The Local Food Report: two pickle recipes

Cucumbers, I used to think, were long and round and green. Then I met the Lemon Cucumber, and the Boothby Blonde, and the Miniature White, and all that changed.

That up there is a Lemon Cucumber, picked from our garden the other day. It looks nothing like a traditional cucumber—what with its roly-poly shape and citrus color and mottled, spiny back. But inside, it is all crunch and gush and seeds. It doesn't have quite so much of the chemical compounds—cucurbitacins—that make some cucumbers bitter and some people prone to burps, which is part of what makes it so unusual, and why people like it so much. It's best for eating fresh and slicing into salads, and if you're into cold soups, it hollows out as a serving vessel quite nicely.

I've been talking with farmers all over the Cape about what varieties of cucumbers they're growing this summer, and the Lemon is just one. There are all sorts of other unusual varieties—the Miniature White I mentioned above, which is good for slicing and excellent for bread and butter pickles, and the Boothby Blonde, an heirloom from Livermore, Maine. Gretel Norgeot is growing Sour Mexican Gherkins for the second year in a row, Ron Backer has a wild, curvy Asian variety called Suyo Long, and of course, a lot of people are growing regular old English cucumbers and Marketmores.

My favorite varieties, though, are the ones that lend themselves to pickling. I lean toward bread and butter pickles, at least I have since I met my husband. I used to be more of a Claussen Kosher Dill girl, but then I tasted a jar of pickles made from the recipe Alex's grandfather got from a friend, copied down decades ago from an inn in Maine. The pickles are thin, and sweet, and tangy, and absolutely perfect piled into a grilled cheese or alongside meat.


But, for those of you who do lean dill—even garlicy dill—I recruited another tried and true recipe today. It's from my producer, Jay, who is a bit of a pickle fanatic. He makes these pickles almost entirely out of his garden, and while they're very different from the bread and butters I make, they are good.

So here you are—two pickle recipes—for whatever kind of cucumbers you might find.

BRAD'S FAMOUS BREAD 'N BUTTER PICKLES

This recipe was passed down to us by Alex's grandfather, Martin Luther Bradford. He got it from a friend, who in turn copied it down from an innkeeper in Maine. The key is to slice the cucumbers and the onions very thinly—Alex's grandfather used the Cusinart slicing attachment; I like to use a mandolin. It makes 6-8 pints.

16 medium cucumbers, very thinly sliced
6 onions, very thinly sliced
1 green pepper, diced (optional)
1 red pepper, diced (optional)
1/3 cup pickling salt
2 trays ice cubes
5 cups granulated sugar
3 cups white vinegar
1 and 1/2 tablespoons celery seed
1 and 1/2 teaspoons turmeric
2 tablespoons mustard seed

Combine the cucumbers, onions, peppers (if using), and salt in a large bowl. Mix well, then crack the ice cubes over top. Let sit for 3 hours, then drain.

Combine the sugar, vinegar, celery seed, turmeric, and mustard seed in a large, non-reactive pot. Add the cucumbers and bring to a rolling boil. Spoon into sterile jars and seal.


BRINY GARLIC DILL PICKLES

This recipe, which comes from Jay Allison, is based on a Mark Bittman recipe. On a good year, Jay is able to get almost all the ingredients from his garden, and he says this year has been especially good for dill. In my opinion the spears are best cold, straight from the fridge, alongside a sandwich.

1/3 cup kosher salt
1 cup hot water
2 pounds pickling cucumbers
6-12 cloves fresh crushed garlic, to taste
1/2 bunch dill
1 jalapeño, without seeds (optional)
cold water

Dissolve the salt in the hot water, then put the mixture in the freezer to cool. Pour this cold salt water into a large bowl or storage container. Quarter the cucumbers into spears (you may even want to cut them into eighths if they're especially large) and layer them into the bowl with the garlic, dill, and jalapeño, if using. Add cold water as needed to just cover the layers.

Cover the bowl and leave it out at room temperature for about 4 hours, longer if you like your pickles stronger (read: more garlicy). Then refrigerate; they last for about a week in the brine.

The Local Food Report: the proof is in

Would you like to see something beautiful?

That is a salad I made on Saturday, January 23rd entirely from Massachusetts foods. The green curls are pea tendrils, from Allen Farms in Westport. The maroon slivers and chunks are pickled beets and onions leftover from a big batch our friend Tracy made for our wedding at the end of October, with veggies from her very own garden. She made the pickled carrots, too. The white blobs, believe it or not, are actually not marshmallows, but little Hannahbells. Oh! and I saved the best for last. Those little golden things? Real, live greenhouse-grown pear tomatoes. Debbie Barrett is very proud of those.

If anyone tells you it's impossible to eat locally in New England in the middle of January because you're going to contract scurvy or starve to death or accidentally stab your neighbor for his Florida orange, well, the proof is in the pudding, people. Or the salad. Or whatever. The point is, that rainbow dish up there should get them to pipe down.

Also, our area now officially has two—TWO!—winter farmers' markets. One in Marstons Mills slated to start next Saturday, February 6th at 10am sharp, and another already underway on the third Thursday of every month from 3:30 to 6pm at Plimoth Plantation. When I first heard about both of these, I did a little dance in my seat. The best part it, the Plimoth one even has an online ordering shop so that if you're going to drive all that way, you can make sure you get what you want.

When I first heard about the online store, I was actually a little bit wary to tell you the truth. I was at the annual Cape Cod Buy Fresh Buy Local meeting, sitting in the back drinking my friend Jessie's homemade cranberry syrup-seltzer infusion and trying not to make too much noise eating smoked bluefish, and these two very smart looking women from Plymouth pulled a computer and a laser pointer out. While they talked about the software, and how the farmers submitted what they had, and then got a report back after the customers had ordered about what to bring, I realized that the whole idea made me just the slightest bit nervous. The thing I like about farmers' markets, after all, is that they are by definition very low tech, and rather than involving computers and telephones and wireless internet and e-trading, they involve people and wicker baskets and carrots and dirt. I had this flash-forward nightmare vision of the local food movement going the way of Big Organics, and for a second my mouth got so dry I had to push away my plate.

I thought about their presentation a lot over the next few weeks.

Eventually, I decided that the only way to get over it would be to call them up and see if they might want to talk. And so I did—I got in touch with Barbara Anglin, the market organizer, and Sasha Purpura, one of the farmers—and last week I ended up walking around with my recording gear and my camera and a big bag of fresh carrots and Chinese cabbage and homemade granola in the Plimoth Plantation parking lot. Then I went inside, and the more we talked, the more I was convinced that online ordering was a good idea after all. Here's how they got me convinced.

For starters, they said that their main goal with the online store is to give more people better access to local food. That isn't really a mission statement I can argue with. Secondly, they pointed out that there are a lot of working parents—mostly mothers, so far as they've noticed, but fathers too—who work during market hours, and therefore can never, ever make it there to do the household shop for the week. Even if they have the money and are into it and are willing to pay the price, they either can't get there at all or get there so late that the eggs and the greens and the grapes and all the good stuff have completely disappeared. Also, Barbara and Sasha argued that the online store has the potential to eventually expand what the market has to offer, because Barbara gives all of the farmers a print out every week showing them who put what up and which items sold like hot potatoes and which ones didn't. The vendors will start to see holes or overlaps, Barbara very reasonably predicted, and then they'll start ramping up new varieties and scaling back in places where there's too much overlap. Ultimately, that could lead to a lot of new foods on our plates.


But the most convincing reason they offered is this: Even though the store is geared toward busy, working parents, and even though they estimate that ninety percent of the people using it are busy, working parents, after these busy people pick up their boxes, they still stick around to shop. They wander through the stalls, and say hello to the farmers they ordered from, and usually buy a few other things. In other words, it's the guarantee they're looking for, not a whole different experience. They have time to say hello, but not to arrive ready for a week's shop and find out nothing's there. That's a wonderfully reassuring thing.

As it turns out, a lot of other people think the online store is a good idea, too. There are a few other places using the exact same program, which was put together originally by a market in Plymouth New Hampshire. The New Hampshire folks were the first people to do it, back in 2006, when the Plymouth Area Renewable Energy Initiative decided to brainstorm ways to get people to buy more local food. The thought was that this, in turn, would decrease these households' overall energy use—and a group of local farmers suggested an online marketplace. That's how the first Local Foods Plymouth was born. Right now, there are about six or seven markets in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, including the one in our Plymouth, using the software. There's also a different online ordering model—Massachusetts Local—at work in the western part of the state.

It's hard to say whether or not the idea will catch on out here. But based on how well it's doing up north, if I were you I'd take a peek.

The Local Food Report: where we're headed

Do you remember my friend Drew from last week? The one who wants to raise organic, grass-fed chickens in Truro and sell broilers for meat and use the layers for eggs? Well, today I'd like to introduce you to the man who inspired him.

His name is Joel Salatin and in the farming world, he's kind of a big deal. He's the farmer who Michael Pollan profiled in his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, for the chapter about pastured meat, and also the farmer who refused to ship a broiler from where he raised it in the Shenendoah Valley of Virginia to where Pollan lived in Berkeley, California. Pollan wanted to taste the chicken for his book, and Salatin explained that the author was welcome to do so anywhere within a four hour radius of Polyface Farm. Salatin feels very strongly about selling the food he raises only within his local foodshed.

Actually, come to think of it, Salatin feels pretty strongly about most things. He thinks that we're awfully arrogant to think that we can treat the earth the way we do, and to think that it won't have any consequences down the road. There's an old Chinese proverb he likes to quote, something along the lines of if we don't change our direction, we're likely to end up where we're headed. It's as close as he'll come to prophesizing a collapse.

When I met him this fall at Cape Cod Community College, he talked mostly about this arrogance, and the problems he thinks it's caused. He thinks that trying to shortcut nature, particularly when it comes to what we farm and in turn what we eat, is the cause of a lot of our current health problems. He looks at the industrial food system, and the way it has manipulated things like potatoes and corn into chips and soft drinks, and sees a fairly direct link to type two diabetes and obesity. And he looks at recent outbreaks of e. coli and listeria and bovine spongiform encephalopathy and sees a fairly direct link between them and the way we let animals stand around in their own feces eating corn they aren't meant to digest on factory farms. He also sees a connection between our environmental worries—climate change and flooding and drought and all sorts of wacky weather patterns—and the fact that we now use 15 calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food. Food should be a net producer of calories, he says, not a net consumer. Finally, he takes a look at our landscapes and sees a link between suburban sprawl and the Peruvian apples on our tables. If we valued locally grown food, he says, there would be an economic incentive to preserve open space.

It all makes a good amount of sense, I think.

But his best point—and the one he uses to try and tip real skeptics over the edge—is that even if we have decided that we're okay with sucking up oil and getting a bad case of salmonella every once in a while, from a community standpoint, we still aren't safe. The idea of a global foodshed—one in which to feed itself our little town of Wellfleet has to rely on imports from five or ten or fifteen other countries, instead of just Barnstable county or maybe Massachusetts or even New England—isn't safe. What if there's a war, or maybe a transportation glitch? Suddenly, we have nothing to eat.

It's pretty scary, if you think about it. It makes me admire people like Salatin and Drew even more, people who are doing what they can—inspiring or learning or coming up with business plans—to try and change the way things work. I read this quote the other day, from Tolstoy. Everyone thinks of changing the world, he said, but no one thinks of changing himself. It's a good point, and a good reminder that sometimes, it's the small actions that count. Sometimes, even, when the pickled beets are homemade from your garden and the eggs come from down the street, actions as small as making up a plate of beet-pickled deviled eggs can make a difference.


BEET-PICKLED DEVILED EGGS

adapted from this recipe published in Gourmet, November 2009

If you don't have any pickled beets on hand, check out the original recipe (through that link up above). It gives a step by step for making the pickling juice. If you do have pickled beets on hand, though, the beets make an excellent double appetizer with the eggs.


12 eggs, hard-boiled and peeled
pickling juice from 1 quart pickled beets
1/3 cup mayonnaise, preferably homemade
1 tablespoon sweet, whole-grained mustard like Raye's Fall Harvest blend
2 scallions, minced (roughly 2 tablespoons)
1 teaspoon white pepper
salt to taste

Find a bowl or container that has a cover and will hold all 12 hard-boiled eggs. Put the eggs in the container, pour the pickling juice over top, and put the eggs in the refrigerator to chill for at least two hours. If the pickling juice doesn't quite cover the eggs, spin them every once in a while so that they turn a deep pink color all over.

Pull the container of eggs out of the fridge and pat them dry on a paper towel or old dishcloth. Cut the eggs in half lengthwise and, using a spoon and taking care not to rip the whites, scoop the yolks out into a small mixing bowl. Arrange the whites on a serving platter, face up. Beat the mayonnaise, mustard, scallions, and pepper into the egg yolks, and season with salt to taste. Using either a spoon or a cake piping kit, fill the wholes of the whites with the yolk mixture. Serve chilled.

Since day one

This summer, my sister's boyfriend invited her to go work, for one week, at his summer camp. He'd gone every year since he could remember, first as a camper and now as a counselor, and it was a very important place, he said. She agreed, sent in the necessary paperwork, and the plan was set.

As summer wore on and the August week got closer, he started to tell her little things about what to expect. She would be leading a trip, he said, overnight, and she should bring two sleeping bags to camp in case the one on the trip got wet. She would have a cabin with campers, and every day would be so choc-a-bloc full it would just zoom by, and she would be very tired at the end, so it might be a good idea to get a day or two off afterward.

Oh, and she should be ready to let her freak flag fly.

That's right. When she called me to tell me this, we decided on the spot that this was without a doubt the most brilliant phrase of all times. It might explain things to tell you that, as a family, I am fairly sure we have been letting our freak flag fly since day one. (Maybe even before, since on the day my father met my mother, which I believe, in the life of a family, is technically the start, he was wearing an outfit composed of a maroon corduroy shirt, purple corduroy pants, leather cowboy boots, and a red bandanna. They hadn't even had their first kiss, and already things were showing some dangerous potential.)

At any rate, the expression stuck. And apparently, word has gotten out that the Pierson girls are not afraid of a little weirdness, particularly when it comes to strange vegetables, because every time I've been to the farmers' market recently, someone has called me over to point one out. This week, it was these:


For size reference, in case you can't tell from the picture up there, those little vegetable halves are about the size of your thumb. When I first saw them, I thought maybe they were watermelons that had been put through a version of Honey I Shrunk the Kids, but as it turns out, they're cucumbers. Tiny, watermelon-shaped and watermelon-looking cucumbers, Mexican Gherkin cucumbers that for the most part taste like any other cucumbers, but on the outside are very, very crisp. Inside, they sort of lack the translucent body bulk, and instead are mostly rind and seeds and a little bit of juice. In short, they are the most readily pickle-able cucumbers of all times.

Unfortunately, I picked the wrong recipe the first time around and botched an entire batch. For the record, these are not dill pickle cucumbers—these are meant to be sweet pickles, bread and butter style.

I didn't realize that. I put them in a salt water brine, left them overnight to crisp in the fridge, and returned to find them far, far too salty for my taste. I tried to wash them, to counteract the mistake, but the deed was already done. The next time around, I followed a recipe passed down from my grandmother-in-law-to-be (!), and things turned out much more splendidly. On Saturday, bright and early, I will be lined up at Gretel Norgeot's stand at the Orleans Farmers' Market for more. Maybe, just maybe, I'll see you there.

BRAD'S BREAD AND BUTTER PICKLES

The original of this recipe calls for English cucumbers and white onions, but for these sweet little Gherkins, I tweaked it a bit. The miniature cucumbers pickle best cut in half the long way (otherwise, when they hit the hot water bath, they shrivel), but I'm willing to bet that if you left them whole and poked a few holes in them that might do the trick as well. Also, I used shallots instead of onions, both for their color and because you can use fewer bulbs to achieve the same strength of flavor, which after cutting all those tiny Gherkins in half is awfully nice.

Makes 6 to 8 pint jars

6 to 8 pounds, or roughly one gallon, Mexican Gherkins, cleaned and halved
4 shallots, thinly sliced
1/3 cup pickling salt
two trays ice cubes
5 cups granulated sugar
3 cups white vinegar
1 and 1/2 tablespoons celery seed
1 and 1/2 teaspoons turmeric
2 tablespoons mustard seed

In a large bowl, toss the Gherkins and the shallots with the pickling salt and crack the two trays of ice cubes over top. Let this sit out on the counter for three hours, and then drain off the water.

In a large, non-reactive pot, mix the sugar, vinegar, and spices with the drained cucumbers and shallots. Bring the mixture to a rolling boil, and turn the heat down to a simmer. While the liquid is kept hot, pack the vegetables into the hot pint jars to about 1/2 inch below the lips. Pour the hot liquid over top and wipe the rims of the jars with a cloth dipped in boiling water to make sure they're clean. Seal with sterilized lids and screw tight. Return the jars to a boiling water bath for 15 minutes, and leave them on a dishcloth upside down overnight. In the morning, check the seals, label, and store in a cool, dark place for up to a year.

Hostess for a day

Have you ever wished you could be a professional, full-time, home-dinner-party-hostess, just for a month or two? That each morning involved waking up, taking stock of your refrigerator and pantry, and planning a menu, a guest list, and decor?

There would be chores involved, certainly. Silver gets tarnished, flowers need refreshing, and dusting when you live in a home with a woodstove seems like the never-ending song of tasks. And of course if being a hostess was the only thing to think about, ever, I suppose you might eventually get bored. But I think it would take me a very, very long time. Because home dinner parties are really my absolute favorite thing.

For starters, there's the fact that you get to spend the morning pouring over cookbooks. You get to pull out a butternut squash, or a container of frozen rhubarb, or a pork shoulder and wonder, what on earth will I do with this? That, in my opinion, is the best part, because no matter what you have, there is always an excellent menu to be made. It simply takes a bit of imagination, and lots of time with those books. Which are some of my favorite inanimate objects to spend a day with. They're more fun than some people and can be awfully talkative, I find.


Then there's the cooking, and the whirlwind of friends and hugs and babies and drinks, and the sitting down to a meal you are offering up to feed the people you love. I really like that part, the food. But the part where I'm afraid I start to sound a bit crazy is right now, when I announce that I like dinner parties so much that I don't even really mind cleaning up. In fact, truth be told, I kind of like the routine. There are always a few women in the kitchen, and between the washing and the drying and the gossiping and the sense of tidiness that ensues, there's something awfully satisfying about that time, too.

I have no idea whether or not this weekend will offer that chance. But if it does, I know exactly what I'll make. Here's an early March menu, in case you find yourself in the lucky seat of host or hostess for a day. You might have to make a trip to the library, of course, but that's the whole fun.

— cocktail hour —

The Old Fashioned, to show off bourbon's charms
from The Essential Cocktail by Dale DeGroff and featured in Gourmet, March 2009

Cracker stacks with Brad's Bread and Butter Pickles and Great Hill Blue Cheese

— dinner —

Butternut Squash in Cream and Cinnamon
from The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, by Judith Jones

Cod baked in foil with leeks and carrots
from Cook's Illustrated, March & April 2009

— dessert —

Tinky's Cozy Apple-Maple Pudding
from Yankee, March/April 2009