much more. Wheat berries don't store well—they tend to get sort of smelly after a couple of days—and the greens will sort of ooze into the dressing overnight. Which is really to say, dig in, and hurry up, before someone else gets the last bite. The first time I made this I added a bit of spinach in addition to the basil, but I think I like it best with the tastes strong and plain. Feel free to experiment a little bit though; I plan to try it with cherry tomatoes once they come into season, and I think kalamata olives would be a nice addition any day.

2 cups cooked wheat berries
2 tablespoons balsamic glaze
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 pound fresh basil, torn into bite-size pieces
2/3 cup toasted pine nuts
salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste
2 ounces Parmesan, shaved

In a large mixing bowl, toss together the wheat berries, balsamic, and olive oil. Add the torn basil and pine nuts, and toss gently to mix. Season with salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste, and as you serve each bowl, shave the Parmesan over top.

To the radishes, first of spring

Sometimes, I don't know quite what to do—with you. You are always the first to the markets; you show up all pink and fresh and new, beguiling in your white-pink-green candy-cane suits. I pick you up and bring you home—thrilled, delighted with my haul—and then, like a new parent (I imagine, that is), I look at you beaming and proud and in love, but a little bit bewildered, too.

I like you on toast, I know that—shaved and crisp, layered with baguette and cold ribbons of butter, flakes of sea salt. You are fine on salads, although I miss you sometimes caught up a in crouton-pickled-beet-crumbled-cheese bite. Still you are there, present, bright. And then the ideas end. Radishes? Thank goodness for the Internet.

I find you online, cut into matchsticks, tossed with vinegar and oil and chives and salt, served over a warm spring risotto of Pecorino and rice. I leave you in and change the Arborio out; barley, I've heard, can make just as creamy and rich a pot. The barley from our CSA is not quite right—hulled, not pearled—but with a strong and patient arm, it lets go eventually. I stir in cheese, herbs, lemon juice, and then it's your turn. I serve myself a bowl, and sprinkle you on top.

We sit down to the table: you fresh and pink and new, and me hungry, grateful, ready to spoon you up.

BARLEY RISOTTO WITH SPRING RADISHES

This recipe is the product of three inspirations. The radish dressing was inspired by a recipe for Romano Risotto with Radishes from Gourmet, September 2009. The most recent issue of Cook's Illustrated provided the method (Almost Hands Free Risotto), and the idea to substitute barley for Arborio rice came from a 2007 101 Cookbooks post on Meyer Lemon Risotto made with pearled barley. Since the barley from our grain CSA is only hulled, not pearled, I wasn't sure it would cream up the way it should, but I decided to try anyway. The result was a little more stirring than I'd bargained for, but well worth the work. If you use pearled barley, your barley should soften faster and you'll be able to cut down on the stirring time at the end.

The nice thing about this recipe is that although it does require some legwork at the beginning and end, it gives you a solid 30-minute break in the middle to get the kitchen all cleaned up and the table set. That way, when the risotto finally is ready, you can sit right down to eat.

for the barley risotto:
5 cups low-sodium chicken stock
1 and 1/2 cups water
4 tablespoons butter, divided
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups barley, hulled or pearled (see headnote)
1 cup dry white wine
1 cup coarsely grated Pecorino, Piave, or Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon lemon juice

for the dressed radishes:
1 pound trimmed radishes, cut into matchsticks
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 tablespoon finely chopped chives
optional: torn basil

Combine the stock and water in a large pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Cover and turn the heat down to a simmer.

Warm up half the butter in a large Dutch oven over medium heat. When it's melted, add the onion and salt. Sauté, stirring frequently, for 3-5 minutes, or until the onions are softened but not browned. Add the garlic and sauté, stirring constantly, for about 30 seconds, or until it starts to get fragrant. Pour in the barley and cook, stirring frequently, for 3 minutes.

Pour in the wine and cook, stirring constantly, until it is all absorbed. This should take about 3 minutes. Pour in 5 cups of the hot broth and water mixture and turn the heat down to medium-low. Cover, set your timer for 40 minutes, and—stirring every ten minutes or so—simmer until almost all the liquid has been absorbed and the barley is just al dente.

Add another 3/4 cup of the hot broth and water mixture and stir until almost all the liquid has been absorbed, about 10 minutes. The barley should be starting to get creamy. Add the remaining 3/4 cup liquid and cook, stirring constantly, for another 10 minutes, or until all the liquid is absorbed and the barley is cooked through and creamy. Turn off the heat, stir in the cheese, cover, and let sit for 5 minutes.

Stir in the remaining 2 tablespoons butter and the lemon juice, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve hot, with the dressed radishes on top.

Note: To reheat this risotto on the stove top, simply put it in a heavy-bottomed pot with a splash of milk or cream.

Dear Casey,

I don't know anyone who loves grape nuts the way you do.

I don't know anyone so faithful, so reverent, so unwavering in their support. There is no one so apt to drop what they're doing—a plate of scrambled eggs, steamy garlic spinach, a bowl of peppermint stick ice cream—for this humble food.

You love them, of course, in a particular way: with plain yogurt, a little bit of skim milk, chopped sweet apples, and a sprinkle of raisins on top. You like them for breakfast on the days when things are regimented—work, run, play. You like them after dinner, for dessert, milk and yogurt perfectly swirled to form a thin, silken cascade. You drop the cereal in at the last minute—splash!—so that it stays crisp. And those last few bites when you get to the bottom—when the milk and yogurt are almost gone, and all that's behind are a few grape-nuts-gone-mush—pooled, huddled in the center of the bowl—you appreciate that, too. You don't leave them behind, but rather, lift them up with the curve of your spoon.

I thought you should know that I made grape nuts today. (I know! It is hard even for me to believe.) But I found them in Kim Boyce's new book, Good to the Grain, and I thought that I should give them a whirl. I didn't have what they asked for—no graham flour, only half the buttermilk—but it turns out, they aren't a picky food. I ground down some Zorro winter wheat coarsely—graham flour is, after all, only an amalgamation of its parts—and cut the recipe in half. I sprinkled in cornmeal and brown sugar, baking soda and salt, a big wet bowl of buttermilk, vanilla, honey. I wasn't quite sure if it would all work out (grape nuts, after all, are your thing), but I fired up the oven and spread them, paddled them, across the pan anyway. The jam spreader made them smooth, and on the baking sheet in the oven they browned evenly, dark. I broke them up with a rolling pin, and what emerged was a cereal: deep mahogany, burnt sienna, cacao. I ate it for breakfast cold, with a pour of chilly milk, and sat down to write you the good news.

HOMEMADE GRAPE NUTS

adapted from the recipe for Graham Nuts in Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce (she, in turn, adapted her recipe from one in Cooking from Quilt Country, by Marcia Adams)

The flour in this recipe is a bit tricky. I made mine with our KitchenAid grain grinding attachment; I ground down whole grains of winter wheat first on the coarsest setting, then on a setting mid-way between coarse and very fine. If you do not have access to whole (literally un-ground) wheat grains or a grain grinder, you can substitute graham flour. Graham flour is made by grinding the endosperm and the bran and germ of wheat grains separately. The endosperm is ground finely, essentially into white flour, and the bran and germ are ground coarsely. The two parts are then mixed back together to form a flour with a nice coarse, flaky texture. (In contrast, whole wheat flour is made by grinding all three components together into a fine flour.) I was able to approximate this texture by only grinding my whole wheat "half way."

You can also make an approximate substitute for graham flour by mixing 2/3 cup all-purpose flour, a scant 1/3 cup wheat bran, and 1 and 1/2 teaspoons wheat germ for every cup of graham flour.

1 and 1/3 cup coarsely ground whole wheat kernels, graham flour, or graham flour equivalent
1/8 cup stone-ground cornmeal
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the "graham flour," cornmeal, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.

Pour the buttermilk into a smaller bowl and whisk in the honey and vanilla until smooth. Pour these wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix to form a batter.

Butter a cookie sheet. Spread the batter thinly across the pan, using a spreader or flat cake spatula to form a smooth, even sheet. (Any too thin or too thick patches will cook unevenly.) Bake for 20 minutes, turning the pan 180 degrees halfway through. Take the pan out of the oven and break off any pieces of cracker around the edges that look dark and dry. Set these pieces aside to cool, turn the oven down to 225 degrees F, and return the cookie sheet to the oven. Bake for another 30 to 40 minutes, checking on it every 10 or 15 minutes and continuing to break off any brown spots, until the cracker is a deep mahogany brown. It should also be very dry.

Break the cracker sheet into pieces, and set it on a wire wrack to cool. Lay out the cooled cracker pieces on your counter and roll over them several times with a rolling pin; crumble any large pieces that remain by hand. Store in an airtight container, and enjoy as cereal with cold milk.

The Local Food Report: Forbidden Fruit CSA

I don't know about you, but I am the sort of person who dreams about things like coming into a large inheritance of fresh carrots in late March. The mere thought of seeing a hairy, sweet little root plucked from the ground so early in the growing season makes me tingle with delight. Or leeks. I'd take those too. I can only hope one day I will be so lucky as to have the experience myself.

Because although it wasn't me that stumbled happily into this occasion, it is a true story. A few people did; people living in the Dartmouth area who subscribe to Forbidden Fruit Farm's CSA. Very smart people, I think.

I should probably back up. Carrots in late March and an abbreviation that sounds like some sort of top secret, under cover military mission is a lot to drop on you all at once. But CSAs are really very simple. The letters stand for Community Supported Agriculture, and the way they work is that a farmer (like Barbara Purdy at Forbidden Fruit Farm, for instance) offers to sell people shares of the season's harvest. The people pay up front—to help the farmer with the sometimes staggering cost of seeds, and labor, and soil inputs, and equipment that all come piled up at the start of the growing season when there's no income to balance them out—and then in exchange, once the crops start to come up, the members get a weekly pickup of whatever's ripe.

It's a very cool system, I think—not only for the farmer, who essentially gets a start-up loan each spring—but also for the families that participate. For one, they get exposed to a huge variety of new fruits and vegetables each week. (One woman who's a member of the Forbidden Fruit CSA, for instance, said she even got her husband to try celeriac this fall, an event she thought she'd never see.) And also, they get to know their farmer and the other families who participate very well, in a community sort of way. Purdy's CSA has work parties, where the members get together to do things like dig potatoes and make pesto for the freezer, with kids running around helter-skelter with the chickens and adults chatting away, everyone chopping basil while they swap recipes and advice.

It's also affordable. Per week, a full supply of fruits and veggies for a family of four at Forbidden Fruit Farm comes to only $35—an amount that one member observed you could quite easily spend on lettuce at a store like Whole Foods. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a pretty good deal for local, organic produce to me.

Most CSA's only run from about June to September, or maybe October around here. But Purdy's goes almost year round. Pick-ups start in April (this month!) with things like wintered over carrots and leeks and spinach and other hardy greens, and then go full on through the fall, right up through New Year's Day. She even arranges special pick-ups for Thanksgiving and Christmas, so that if you have a whole flock of relatives coming into town, you can stock up on veggies for them, too. Here's what was going on in her greenhouse in mid March:


For some people, the idea of getting a basket every week and having no idea what might be inside could be a bit nervewracking, but I think it sounds like fun. You never know what sorts of new friends you might make with a system like that—human and edible alike.

There are quite a few new CSAs around here—with all sorts of options offering everything from adding in herbs, which makes for a CSA-W, or Wellness CSA, to getting your pick-up basket delivered to your local farmers' market each week. You can put in your area code and find the one closest to you here, if you're interested in signing up.

As for those carrots—if you're wondering what those lucky CSA-ers did with the little delights—well, from what I heard, they cooked them up using a recipe from Cary Isaacs. He's the member with the biggest cranial recipe collection, I gather, and the recipe he offers below—for sesame carrot pasta salad—is very good. I can vouch for it, as you might have gathered from the photo way up above. We made it a few nights ago and ate the whole thing in a mere 24 hours with only two of us to pitch in. With more than two at the table, I highly doubt it would ever make it off the table and into the fridge.


SESAME PASTA SALAD

adapted from a recipe by Cary Isaacs of Forbidden Fruit CSA in Dartmouth

I misread this recipe the first time I tried it and turned Isaacs'original creation—a soup—into a pasta salad. I liked the results so much I decided to stick with it, but you could easily revert to the original by simply simmering the first four ingredients—the core of the dressing—with 2 or 3 cups of chicken broth, and then serving the veggies and noodles with the hot broth in a soup bowl.

I also tried a variation using more ginger and a few spoonfuls of peanut butter to make a creamier, zingier dressing, which I loved. If you try that, I recommend ommitting the mushrooms—they don't go well with the nutty taste.

1/4 cup minced ginger
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup chives, thinly sliced
3 cups shredded carrots
1 cup storage cabbage, thinly sliced
a handful of dried shiitake mushrooms, rehydrated and thinly sliced
1/2 pound pasta, cooked (soba noodles, spaghetti, or any other thin pasta—homemade included!—will work)
sesame oil to taste
salt and pepper to taste

Combine the first 5 ingredients in a small mixing bowl and stir together to make a dressing. In a large mixing bowl, toss together the carrots, cabbage, mushrooms, and pasta, and pour as much as you need of the dressing over top. (There may be some extra.) Coat with sesame oil and a pinch of salt and pepper. Taste for seasoning and adjust as needed.