All sorts of keepers

You know where's a good place to find recipes? The Williams Sonoma catalog. Honestly. I find all sorts of keepers in there. The gadgets that go with them—banana slicers and salad dressing emulsifiers—get a little ridiculous, but the recipes are terrific.

Take, for instance, the roasted beet salad recipe I tried the other day. The base ingredients are pretty standard—watercress, roasted beets, toasted walnuts, goat cheese—but the dressing is something else altogether. Basically you take lemon juice and a little bit of crème fraîche and add oil and shallots and a big handful of dill. The dairy makes it creamy, the lemon juice gives it kick, and the shallots and dill make it feel big and zippy. When you pour it over the greens and beets, a sort of magic happens, and everything feels at the same time rich and fresh.

We've made it about three times this week, and today, I'm thinking of having it for lunch again. It's just the thing for a hot day—filling but not heavy, satisfying in a very summer sort of way. Enjoy the sunshine, friends.

ROASTED BEET SALAD

I made a few changes to the Williams Sonoma original of this recipe. For starters, I used arugula and spinach from our garden in place of the watercress. I also added homemade croutons (rustic bread seared in olive oil on our cast iron griddle) and swapped out the crème fraîche for whole milk plain yogurt and Cloumage cheese.

(Cloumage, for those of you who have never had it, is the newest cheese from the Shy Brothers. It tastes sort of like a cross between ricotta and crème fraîche, and they sell it at the Provincetown and Falmouth farmers markets.)

Finally, I upped the dill. I don't know about you, but I can't get enough of that green.

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2 and 1/2 tablespoons Cloumage

2 and 1/2 tablespoons whole milk plain yogurt

5 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill

2 teaspoons minced shallot

salt and pepper

4 cups arugula or watercress

2 large beets, roasted, peeled, and cut into wedges (for a roasting tutorial, click here)

1/3 cup toasted walnuts

4 ounces crumbled goat cheese

2 slices good rustic bread, toasted in olive oil in a cast iron skillet or griddle and cut into croutons

Combine the lemon juice, Cloumage, yogurt, olive oil, dill, shallot, and salt and pepper in a Mason jar or salad dressing container. Shake vigorously to emulsify and set aside.

You can plate the salads either individually or on a large shallow platter. Arrange the greens on the bottom, then layer on the roasted beet wedges, toasted walnuts, crumbled goat cheese, and homemade croutons. Drizzle with dressing and toss just before serving.

We're home

Hi! We're home. We have taken every last pair of pajamas, every toothbrush, and even a final forgotten E & T Farm tomato from Alex's parents house. We're not quite in our own bed, mind you—things are still fairly messy upstairs—but we are in our own basement, and for me, for now, that feels amazingly, ecstatically good.

We spent the entire day yesterday cleaning—scrubbing every glass, every pot, every surface of the kitchen counters and shelves. The rest of the house won't be livable for a few days yet, but hey!—I figure with the kitchen down, we have covered at least the most important ground. We can now eat, and cook, and clean up—at least once we get a little rest.

In the meantime, I wanted to share with you a recipe I've made twice in the past week—an asparagus-spinach pasta, dressed with crushed pistachios and grated Parmesan and a garlic-lemon-EVO dressing. The inspiration came from a recipe for asparagus with an orange zest-pistachio aillade I tried from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook last spring. I liked the flavors, but there were too many odd ingredients, and it was too fussy. This take is fresh, and easy, and springy, and does a good job, I think, of showcasing the main star: the asparagus.

If you make it, let me know what you think. I'll be here, scrubbing away.

GARLIC-PISTACHIO ROTINI WITH SPINACH & ASPARAGUS

We can't pick from our asparagus patch yet (it still has another two years!), but Ron Backer's had spears at the Orleans farmers' market the past two weeks. As for the pasta, rotini is the corkscrew-shaped kind that comes in short, thumb-length pieces. It isn't the only option for this, but I like the way it catches the garlic and pistachios and spinach as it rolls around in the dish.

1/2 pound dry whole-wheat rotini or other pasta

5 cloves garlic, peeled

1/2 cup shucked pistachios

1 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 pound spinach, washed

1 pound asparagus, woody ends snapped off and spears cut into roughly 1 and 1/2-inch pieces

juice of 1 lemon

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

grated Parmesan to taste

Put the pasta on to boil.

Meanwhile, pulse the garlic in a food processor until finely minced. Add the pistachios and sea salt and pulse several times, until the pistachios are crumbled.

When the pasta is about 1 minute away from being fully cooked, add the spinach and asparagus to the pot. Stir well so that the vegetables are evenly cooked, and take care not to over cook the asparagus. When the pasta is fully cooked and the asparagus is still al dente, drain the water from the pot.

Toss the hot pasta and vegetables with the pistachio-garlic mixture, the olive oil, and the lemon juice. Add more salt to taste if needed. Let it sit for a few minutes to allow the flavors to meld, then serve still piping warm topped with grated Parmesan.

Inventory, of the fridge

Prompted by the eternal question: What is for dinner?

• 5 leeks
• 1 gallon raw, whole milk
• 1 pint yogurt, swirled with honey and pumpkin puree and peppered with nutmeg and cinnamon
• 1 cup leftover oatmeal, cold and lumpy
• 1/2 pound green beans, thawing, from our garden last year (overlooked?)
• beets—so many big, earthy, Chioggia beets

It took a while—a few cookbooks, a cup of tea, a brisk, sunny walk—but somehow, from there, we got to this. Happy chilly evening, everyone. I hope you're well fed, and warm.

ROASTED BEET, TOASTED WALNUT, & BLUE CHEESE SALAD

This recipe comes from the Balthazar Cookbook. I had it on my first visit to the restaurant on our trip last spring to Manhattan, and when I realized today I had all the ingredients, I had to have it again. I have swapped out a few of the fussier ingredients (i.e. sherry wine vinegar) for a slightly simpler salad, but be warned: as far as salads go, it's still on the fancy side. That said, if you prep out a big batch of the separate parts of this salad ahead of time, you can have it as an impromptu lunch or dinner all week.

1 cup walnuts
1 cup olive oil, divided
6 sprigs thyme, divided
4 medium beets
1/2 pound green beens (frozen are fine)
4 leeks, thinly sliced
1/4 cup minus 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon sherry (optional)
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/4 cup walnut oil
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
finely ground black pepper
3/4 pound mixed greens (I used young spinach and red and green lettuces from the garden)
1/4 pound Great Hill blue cheese, cut into 8 pieces

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Spread the walnuts on a baking sheet and toast for about 3 minutes, or until fragrant but not browned.

Pour 1/4 cup of the olive oil onto a plate. Rub the beets in the oil, then wrap each one individually in tinfoil with a sprig of thyme. Bake for an hour, or until tender when pierced with a fork. Cool, peel, dice, and set aside.

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Cook the green beans until al dente, about 5 minutes. Remove the beans from the water with a slotted spoon and transfer to an ice bath to cool. Meanwhile, cook the leeks in the reserved (still boiling) water for roughly 10 minutes, or until tender. Remove the beans from the ice bath and set aside, and remove the leeks from the pot with a slotted spoon and transfer to the ice bath to chill. Once cooled, add the leeks to the beets.

Make the salad dressing: whisk together the red wine vinegar, sherry (if using), remaining 3/4 cup olive oil, walnut oil, salt, pepper, and remaining thyme (picked from sprigs). Toss this dressing, to taste, with your mixed greens.

Get out four salad plates. Create a bed of the beet-leek mixture in the center of each and top with a handful of green beans. Layer a handful of the dressed mixed greens on top of that. Lean two wedges of blue cheese on each salad up against the beets. Sprinkle with toasted walnuts, and enjoy at once.

It's here

The asparagus is in.

If you see my mother, you can let her know I finally made that asparagus stir-fry she keeps raving about. She found it on 101 Cookbooks last spring—sautéed asparagus and greens with seared tofu and lime juice and hoisin sauce—and it became a staple for her and my father. Only by the time she got around to telling me about it, the asparagus was gone. It's been a long nine months.

You can also tell her that I changed the recipe a little bit. I couldn't bring myself to buy tofu, so instead I used local sea scallops from Alex's market. They were wonderful—perfect, even—except that the first time around, I didn't account for just how much liquid a block of tofu sponges up. Everything was a little too limey, a little too hoisony, a little too sauced.

The second time around, though—the second time, I got it right. I used a bundle of Tim Friary's asparagus, basil from E & T Farms, mint and spinach from our garden, and almost half the hoisin and lime. The vegetables were springy, and fantastic, and just right. The sweetness of the hoisin toned down the tang of the lime, the greens wilted into soft, aromatic ribbons, and the scallops stood firm, golden, fresh.


It was the kind of stir-fry worth waiting nine months for. And now that the asparagus is here, I have a feeling we'll be making it over and over again until the spears disappear.

ASPARAGUS & SEA SCALLOP STIR-FRY

I adapted this recipe slightly from the original over at 101 Cookbooks to take advantage of the beautiful sea scallops that have been at Alex's market recently. The most time consuming part of this recipe is preparing the ingredients—do all the chopping first—and once you fire up the stove, the actual cooking will be done in less than five minutes. Now that the farmers' markets are open in Provincetown and Orleans ( ! ) all of the vegetables can be sourced locally, just picked, and fresh.

8 ounces small sea scallops
1/3 cup toasted sesame oil, divided
4 scallions, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon peeled and freshly grated ginger
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 pound asparagus, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup cashews
1/4 cup slivered almonds
1/2 pound spinach or Swiss chard, roughly chopped
zest and juice of 1/2 lime
2 tablespoons hoisin sauce
1/2 cup fresh mint, slivered
1 cup fresh basil, slivered

Pat the scallops dry. Heat up half of the sesame oil over very high heat in a large soup pot or wok. When the pan and the oil are very hot, drop the scallops in and sear them for two minutes, or until they develop a nice golden crust. Flip the scallops and sear for another minute; this side shouldn't take as long. Turn the heat down to medium high, take the scallops out of the pan, and set them aside.

Add the remaining sesame oil. Once it's hot, add the scallions, ginger, red pepper, asparagus, and salt. Stir fry them for about a minute, then add the garlic, cashews, almonds, and spinach or Swiss chard. Stir fry, stirring frequently, for another minute or two, or until the greens start to wilt. Add the scallops back into the pan, pour in the lime juice and zest and hoisin sauce, and cook for another minute, stirring the whole time. Turn the heat off, stir in the mint and basil, and adjust the seasonings (more salt or hoisin) to taste. Serve hot, either on its own or over cooked oat groats or whole wheat noodles.

The Local Food Report: full strength sea

Did you know that not all Wellfleet oysters are created equal?

This oyster, the wild banana oyster, is the one that shuckers preferred years ago. They were selling oysters by the jar, and this long, thin banana oyster had a whole lot of meat inside. It's from Chipman's Cove and it grows in the mud, just far enough down that it has to stretch to get up and out of it for air, and so it's constantly growing skinny, up. It used to be this biomass banana people picked.

But then, the game changed. Wellfleet made a name for itself—people in the midwest wrote letters cross country about those sweet jars of Wellfleets they found on their supermarket shelves—and the raw bar market sprang up. Tourists and locals wanted their meat served on the half shell, and the deep cupped West Side and the manicured grant oysters with their round, shapely figures jumped in.

The West Sides grow on sugar sand bottoms, places where there's deep water and rough sediment and every time the tide turns any sharp, thin edges get chipped off. A grant owner creates this same look by pulling their oysters out, knocking off the beaks and coaxing them into wide, deep shells.

The funny thing is, they all taste the same. The flavor of an oyster is determined by the water, and in Wellfleet, we are full strength sea salt. Most people, myself included, would take our raw thirty-three parts per million over a southern oyster—those flat-tasting warm water creatures from Virginia and Florida—any day, whatever the shape.

If you get those deep-cupped West Sides or a nice, wide grant shell, though, you almost have to try Oysters Rockefeller. The greens and the herbs and the sherry and the cheese—they just fit. The wide, deep cup holds the juice and the meat and the flavor all at once, and if you're any good at shucking, they take hardly a quarter hour to make. They're elegant and dressy and just sophisticated enough, and the way they feel on your tongue is like pure luxury slipping down.

We ate six last night—six West Sides Rockefeller with two glasses of white wine and my grandmother's tiny silver oyster forks. While we sat the radio signal went silent and the dark crept up the windows, and we decided instead of turning on the lights to simply tuck in, leave the dishes, and go to bed. I can't say if it was the oysters or the quiet or the wine, but it all felt very extravagant.

Wherever you live, and whatever sorts of oysters you have (please don't tell me, please don't, that you have none at all), I highly recommend you pick up a bag this afternoon. Look for the ones with the deep cups, the tall sides, the wide, holding shells, and make sure you have a shucking knife. Crack them open over a bowl, and save the juice, then sauté up your best spring greens with some sherry and herbs. Turn on the broiler and just as the air begins to chill, arrange the meats in their shells with a frock of green and a sprinkle of grated Parmesan or pecorino on top. Pull them out just as the cheese begins to sizzle and brown, and eat them as the sun goes down.

OYSTERS ROCKEFELLER

This recipe is somewhat adapted from one a very talented former Mac's Shack chef passed along, but mostly, it is made up. The chef's recipe had an incredibly daunting number of steps and soaks and sautés—the sort of undertakings that would be okay for a whole night of service at a nice restaurant, but absolutely ridiculous for a half dozen oysters at home—so I took a rough inventory his ingredients and technique and reinvented it on my own. The result was delicious, simple, and so long as your oyster shucking technique does not involve a garden glove, a layer of dish towels, and a lot of fear, also very fast.

6 oysters
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 shallot, thinly sliced
2 ounces spinach, chopped into small pieces
2 ounces Swiss chard, chopped into small pieces
salt to taste
1 tablespoon finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon finely chopped dill
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
2 tablespoons sherry
1/2 tablespoon butter
2 ounces grated Parmesan or pecorino cheese

Shuck the oysters, reserving the liquid and meats in a small bowl. Scrub the bottom shells clean and set them aside; throw the tops in the compost.

Heat up the olive oil in a large sauté pan over high heat. Add the shallot and sauté for about 30 seconds, or until it just starts to brown. Throw in the spinach and Swiss chard, and sauté, stirring vigorously, for about a minute. Add the herbs and continue sautéing for another minute or two, or until the greens are completely wilted.

Pour the sherry around the edges of the pan to deglaze; it should sizzle and almost instantly disappear. Pour in the oyster liquid, taking care not to let any oysters slip in. Stir in the butter and continue cooking for another minute, or until the oyster liquid is reduced by half, all the alcohol in the sherry has cooked off, and the butter is absorbed. Turn off the heat and set the greens aside.

Preheat your oven broiler and arrange the six bottom oyster shells on a baking sheet. Place an oyster meat in each one. Divide the sautéed greens evenly between the six shells, gently layering a spoonful on top of each of the oysters. Top the greens with the grated cheese, and broil the oysters for 2 minutes, or until the cheese turns golden brown. Devour at once.

The Local Food Report: Seed Ordering

Today, finally, I placed my seed order. Ordering seeds always seems very daunting to me—like taking on the Impossible Project or maybe surviving a twenty-six-point-two-mile run.

I was thinking about this the other day while playing eeny-meeny-miny-moe with Crisp Mint and Rouge d'Hiver on the lettuce page of the Fedco catalog, and I decided it was time to get help. (For seed ordering. Just to be clear.) I called my friend Tracy (who helped me start a garden for the chefs at one of Alex's restaurants last spring), and she told me to talk to a friend of hers, Master Gardener Celeste Makely. I met Celeste in her sunroom, we talked for two hours about seeds and seedlings and garden planning and even baked tomatoes. She sent me home with a tiny fig tree, a homegrown Valencia orange, and all sorts of excellent recommendations. I am not very good at sharing oranges, or potential fig factories, but fortunately, I do much better with notes. So for those of you who aren't quite sure what you want to plant, here are Celeste's top seed picks for 2010:

1. Danvers (carrot)

Apparently, the reason carrots are so tricky to grow is because they need a very fluffy soil. If they don't get it, they tend to become distorted. Unless they're Danvers. Celeste says these carrots stand up particularly well to heavy soils, and are thin and long with a strong top. (For yanking.)

2. Spinach and lettuce of any kind

Spinaches and lettuces are, by definition, easy, Celeste says. Order what you think is tasty, or pretty, plant a bunch, and don't worry about it too much unless the weather gets outrageously sunny and hot. If that happens, give the plants some shade and some water, and they will soldier on. Depending on how you plan to plant your garden, it might be a good idea to buy some early and late varieties, and some that can stand the heat. This way you can be in greens all the time.

3. Chioggia (beet)

These are those pretty magenta and white swirled beets you see at the farmers' markets all the time. Celeste cooks sometimes at the soup kitchen in Provincetown, and last year, a local gardener donated a whole bunch of these. She says they were the hit of the season—wonderfully sweet just roasted with a little bit of oil and salt and pepper.

4. Early Spring Burpless (cucumber)

Celeste likes these for slicing, because they are early, and prolific, and inside their bright white flesh is oh-so-crisp. They also grow long, and don't have too many spines.

5. Bush Pickles (cucumber)

These are ideal for people who don't have much space, but want lots of cucumbers and lots of pickles. Celeste says they grow small (about four to five inches, a.k.a. ideal pickle length), and stay firm, even jarred.

6. Bright Lights (Swiss chard)

We grew Bright Lights Swiss chard in our garden last year, and I can attest to its fabulous-ness. We planted it twice, once in the early spring, and once at the end of August, and we have been in red-yellow-pink-and-orange chard from April through today. I know! Two plantings, a million cuttings, lots of salads, lots of stir-fries, a whole bunch of soups, one Swiss chard gratin, a whole lot of blanching and freezing, and several pounds of onions and garlic later, and we are still eating from a single pack of seeds. Celeste likes it because it's beautiful, and prolific, and easy, and as I just mentioned, about as versatile in the kitchen as one green can be. She found this recipe for goat cheese rolled up in chard leaves and grilled, which even without having tried it I feel I can heartily recommend.


7. Pointsetta (hot pepper)

Pointsetta wins purely on cuteness. It's a new pick for Celeste this year, but she likes the way that the peppers point up instead of down, and are very bright and tiny and generally adorable. She's doing a demo garden for the new Wellfleet Community garden plots, and she says that when she saw this she simply couldn't resist.

8. Jalapeño (hot pepper)

Believe it or not, Celeste recently had a Jalapeño plant that lived for five years. She says she simply planted it in a pot, and brought it inside in the fall and back out again every spring. Jalapeños are easy, and better yet, produce peppers that sliced in half, stuffed with cheese, and broiled, will bring you to your knees.

9. Herbs (not Rosemary, or Parsley)

At least not from seed. Rosemary and Parsley are both difficult to germinate, Celeste says, and not worth your trouble at all. Get them, but buy them already robust in little pots at the garden store. As for the rest, plant Oregano and Spearmint but watch out because they spread, and accumulate as many varieties of Thyme and basil as you can. Oh! and while we're on basil, Celeste thinks Genovese, the big, broad-leafed Italian variety is very nice, as are Thai basil and lemon basil.

10. Tropical fruits (huh?)

Celeste's last recommendation is just in case you decide that this year, you want to go big time. She has a sunroom on the south side of her house, and for a while now, she's been experimenting with tropical fruit trees. Based on my Valencia-orange-eating-in-February experience, I'd say it's been a wild success. In addition to the oranges, she's ordered and successfully nursed to maturity a Meyer lemon tree, a Ponderosa lemon tree (which produces fruit the size of baseballs!), and several varieties of Italian figs. (The seeds for which her grandfather brought over from Italy.) She thinks that if you have a sunny room, you should go for it.

There you have it—Celeste's top ten for 2010. Before I go, though, a few notes. You probably noticed there are no tomato varieties up there. That's because next week, I will be bringing you another of Celeste's seed-ordering lists, this time ONLY for tomatoes. Yipee!


And a note about seed ordering: Celeste orders most of her seeds from Totally Tomatoes, which carries both tomatoes and a few other plants, like hot peppers and cucumbers and basils. It's a great catalog for anyone, but maybe more so for a tomato zealot like Celeste than for the rest of us.

I order all of my seeds from Fedco, a Maine-based company that I like because it a) sells only seeds adapted to our cold New England climate, b) is very committed to sustainable growing and non-GMO seeds, and c) has in its catalogs sections like "How Not to Order" and seed descriptions like this. Reading it makes my eyes water and my sides hurt.

To request a Fedco catalog, all you have to do is click on over here, and then call and leave a message with your name and address. They say it might take a few weeks to get it, but mine only took a few days. Have fun!

The Local Food Report: warm, lush

Arthur Teubner lives in Truro. His roommates include one fig tree, one taro plant, a rosemary bush, a whole bunch of rainbow chard and spinach and arugula, and a potted banana plant. As you can see, it's very cozy in there.

The coziness has a lot to do with glass, and the sun. In the seventies, Teubner volunteered at the New Alchemy Institute in Hatchville, and he got very into the idea of incorporating growing space into living space. The Institute was a research center studying organic agriculture and aquaculture and bio-shelters, and it created an indoor eco-system called The Ark. The basic idea was to build a greenhouse for both shelter and food, and to populate it with species that would compliment and regulate each other as they grew. It was very successful, and Teubner took the idea with him.

He built his house about a decade later, with his own plans and hands and a lot of recycled materials. He designed it to sit on a south-facing slope overlooking his garden (which has since turned into a farm, First Light Organic Farm), and an orchard of fruit trees. It was an upside-down home with three floors: on top, a master bedroom and bathroom and study, in the middle a kitchen and dining room and living room, and on the bottom, an extra bedroom and an attached greenhouse. By building the greenhouse onto his home, he reasoned, he could grow warmer-climate crops or over winter native crops by regulating the temperature in conjunction with his living space. This seemed more sustainable to him than having a separate, independent structure that he would have to supply with nutrients and heat.

But that isn't even the cool part.

The cool part is that the way he did this was to incorporate the air from the greenhouse into his home. He cut power registers and ducts into the walls and ceiling of the greenhouse, so that if the sun creates excess heat, he can pull it into his home. He created heat sinks in the form of brick flooring and dark earth growing beds, and he built a row of cylindrical water columns to act as solar heat sinks. He also added a indoor fish pond that connects to an outdoor fish pond, so that the protein he raises can swim in or out depending on the weather or temperature or just what sort of an adventure it feels like taking that day. When the fish have been swimming and eating for a while, he takes the nutrient rich water from their pond to water the vegetable crops.


Finally, he planted grapes—Concords and a few other leafy varieties—along the east and west sides of the greenhouse. He trained them to grow up along the sides and over to cover the top, and in the summer, they leaf out. The greenery blocks the sun in the summer, keeping the greenhouse cool and shady. In the fall, the leaves drop, and the light is allowed back in.

There are clearly a lot of good features to this indoor growing space. For starters, when he's cooking dinner, Teubner can sneak downstairs in his socks or even bare feet and pick a whole meal's worth of chard and arugula and thyme.


He can also grow plants that normally wouldn't survive in this climate, like figs and bananas, because they spend the winter protected, inside. Lastly, and sometimes he thinks most importantly, when it is February or March on Cape Cod and the weather report says GREY for the seventy-second day straight, he has a warm, lush, almost Costa-Rican place to go. This insanity salvation, he says, is almost better than the fresh figs.

Of course, most of the year, his food production in the greenhouse focuses on leafy salad plants. The figs and grapes and whatnot come in a big September-October whoosh, and from there it's herb and cold crop time. The day I visited, last weekend, he had Swiss chard, arugula, lettuce mix, spinach, and Dinosaur kale going on. It actually looked a fair amount like what we have in our not-so-toasty, unattached greenhouse right now, except that everything was bigger, and a bit healthier, and not looking quite so desperate for heat and sun.

By the time I got home, I was trying to figure out how we could build a greenhouse onto the south side of our house and whether or not I would rather have a fig tree or a banana tree, or maybe even a lime tree, or if maybe I should just fill the beds with oregano plants. Of course, I was getting a little bit ahead of myself. In the end, I drew a lot of pictures and researched green design architects online and made myself a pot of barley and winter greens soup.

A Costa Rica Room would be nice, one day. But in the meantime, the soup turned out to be cheap, and tasty, and a very good second best.

SO FRESH AND SO GREEN (!)

[I am so, so sorry for the bad pun title. Hopefully Outkast will forgive me. And hopefully you will forgive me for discovering the Lala Song Player and, yet again, giving you a link with sound.]

As for the soup, it's excellent. It's adapted from a recipe I found the other day in the Feburary issue of Bon Appetit, now that I (ahem), finally got it back from my sister. Anyway, it's for a barley soup with kale, chard, spinach, fennel, lemon, and dill, which, as soon as I saw it, I knew was for me. I changed a few things, but the idea is the same. This soup is bright and light and hearty all at once, and in a much more wholesome way than the song, really and truly very fresh and very clean. There is something almost squeaky about it, in the same way that, say, lying in a mud wrap with cucumbers on your eyelids is. Best of all, it is an excellent first use for our brand new, New England grown ( ! ) barley.

2/3 cup uncooked barley
8 cups chicken broth, preferably homemade
4 cups water
sea salt
2 tablespoons butter
3 medium onions, chopped
1 teaspoon dried dill weed*
1 teaspoon dried, crushed fennel seed
1 teaspoon dried, crushed basil
freshly ground pepper to taste
1/4 cup dry white wine
8 cups Swiss chard, rinsed, coarsely chopped, and packed**
8 cups spinach, rinsed, coarsely chopped, and packed
1 cup cilantro, coarsely chopped, for garnish
4 ounces feta cheese, crumbled, for garnish
1/3 cup scallions, thinly sliced, for garnish
1 lime, cut into eights, for garnish

*The original recipe called for fresh herbs. If you're making this soup in the summertime, when fresh dill, fennel, and basil are readily available, I would certainly recommend swapping them in—1/3 cup each to replace the dried measurements.

** The original recipe also called for kale in addition to the Swiss chard and spinach. I think you could probably use any combination of winter braising greens you like—the more the merrier—with success.

Bring the barley, 4 cups of the chicken stock, the water, and 1 teaspoon of sea salt to a boil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Reduce the heat to low, cover the pot, and leave the barley to simmer for about 45 minutes, or until tender.

Meanwhile, pull out a skillet and heat the butter up over medium-high heat. Add the onions, stirring frequently, and cook for about five minutes. Sprinkle in the herbs, and season with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Continue cooking for about three more minutes, or until the onions are soft and translucent. Deglaze the pan with the wine, cook for a minute or two longer, and turn off the heat. Set the onions aside.

When the barley is tender, add the remaining stock and the onions to the pot. Add the chard and the spinach, and simmer for about six minutes, or until the greens are tender. Season the soup with salt and pepper, and pour it hot into bowls. Put the cilantro, feta, scallions, and lime wedges on the table to use as garnishes. (The cheese doesn't matter too much, and the cilantro and scallions are sort of personal decisions, but whatever you do, don't skip the lime juice. It brings out the flavors of the greens and brightens the barley and the broth.) This soup is good on day one, but even better on day two, so don't be afraid to let it sit.

Most fantastically orange

You know the way Kraft dinner macaroni and cheese tastes on a camping trip? Well, I think I've figured out how to recreate it. It feels sort of like it did when I was fourteen and spent six days paddling the Petawawa, only without all the mosquitoes and the wet sleeping bag. Oh, and we've been eating with my grandmother's silver.

And while generally, as a rule, KD macaroni and cheese tastes better off of bent stainless steel sporks and tin plates, so far, we haven't let that get our spirits down. We also haven't been deterred by the fact that it isn't raining, that we don't have any sandwich bags full of wet, clumpy lemon pepper to sprinkle on top, and that we no longer spend our summers at Camp Northway Lodge. Which, in case you are wondering, is in Algonquin Park, Ontario and is North America's oldest wilderness camp for girls. It was founded by Fannie L. Case in 1906, and there is no electricity or running water, and to this day, every meal is cooked over a big, pot-bellied woodstove.

(Also, in case you're wondering, we has been referring to both me and Alex, and no, he did not attend. He has learned a few camp songs, though, and although he doesn't like to admit it, I'm pretty sure he secretly sometimes practices them on his own.)

At any rate, although neither Alex or I have done any class four rapids recently, and although we don't own a cedar strip canoe, and even though it is only about 18 degrees out and fairly prohibitive of camping activities in general, we have been enjoying quite a bit of macaroni and cheese. Not actual KD, mind you, or even traditional macaroni and cheese, but a pumpkin penne with spinach and goat cheese that will fool you so completely that you may never go back. It's hard to believe, I know, but if you sauté some red onions in a pat of butter, add some pumpkin puree and some milk and salt and a little dash of Sriracha sauce and throw it over penne, you get a big bowl of pasta that tastes alarmingly similar to the warmest, cheesiest, most fantastically orange macaroni and cheese you've ever had. It makes me feel cozy just to type all those adjectives up.

You can imagine how nice it is to actually dig in.

Happily, it's a snap to make. It's the kind of thing you can throw together in fifteen minutes for a working Monday lunch, or even a last minute dinner for company. The key is to have the squash—either a pie pumpkin or a butternut or something in that vein—already baked, so that all you have to do is boil water for pasta and sauté. Recently, we've been keeping a jar of pureed squash on hand at all times in the fridge, partially because some of the pie pumpkins in the basement have been getting soft spots, but also because of how quickly, now that we have this recipe, pureed squash disappears. I don't know about you, but there are only so many sweet squash pies and butternut soups I can eat. This opens up a whole new world, this putting pumpkin on penne.


Oh! and we've been putting crumbled up goat cheese on top, which has made things pretty new and exciting, too, and spinach from the greenhouse. Since we're not fourteen any more, I thought a little green might be nice.

I could go on and on, in case you can't tell, about the merits of what we've taken to calling Pumpkin Penne alla KD. I could also tell you a fair bit about rapids, and what it's like to tip over in them every day for six days in a row while it rains and your shorts and t-shirt and underwear are constantly wet, and even what it's like to resort to eating fried uncooked soggy pasta because it has turned back into dough, but I'm not sure any of that would be a good idea, for anyone.

So for your own good, I'm going to sign off, and let you get to your kitchen and your squash and your food processor, and let you start recreating your own camp memories lickety-split. Have fun, everyone.

PUMPKIN PENNE alla KD

For the original idea for this recipe, I have to thank Mr. Mark Bittman. As you probably know, he's into doing more with less, and he decided for his book The Best Recipes in the World to try and recreate the taste of Italian squash filled ravioli without having to actually do all the tiny finger work. He thought maybe it would have the same effect to just put the squash filling on the outside of the pasta, as a sauce for penne instead, and boy-oh-boy, it did. The only flaw I could find with the whole thing was that he spiked his sauce with sugar and nutmeg in a way that made it taste more like pumpkin pie filling and less like a savory dish. So instead, I went in a butter-milk-Sriracha-salt-spinach-goat cheese and sauteed red onion direction, and it came out absolutely perfectly—a lot less like pie, and a lot more, in the best way possible, like camp style KD.

2 tablespoons butter
1/2 red onion, chopped
1 cup pureed pie pumpkin or butternut squash
3/4 cup whole milk
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
a pinch of nutmeg
a dash of Sriracha or another spicy chili sauce
salt to taste
1/2 pound pasta—penne, macaroni, or any other bite size shape—cooked and drained
1/2 pound baby spinach, washed and dried
4 ounces goat cheese

Heat up the butter over medium-high heat in the bottom of a medium size, heavy-bottomed pot. Add the red onion and sauté for 8 to 10 minutes, or until it becomes soft and translucent. Turn the heat down to a simmer and spoon in the pureed squash, stirring constantly, along with about a third of the milk. Keep adding the milk in splashes (and keep stirring), until it has all been added and absorbed. Now season the sauce with the white pepper, nutmeg, Sriracha, and salt. Add the pasta to the pot and stir it into the sauce, until all of the pieces are completely coated. While the pasta and the sauce are still hot, stir in the spinach. It should wilt a little bit, and sort of melt into the mix. (If it doesn't seem to be shrinking down, try putting a lid on the pot and turning the heat back on low for a minute or so. The steam should do the trick.) Serve the pasta hot, with a few crumbles of goat cheese on top.

The Local Food Report: the first farmers' market

This week, I went to the farmers' market. I'm going to type that again, because I'm still pinching myself, trying to figure out whether or not it's really true.

This week, I went to the farmers' market. Phew!


I have been waiting for this day for months, every month, in fact, since last October, when the farmers' markets in Orleans and Provincetown and Hyannis and everywhere else on this sandy strip shut their doors. They simply put down their tent flaps and left—a terrible thing for a friend to do anytime, but in the gray, cold, rainy months in particular.

I went to a few markets in other states while they were gone—a winter market in my hometown of Brunswick, Maine, and the huge year-round market in Providence, Rhode Island. They were both exciting, but not the same. I couldn't wake up bleary-eyed, throw on my jeans, and run out the door. Julie wasn't there, and neither was Gretel, or Claire or Darnell or Tim. I didn't know anyone's name, or what they usually had for sale—they could've just gotten a crazy new hair cut and stopped growing radishes and decided to be a lobsterman, and I'd never have known.

The Orleans market, on the other hand, is like one of those friends you've always known—warm and smart and inviting—the kind that you can read like a book. It has 21 vendors, all from the Outer Cape, selling everything from rhubarb to radishes to asparagus to greens. They have muffins, too, and other baked goods, and live lobster and shiitake mushrooms and flower bouquets. This week, they had seedlings—things like celeriac and strawberries and mesclun mix and 150 different varieties of tomatoes. Now that's what I call a friend.

This first week, I did more catching up than shopping, but I still brought a full bag of veggies home. I tucked away a bunch of French Breakfast radishes, a bundle of scallions, three leeks, a dozen eggs, a pint of cherry tomatoes (from the E & T Farms greenhouse!), and a flowering currant plant for a friend. All in all, a pretty good haul.


Other markets will be opening up soon—in Provincetown and Hyannis, on the islands, and up Cape. There's a full list here. So keep your eyes peeled for those rows of white tents, and just as soon as you can, pick up the makings for the salad below. It's the best I've had since October.

SALAD OF SPRING GREENS, RADISHES, AND SCALLIONS

I mixed the radishes greens from the bunch above with spinach, butter lettuce, Italian dandelion, and tat soi from my garden to make a spring salad mix. Look for very young radishes if you plan to use the greens; the bigger they get the more fuzz they have on their skin, and they also tend to acquire a more bitter taste. This recipe makes enough salad for roughly four.

for the salad:
1 pound spring greens
1 bunch French breakfast radishes, sliced into thin half moons
2 scallions, thinly sliced

for the dressing:
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons wine vinegar (slightly sweet is nice)
5 tablespoons olive oil
4 tablespoons mayonnaise (preferably homemade)

Wash and dry the greens and toss with radishes and scallions. On a cutting board, mash together garlic and salt with a fork. Scrape into a small jar and shake together with vinegar, olive oil, and mayonnaise until well mixed. Pour dressing over greens and toss well.