The Local Food Report: community kitchens

Jennifer Joslin didn't plan on starting a pasta sauce business. She had three kids, picky kids, and the two things they really liked were pasta and pizza. She figured the easiest way to get carrots and green beans and cabbage into them was to sneak it into their tomato sauce, and so she did.

Then it hit her: Eat Your Vegetables! Maybe, just maybe, she could support her family and help other parents put a healthy meal on the table by turning this pasta sauce into a business. The thing was, she didn't have the money to buy equipment and build a certified kitchen. Building a kitchen is expensive, hugely expensive, and she wasn't even sure yet if this idea was going to work. Then she found out about the Dartmouth Grange.

The story behind grange is this: a few years ago, a group of Dartmouth residents noticed that their grange, their historic community hall, was sitting largely unused. They wanted to change that. They also wanted to help Dartmouth stay rural, but still boost agricultural and economic development. So they raised money to put a 2,000 square foot addition on the historic hall, complete with a steam kettle, braising pan, stovetop range, several ovens, and a filling machine—in short, a complete clean, certified, licensed kitchen space. Then they established a rate—the kitchen costs about $33 per hour to rent—and opened the doors to the public.

For Jennifer, it was the perfect place. She could start her pasta sauce company with very, very little overhead, and even less of an investment risk. All she was really buying besides the time was the vegetables and the glass jars, and hey! if the company never took off, she and her family could eat that commercially-certified shelf-stable sauce for for years.

But the company did take off. Within a few months, Jennifer had her sauce in two markets, and after a year, she now sells it in sixteen. (And one of those is a Whole Foods!) Parents liked that it had six vegetables (tomatoes, carrots, garlic, green beans, eggplant, and red cabbage) and that two of them were often from local farms (the carrots and the eggplants) and that it was appealing to their kids.

Recently Jennifer moved to another shared use kitchen—a community kitchen with a bigger steam kettle at How on Earth in Mattapoisett—so that she could make larger batches. Hers is a story of community kitchen success.

She's met lots of other people who got their businesses off the ground in community kitchens, too. There are granola makers, pickles, jammers, and all sorts of folks, all producing small-scale, local, artisanal products in these two kitchens. It's pretty cool.

You can find out more about Jennifer's pasta sauce, Eat Your Vegetables!, over here. For a link to the Dartmouth Grange kitchen head on over here, and you can learn more about the shared used kitchen at How on Earth in Mattapoisett over here.

Happy dreaming, everyone.

Something solid and normal

I have been trying not to tell you anything about the wedding this week. I have been trying to put it on a shelf, to sit down squarely, and to write you about something solid and normal, like butternut squash or apple pie or turkey soup. I have daydreamed stories about scalloped potatoes and cranberry crisp and basil-tomato-mozzarella sandwiches, but the trouble is, I haven't been making any of those things. I have been planning and thinking about and going over the wedding again and again—with my mother, with Alex, and with his mother, too.

This weekend was especially taken up by It That Shall Not Be Named. Alex and I went up to Wellesley, where he grew up, for a shower thrown by his mother's friend. My mother came down and my sister and her boyfriend, too, and we got all gussied up in black dresses and blue button downs and orange ties and brown boots and ate a whole heap of good food, including quite a few of Judy Harrington's famous grape jelly meatballs. (It sounds strange, I know, but I swear you have never tasted anything like those things.) And after the wine and the high heels and the hugs and the trash bags of wrapping paper, when all was said and done, we drove home with a ridiculous pile of loot.

We felt sort of like bank robbers on the car ride home, worried about getting out for a sandwich or a bottle of fizzy water or a pit stop lest we return to a rubble of missing dinner plates and broken glass, but we made it back unscathed. And when we did, we realized that no one had warned us about the next part. We realized that we had a rather full house and some very important decisions to make over the next few months about what stays and what goes, and then we took a vote about what to do. My vote was to unpack the car into the guestroom, to pile up the boxes and shut the door and lock it and throw away the key and come back after the whole wedding hoopla is over and do the opening all over again (it would be like Christmas! twice!), but Alex informed me that this was not how things would go. We would unpack the car now, and we would unpack it for real. Meaning that there would be all sorts of unpleasant things involved like cleaning out closets, going through clothes, and throwing backpacks from elementary school away. It seemed like a good way to make a mess of an otherwise perfectly wonderful weekend, but the man was determined.

Luckily for everyone's sanity, we unpacked the dinner plates first. They are Gien, from France, and they make plain, un-buttered toast look like a meal for Cherie Blair. I pulled out a batch a pesto from the freezer, and we made a pot of pasta before the big clean. There were still spiders in the entryway closet and packing peanuts all over the floor, but the plates—our first meal on our very own handpicked china—made it all much more okay. In fact, it made it rather splendid.

I have a feeling that from now on, between the wedding and the husband and the perfectly creamy plates, dinner will make me feel that way every single day.

BASIL PESTO

This pesto, adapted from The New Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen, is the one I grew up with, and is one of my all-time favorite sauces. My mother used to make huge batches in the summer to freeze so that we could have homemade pesto all winter long. As a toddler, my sister was famous for finishing her pesto, then promptly placing her oily, green-flecked bowl on her head. She was also famous for going on strike from bathing, but luckily, the two phases didn't overlap much.

3 cups fresh basil leaves, packed
3 large cloves garlic
1/3 cup pine nuts
1/3 cup olive oil
1/3 cup grated parmesan
salt and pepper to taste

Combine everything in a food processor and give it a whirl. Keep going until the pesto is thick and well-blended. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

It's time

Life is not always so kind as to give you lemons. Sometimes, it gives you onions instead.


And in March, it gives you the onions you yourself tucked away in late October. It gives you the onions hanging in your downstairs closet in bulging nylon stockings, tucked away from warmth and light. It gives you the ones beginning to sprout unsightly green wigs and soften around the belly a bit.

That's when it's time to make onion relish. Even if you wish you were out on the porch sipping lemonade; I'm sorry, but it's simply not the season for that.

Truly, onion relish can be just as good. It's more of an indoor comfort, to be sure, but spread over hot sourdough toast, or on plain old whole-wheat with a hunk of cheddar melted over top, it is simply divine. Especially on a cold day, when the sky is spitting terrible, icy chunks and is colored a stern, foreboding gray. That is just the sort of afternoon for an onion relish melt.

I found the recipe I use in Cooking Light, and after tweaking it a bit to add back in some of the fat (it's never a good idea to lose too much butter, in my opinion), I found it quite perfect for a day like today. So go unravel your onions, and enjoy.

SWEET ONION RELISH

adapted from Cooking Light magazine, December 2008

Feel free to cut the butter back down to 1 tablespoon, as recommended in Cooking Light. I know a 3 tablespoon increase might seem like a lot, but most recipes for braised onions (which are different in application but similar in cooking concept to this spread) call for close to a stick. So really, a few extra tablespoons is pretty moderate. Plus, think of how much butter you'd put on that bread if there was no relish to spread.

4 tablespoons butter
4 cups sweet storage onions, chopped
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup chicken stock
1 tablespoon brown sugar, honey, or maple syrup
salt
freshly ground black pepper

In a large skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion, and cook it, stirring often, until it is first translucent and then golden brown. Add remaining ingredients, including salt and pepper to taste (keeping in mind that the liquid will evaporate, concentrating the salt, and that chicken broth is salty to begin with), and stir well. Let the mixture simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 15 minutes or until it begins to thicken and all the liquid is gone. When it is nice and spreadable (think toast), it's done.

Fat jar tomato sauce

Heaven might just lie in a vat of simmering tomato sauce. Late yesterday afternoon, beneath shuddering clouds and the hazy clap of thunder, I watched the sky light up my heavy bottomed pot.

Thick, red fruit bubbled up in the flash, and the smell of rich red wine and frying fat rose up from the stove. Onion and salt, rosemary and thyme wafted into the rafters, and the storm began to quell.

By the time the rain had stopped, the sauce reached a slow, lilting simmer. The earth began to let go outside, sucking up the rain puddles and dew drops and breathing against the stark silence of the passing storm.

As the sounds of the yard began, slowly at first and then chirping and humming and swaying in earnest, again the sauce roared up. The pot burped and spat as red juice reduced to a thick, rich sauce.

The secret was in the fat jar from the freezer. Layer upon layer of drippings from bacon and salt pork, pink, juicy burgers, pork tenderloin and duck breast lay piled up, chilled stiff, in a Clausen pickle jar in the freezer door. I used it for frying, sometimes, for greasy spoon dishes like omelettes or grilled cheese. I'd snuck it into waffles once before, and even cornbread. It had never, ever, let me down. Bacon, as they say, is good with everything.

So in place of the olive oil requested by most recipes, I picked up a fork and began to pry away the top layer from the fat jar. I dropped it into the pan—hot!—and watched it leap and sizzle in anticipation of the onions. Finally they joined and then came the tomatoes and wine, dying the pot a thick, deep red. Rosemary topped it off with a dash of green.

This morning, lacking pasta, I ate a bowl plain and fast, cupping the spoon to my mouth in hungry anticipation. Not your average breakfast, to be sure, but delicious nonetheless.

FAT JAR TOMATO SAUCE

Serves 6-8

Drop 5 tablespoons fat drippings into a hot pan. Add 1 cup of chopped white onions, and sauté until translucent. Add 6 cups chopped tomatoes. Add 1/2 to 3/4 cup red wine, and bring to a boil. Turn to low and simmer until reduced by a third. Season with 1/3 cup fresh herbs (rosemary, thyme, oregano, or basil) and salt and pepper to taste. Serve generously over fresh pasta.

Crushed tomatoes

Saturday morning, sweat beaded down my temples as I moved from garden to sink, sink to stove, and stove to compost. The tomatoes sat naked on the kitchen counter, stripped of their taut, rosy skins and perfectly unblemished in their translucence. It was canning day, and the kitchen was hot.

The tomatoes I'd been collecting all week. Some had ripened on the vines of our yellowing garden plants, others on the tables of the farmers market, and the rest on the windowsill of a friend. They had been prepared, each carefully washed and dried and set out alongside the cutting board by the stove to await a momentary plunge into the pot of rolling water.

Now skinned, they faced another pot. A sixth of the diaphanous globes dropped into a heavy bottomed Dutch oven, crushed by the force of a grinding arm and the weight of a broad black masher. They exuded juice and pulp, seeds floating atop a lake of viscous red. Their companions joined them one by one, falling in quarters into the pot and slowly softening to its contours. A thick tomato steam began to rise, and the time came to say goodbye.

The crushed fruits poured easily into glass jars. Made tart by a spoonful of lemon juice and flavorful with a pinch of salt, the tomatoes returned to the boiling water for a final bath before settling in to await the pot again. Next time, perhaps, as part of a batch of Portuguese kale, or winter minestrone.

CRUSHED CANNED TOMATOES

Yields approximately one quart per 2 pounds of tomatoes

Skin, core, and quarter tomatoes (any quantity). Add 1/6 of pieces to a large, heavy bottomed pot and crush well to release juices. Heat quickly, gradually adding the rest of the tomatoes. For each quart, add a tablespoon of sugar. Boil gently 5 minutes.

Pack immediately into sterile quart jars, adding 2 tablespoons bottled lemon juice (to assure sufficient acidity) and 1 teaspoon salt to each jar before adding hot fruit. (For pints, halve these amounts). Wipe jar rims clean with a hot cloth and screw sterile caps on tightly. Process in a boiling water bath, 45 minutes for quarts and 35 minutes for pints.

Leave upside down overnight to cool; check seal and store in a cool, dark place.

Brandywine steak

The tomato was more still-life than salad. Perched atop the butcher's block, it glowed orange and scarlet, daring me to drop the ax. Ribbed, meaty shoulders cushioned its gnarled core, while cracks spread from beneath its seat in weepy seams.

The brandywine is known for flavor, not looks. The 19th century cultivar found its way into the mainstream in 1982, when elderly Ohio gardener Ben Quisenberry introduced it to the Seed Savers Exchange.

From there the brandywine took off, shading its broad, green potato leaves over soil plots across the county. Each plant produced only a few pink fruits, heavy in the hand and costly at the market. Soon sub-strains began to appear—purple brandywine and golden, Amish and Glick's, brandywine cherry and brandywine sport—some as hearty as the original, some without the flavor.

Today, the original is distinguished as Sudduth's brandywine, named for Mrs. Dorris Sudduth Hill who first passed the seed to Quisenberry, and saved from the same line of plants ever since. I have no way of telling if mine is a fraud; a forgery would likely pass along my unknowing tongue long before I learn enough to cry out. But the woman who sold it to me at the market was called Dorris, coincidence star-crossed enough to make me a believer.

I sink the knife into its core, circling quickly and finally pulling hard. I turn the noble fruit on its side and slice it into rings so meaty they appear as steak on the board. I plate them, arrange them with basil and sea salt, and drizzle the constellation with a sweet, creamy balsamic. Real or not, the taste is divine.

BRANDYWINE STEAK

Serves 2

Cut the core from one unrefrigerated 1 pound brandywine and slice into rings. Plate fruit in a fan on 2 dishes. Thinly chop 6-8 large basil leaves into strips and layer over tomatoes. Sprinkle with sea salt to taste. Whisk together 2 tablespoons homemade mayonnaise (see yesterday's post on summer slaw for recipe, leaving out garlic), 2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar, and 1 teaspoon whole grain mustard to make a creamy balsamic. Drizzle over top and enjoy.

Crisp summer slaw

The transition from leafy, spring greens to the crisp violet storage vegetables and emerald succulents of high summer has begun. Red cabbages and violet beets lie taciturn beside scarlet radishes and carrots the hue of the scorching sun. Snap peas, kohlrabi, and cucumbers replace red leaf and romaine, while spinach wilts in the noontime heat and falls dry to the earth.

With the transition comes a shift in salads; the soft, leafy arugula and buttery bibb mixes pass and crisp summer slaws slip onto the plate. The crunch of hard, tightly wrapped cabbage is softened by watery cucumber and the draping of a grated beet. Snap peas and kohlrabi echo with crisp sweetness, a concert in contrast against the damp raining humidity of the summer air.

From vegetable to salad, I use only a grater and a whisk. I rub the skin from the beets, staining the white porcelain of the sink a deep, gory red. The kohlrabi goes more quietly, green pastel and knobby knuckles giving way to pure white. The cabbage falls leaf by leaf, the snap peas in half, and the cucumber with limbs strewn across the board. In a large bowl, the gratings mix and bleed together, a violent sea of purple and green.

Finally, I whisk yellow yolks hard with the dripping stream of measured oil. Slowly they stiffen and lose translucence, emulsifying into a satisfying mayo. I grind in a clove of crushed garlic and a dash of vinegar, and pour the dressing over the slaw. Purple becomes pink, yellow turns to cream, and I sit down to a bowl of tangy summer salad.

CRISP SUMMER SLAW

Serves 12

Finely chop 1 small head red cabbage. Grate 3 small red beets, 1 head kohlrabi, and 1/2 medium sized cucumber. Snap in half 1 cup sugar snap or other edible pod peas. Combine in a large bowl.

In a small mixing bowl, whisk 1 egg yolk until smooth. Drip in, whisking constantly, 1 cup olive oil, making sure to add slowly enough to keep mixture opaque. Add 1 teaspoon salt and 1 clove crushed garlic. Mix well. Spoon over slaw (there may be some leftover*), adding several tablespoons white or cider vinegar and fresh ground pepper to taste. Toss well and serve chilled.

*Garlic aioli will keep in the fridge for at least a week, if not longer.