The Local Food Report: A through K

One of my favorite things about Italy was the markets. In the country house where we stayed—in Panicale, straddling the border of Umbria and Tuscany—we shopped at the local market nearly every day. We had eaten our fill of fancy shaved truffle pastas and Caprese salads in the city, and while we were in the country we intended to shop, and cook. The woman who ran the tiny store didn't speak a word of English, and we couldn't get very far on my two semesters of college Italian, but it didn't matter. We would point at cheeses and meats or chestnuts and artichokes, and she would either grit her teeth and tilt her hand from side to side or break into a wholehearted, approving grin. This was how we decided what to buy for dinner each day.

On the third day we were in town, though, we managed to learn that there was a farmers' market in a bigger city, Castiglione del Lago, 10 kilometers down the road. We woke up early and packed ourselves into our tiny, baby blue Lancia, and made our way down the hill and across the lake basin as fast as we could. (It's a good thing making the market was our biggest hurry of the trip, seeing as our beloved Lancia, even with the gas pedal flat on the floor, topped out at about 55 miles per hour on a downhill.)

At first we had a hard time finding the food vendors—outdoor markets in Italy apparently function more like department stores, the streets filling up with stands selling socks and hats and tights and children's costumes and housewares—but eventually, we made out a man with radicchio and endive and spinach and carrots, and from there the food wound on and on. There were beautiful fruits and vegetables—artichokes and clementines and persimmons and every sort of olive imaginable. There was a man with wild boar sausages and another with dried fish and one with an entire table of hard cheeses and fresh breads. And then finally, way up top, tucked onto one of the highest cobbled streets, we found the grain and bean bins.


And that was the first thing, I realized, that was really and truly different. Every other stall we had our version of in farmers' markets at home. We have the produce stands and the shellfish vendors and the meat guy and the cheese guy and the baker with a table full of breads. We have root vegetables and greens and fruits and granolas and even handmade pastas sometimes—but there is never, ever anyone selling locally grown grain, and only on the very rare occasion have I been lucky enough to find beans.

When we got back from Italy—when I settled into my desk and started checking email and making my way through the 279 messages that had accumulated while we were gone—I found something very exciting in my Inbox. It was a message from Andrea, Andrea who you sometimes run into in the comments section of this blog, and she said there was something I should know about. A couple in Amherst was starting New England's first grain and bean CSA, and she thought I might like to take part. They had been full for a while, but they had just opened up a few extra shares, and if I emailed them quickly then maybe, just maybe, I could get a spot. So I sent an email, and we (phew!) got a spot, and last month, on a snowy Wednesday in January, I drove to Amherst to pick our share up.

When I arrived, I had only a little bit of an idea of what to expect. I knew that the couple's names were Ben and Adrie Lester, and that they owned a bakery called Wheatberry on Main Street, and that this was where I should go. I knew that we would be getting grains A through K, and that there would be roughly one hundred and five pounds of them in all, and that I should come prepared to carry them out with six canvas shopping bags.

I did not know that they had an absolute stunner of a little daughter named Ella, and that their bakery was secretly exactly like the one I hope to open one day in Wellfleet, with cream and milk from a local dairy and sandwiches made with local meats and cheeses and veggies and fresh baked bagels and pastries and baguette and rustic breads and some of the best pickles and chocolate chip cookies I have ever washed down. (Together, no less.) And, most importantly, I had no idea what grains A through K were.

Since then, I've learned quite a bit. I've learned how to store whole grains—in cloth bags, downstairs in the basement where it's dark and cool. I've learned how to grind grains—by screwing this attachment onto our KitchenAid and playing around with coarse and fine grinds. I've also learned how to start cooking with things like farro and dent corn and spelt, and of course there will be more on that as the winter wears on. But what I've learned that I want to share most is simply what the grains are—what they're called and how they grow and what they grind down into and what we're supposed to use them for. We've gotten fairly out of touch with whole grains, especially the older, more unusual ones, and I think it might be nice to get reacquainted. So here goes—everyone, meet A through K.

A. Spelt: You've probably heard of spelt flour as an alternative to wheat flour for making breads for people with wheat allergies. But actually, spelt is a species of wheat—the grain we call wheat is really just common wheat, not the only wheat. Spelt is an ancient wheat species, one that was once important as a staple in Europe, and one that probably originated from a cross between emmer (we'll get to that) and common wheat. It has some gluten, so it can be ground down to make a flour for baking bread, which will have a nutty, slightly sweet flavor. People also use it to make pasta, and gin, and beer, and vodka, and in Germany, from what I gather, they dry the unripe grains and eat them whole as a snack called Grünkern. The spelt we got in our CSA share was grown by a farmer in New York, Clauss Martens of Lakeview Organic Grain. (Originally, the Lesters intended to use only grain grown in Western Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley for the CSA, but because of the wet summer, they experienced several crop failures. They bought these grains in from other small New England farms.)

B. Red Fife Wheat: This grain was grown right near Amherst in Belchertown at White Oak Farm, the main planting grounds for the CSA. It's a heritage bread wheat, and it's good at adapting to all sorts of growing conditions. It's named for a guy named David Fife, whose family developed the strain around 1842. The wheat kernel is reddish, which gave it the other half of its name. Farmers like it because it can grown in poorer soils, and many of the bread wheats grown commercially today can trace their lineage back to Red Fife seeds. Recently, it's been making a comeback on small farms, with help from the Heritage Wheat Project and placement on the Slow Food Ark of Taste list. It is an excellent milling grain and makes top notch bread.

C. Hadley Wheat: This one is a bit of a mystery. I can tell you a few things about it—namely, that our particular harvest was grown in Hadley by a farmer named Alan Zuchowski, and that usually, his farm has grown tobacco. Tobacco did terribly this year, and so he was happy to have switched to wheat. He dried it in his barn, which has removable side panels that he opens and closes every morning and evening to let the light in and shut the dew out. Based on my milling experience, Hadley Wheat is a very hard variety, and is an excellent baking wheat, but other than that, I'm afraid I don't know much. I'm working on it, and I'll be back when I can tell you more.

D. Spring Barley: Farmers classify varieties of barley by the seasons because some need to be exposed to cold and some don't. Winter barley, for example, must be planted in the fall so that the seedlings will be exposed to low temperatures. Spring barley, on the other hand, doesn't need the cold, and so can be planted in the spring. The spring barley in our share was grown at White Oak Farm, and whole, is excellent for cooking into soups and stews. It can also be used to make malt for beer, and once upon a time, it was such an important grain that it was used as currency.

E. Zorro Winter Wheat: Winter wheat, like winter barley, is planted in the fall. It sprouts before the ground freezes, and then goes dormant until things warm up come spring. It needs the cold in order to flower, and so long as it gets it, it will be ready for harvest in early July. Winter wheats tend to be hard, which means that they have high levels of gluten, and make good flour for breads. (Soft wheats, on the other hand, tend to make better flour for cakes and baked goods.) The Zorro winter wheat in the CSA share was grown at White Oak Farm.

F. Winter Rye: Umm, are you catching a theme here yet? Winter rye is another one of those winter grains, and is often planted in the fall as a cover crop because it forms a ground cover quickly and is good at all sorts of handy things like protecting fields against erosion, finding leftover nitrogen, and preventing soil compaction. What's interesting, though, is that although a lot of small farmers plant winter rye as a cover crop, not many go to the trouble of harvesting it, because up until recently, there hasn't been much of a market. With the growth of the local food movement, more farmers are starting to harvest and dry the grain. I haven't quite figured out yet whether or not there's a use for it whole, but ground, it makes a mean pumpernickel bread. The winter rye in the CSA share was also grown at White Oak Farm.

G. Emmer: Remember this one from the other day? It's the grain I put in our soup, the ancient variety of wheat that also goes by the name of farro. It's best used just as is, soaked whole and then cooked down in soups or for cold salads or maybe just with a little bit of butter and Parmesan cheese. It can also be ground down into flour for making pasta. Whatever you do with it, it is a little bit nutty and absolutely delicious. Our emmer, yet again, was grown at White Oak Farm.

H. Dent Corn: When I picked up the share, this was the grain I was most curious about. It was big corn, in whole kernels, and I wasn't quite sure it would grind down. But apparently, dent corn has a lot more starch and not as much sugar as table corn, and it is soft, which makes it good for milling into cooking and baking grains like cornmeal and polenta and grits. Dent corn was a crop failure for the CSA, so Ben and Adrie bought it in from Eric Smith at Cayuga Pure Organics in New York.

I. Black Turtle Beans: These small, shiny black beans (which are also from Cayuga in New York) are the ones you see in rice and beans in Latin America. They're the most common black bean, and they have a dense, meaty texture and plenty of flavor. I think we'll be putting most of ours into soups and grain/bean salads, and maybe a few burritos here and there.

J. Boston Favorite Beans: Somehow, I do not seem to have brought any of these beans home. I can't tell you what they look like, or what they're used for, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would say they are good for making baked beans with onions and bacon and molasses.

K. Oats: I am not going to say much here. Obviously, we all know what oats are, but the oats from our share (grown at White Oak Farm) are whole, not rolled. Since we don't have a means to hull ours, this means they will be going whole into dishes like this.

Well. I'm glad we got that out of the way. Think of this as a first time meet-and-greet, and I think we can all look forward to bumping into these grains again, maybe a little bit more one-on-one, another day. In the meantime, just in case you get inspired to go to the health food store or the market or wherever and seek out a few of these whole grains (if you find any that were locally grown, be sure to let us know!), I thought I might point you in the direction of a recipe. I made this the other day with our emmer, except with sweet potatoes instead of butternut squash and kalamata olives instead of toasted walnuts. It was absolutely delicious, and I have a feeling it can take all sorts of tweaks.

Have fun playing around with it, and enjoy the weekend, everyone.

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.

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.

GRASS-FED BEEF // the local food report

What's so good about this steak?

For starters, I finally learned how to cook it. I've nailed it now twice in one week. Bring on the meat! But there's another, more important component at play. This steak is 100 percent grass-fed, from a local cow. What does this mean?

Well, there's a lot of meat jargon out there these days. Grain-finished. Grass-finished. Grass-fed. Pastured. Hormone free. Antibiotic free! Depending on who you ask about what all these terms mean, you can get different answers.

Let's start with the current conventional standard of cattle farming. While there is some middle ground, there are two basic ways to do it. You can raise calves on mother's milk and pasture, and continue them on pasture for another few years until they reach slaughter size. Or you can start by raising calves on mother's milk and pasture, and once they reach a certain cut-off weight—usually around 650 or 700 pounds—put them on a diet where 70-90 percent of their rations come from "grain and protein concentrates," usually some combination of corn and soy byproducts. On this grain-based diet they reach slaughter size much faster than they do on grass, and they get much fatter.  In fact, most feedlot cattle are 30 percent fat by weight—technically obese. Because they gain weight so quickly, they gain a lot of it as intramuscular fat, what butchers and cooks call "marbling." Grass-fed animals, in contrast, tend to gain fat around their bones.

There is something we should stop to note. The USDA grades beef based on the amount of marbling and a cow's age at slaughter. The younger and fatter, the better the grade. Since grass-fed cattle have on average half as much fat as grain-fed cattle and often take a year or two longer to reach slaughter size, they don't usually make the cut.

Before we get into the health implications of all this, let's start with the history. Grain-finishing—finishing is the term used to describe the process of fattening cattle up for slaughter—is a relatively new phenomenon. Until about the 1950s, most cattle were raised and finished on grass. But with the advent of the Green Revolution, U.S. farmers found themselves with a lot of cheap corn and soybeans on hand. They started feeding them to cattle, noticed how quickly the grains fattened the cows up, and decided it was quicker and cheaper to finish cattle on grain. 

But there were health consequences. Lots of them, both for the cows and for us. 

For starters, ruminants aren't good at digesting grain. Grain-based diets lower the pH in their colons, fostering the growth of a new acid-resistant strain of E. coli (O157). Other strains of E. coli live in the colons of healthy cows and humans, and can be harmless. And usually, even if we eat food contaminated with E. coli (usually by way of fecal matter), our stomach acid kills it. But this acid-resistant strain of E. coli is much more dangerous—it thrives in our acidic stomachs.

In addition to increasing our risk for E. coli, feeding cows grain also changes the composition of their fats. The typical American consumes 14-25 times more omega-6 fatty acids than omega-3 fatty acids, mainly because we eat so many processed foods. The ideal ratio is 1:1, and we can't make these fats—we have to eat them. This imbalance has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, depression, obesity, cancer, arthritis, asthma, and a host of other health problems. Grass-fed beef has a much more favorable ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids than grain-fed beef, and also has twice as much CLA, or conjugated linoleic acid. CLA is a rare omega-6 fatty acid that acts more like an omega-3 fatty acid, in that it's thought to reduce the risk of heart disease, keep cholesterol and weight in check, and boost the immune system.

Finally, grass-fed beef has been found to have ten times as much beta-carotene as meat from feedlot cattle (that's why the fat from grass-fed beef has a more yellow color than the snow-white stuff you see on grain-fed steaks) and at least three times as much Vitamin E. And that's just the nutrition stuff. 

Feedlot diets also make cattle sick. Crowded together with their digestive systems doing overtime (they're asked to gain between 2 and a half to four pounds a day), they're at a much higher risk than animals on pasture for all kinds of diseases. To counter this, many farmers add antibiotics to the animals' daily rations, both as a way of keeping disease in check, and because they've noticed that antibiotics, too help cattle gain weight. The use of antibiotics in farm animals has increased over ten to twenty times since the 1950s, and the antibiotic-resistant pathogens that develop in these animals can make us sick, too, and leave us with no way to treat the illness. 

In addition to antibiotics, most feedlot cattle are also often given growth hormones in the form of implants. Nearly all cattle entering conventional beef feedlots are given a combination of six anabolic steroids, including estrogens, testosterones, and progesterones. Measurable levels of all of these growth hormones—including those that mimic human sex hormones and are known endocrine disruptors—are found in the meat at slaughter, which means we're eating them. There has been remarkably little research done in the United States on the effects of these hormones (the E.U. banned them in 1988). But a 2007 study looked at sperm quantity and quality of men born to women who ate a lot of beef (defined as more than seven servings per week, which really is A LOT!) or "not much" beef (less than seven beef meals per week, still a fair amount). The more beef women ate, the lower their son's sperm concentrations. Most beef in the United States comes from grain-fed, feedlot cattle, and hormonally speaking, this study is just the tip of the iceberg. Premature puberty in girls, various reproductive cancers, and a host of other health issues have also been linked to endocrine disruptors. Is it all because of grain-fed steak? Not at all. But sticking to grass-fed meat is one thing that can help.

So this all is the long answer to the question: What's so good about that steak?

The short answer is this: Compared to a conventional, grain-finished steak from a feedlot, it has on average twice as many omega-3 fatty acids, twice as much CLA, ten times as much beta-carotene, three times as much Vitamin E, and none of the antibiotics or growth hormones.

It also costs twenty to forty percent more. You get what you pay for. To me, it's worth every penny. 

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.

Very 2010

On Saturday, we had an absolutely enormous tide. The lumberyard went under, like it always does, and Uncle Tim's bridge had water just up to its planks, and the building I'm sitting in right now—the old Mooney grain barn Alex and his brother turned into a little hub of offices on Duck Creek—our wobbly old red frame dipped its whole northeast corner right into the sea.

After I ran up the sidewalk to the marketplace to buy a roll of film and shot all twenty-four exposures in a matter of eleven minutes, Alex and I just stood at the top of the basement stairs, looking down. We watched as the tide swirled old windows and scrap wood and extension cords around the cement, and as the water rocked sawdust in and out through the crack beneath the old garage door. I wondered if we shouldn't be pumping or mopping or scooping, but I realized there was nothing to do, really, besides wait for the water to give up and retreat.

I have to admit, the thought kind of scared me. I wondered, for a few minutes, what it would mean for our little town—which to begin with is hardly more than a pile of sand and visitors anchored with a few churches and roads and locust trees—what it would mean for us if we all end up changing the world in a way where the sea does not retreat. It was the sort of thought that made me want to walk home, to hang out our laundry by the woodstove and curl up on the couch to look up houses for sale downtown and the Flex bus schedule on the Internet. It was the kind of thought that made me hesitate a second at the sugar bowl, put it back on the shelf, and spoon honey into the bottom of my tea.


It was also the sort of thought that made me feel incredibly thankful and a whole lot braver for knowing all of you. We might not know if the little things we do—buying a pig raised on scraps from a restaurant down the street, or avoiding corn syrup and orange soda, or packing our freezers in July with strawberries and spinach and Swiss chard—are enough to keep the water out, but at least it isn't already coming in under the door.

And so for the New Year, I decided to make a list. I have always liked lists, and fresh start lists in particular, written on crisp, college ruled paper with my friends Katy and Siobhan in mind, who long ago invented a tradition of calling every list The List in order to give it that fresh start ring. So here, in honor of a new year and good friends and pumping and mopping and scooping before it is too late to do any good, is The List for 2010:

—Don't eat meat—any meat—that doesn't come from a place I trust and can name. This, ahem! includes bites of other people's burgers, late night wings and even, I fear, chicken flavored Ramen noodle broth.

—Get so many people excited about this new grain CSA, that they are full again next year and lots of other ones spring up to feed the demand.

—Keep a freezer inventory. Write down what goes in, and when, during the summer, and what comes out, and when, during the winter. Adjust accordingly—put up more strawberries? fewer crushed tomatoes? more beans?

—Keep a garden book for more than the first three days. Like the freezer, write what goes in, and what comes out, and what we liked to eat the most. Again, adjust accordingly.

—Do not, unless it comes from Pan d'Avignon, buy bread; bake it instead. This should be easier once our share of wheat and rye comes from the folks over at Pioneer Valley, but there's still always the option of baking with this flour from Maine.

—Figure out ways to favor honey over sugar for making things sweet, even though I may be one of the only people on the planet to think that honey is just a little bit gross. I used to feel the same way about rice, and although it took years of coaxing, I now, sometimes, eat stir-fries, so I guess there's hope.

—Finally, at least once, take the Flex bus to the Orleans farmers' market. Really, with a good book and a few tote bags and the promise of a treat from the woman who rings the bell, it cannot be that bad. If I like it, do it again the next week, and if that goes well, do it whenever I can. Maybe, if things go really well, get a few of you to come along, and sit altogether with our tomatoes and leeks in the back.

I think that's enough. If this year is good enough to allow me to accomplish every one of those things, it will have been very kind indeed. Plus, I'm hoping you might have a few suggestions, too, and I'll want to tack those onto the end.

Oh! and here's a recipe from James Beard for no-knead, one-rise, all whole-wheat bread, no-sugar-just-honey bread, in case you want to get on board. When I first saw it I was very kind of skeptical, but as it turns out, it's actually quite good. Not in a white bread, 1950s sort of way, but in rustic, moist-toast-and-sweet-butter earthy way that feels very 2010.

New Year's Beard Bread

adapted from Myrtle Allen's Brown Bread, found in James Beard's Beard on Bread

It is really kind of amazing that this bread is bread at all, considering that what we generally think of as bread involves kneading and two rises, minimum. But somehow, it turns out very satisfyingly—like a slightly denser, moister, meatier version of its kneaded counterparts. All in all, considering it involves five minutes of prep time, just under an hour and a half of waiting, and can be made with all local ingredients, I found it well worth my while, if a little unusual.

3 and 3/4 cup whole-wheat flour
2 tablespoons honey
2 cups very warm tap water
1 and 1/2 tablespoons yeast
1 tablespoon salt

Scoop the flour into a large mixing bowl. Put the bowl in a warm place—a gas oven with a pilot light, or next to the woodstove, or an electric oven on very, very low—and leave it there until both the flour and the bowl are warm. Once they are, dissolve the honey in 1/2 cup of the warm water and stir in the yeast. Let it proof for five minutes, or until the mixture starts to rise up and get bubbly.

Add another 1/2 cup of warm water to the yeast mixture, and stir it into the flour along with the salt. Mix well, adding the remaining cup of warm water and more as needed, until the mixture forms a moist, sticky dough. Transfer it into a buttered bread tin, cover it with plastic wrap, and set it in a warm place to rise. When the dough has increased in size by almost a third, preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. By the time it is warm, the dough should be a third again its original size, but should not spill over the top of the baking tin.

Bake the loaf for 35-45 minutes, or until the top is a deep brown and sounds hollow when tapped. Turn the oven off, tip the loaf from its pan, and return it to the oven to sit on the rack for another 15 to 20 minutes. This will help the bread develop and more distinct crust. Enjoy warm, with plenty of butter, or the next day alongside a bowl of soup.

Good for me

If I knew what was good for me, I would stop creating chocolate desserts. But because I don't, and because I come from a gene pool that created this:

I will be doing no such thing. Instead, I will continue to do things like what I did yesterday, which was to open a cookbook about whole grains and wind up arguing with my niece about who gets to lick the bowl where we mixed the chocolate and honey and eggs. 

The cookbook in question is by Maria Speck—Ancient Grains for Modern Meals. It is a very good cookbook, and it is not Maria's fault that I paged straight to the chapter called Sweet Endings. There are, in fact, lots of absolutely delicious looking recipes for things like lamb stew with wheat berries in red wine sauce and homemade spelt fettuccine that I have bookmarked for another day. But yesterday I had no choice but to inaugurate the book with a rendition of her dark chocolate truffle tart with walnuts.

Where are the whole grains? you ask. In the crust! It's not the book's most adventurous recipe—many use the whole berry and call for grains like rye and barley and amaranth—but the whole wheat and butter tart crust is easy and delicious. 

The chocolate filling caught my eye because it is sweetened mainly with honey. I find dessert recipes with honey hard to come by in American cooking, but Maria seems to use it in all of her sweets, crediting Greek heritage. It also calls for milk and butter and walnuts and eggs, all of which we have been eating a lot of around here (walnuts because they're tasty and good for Sally's brain).

So without further ado, I'd like to introduce the dark chocolate walnut tart of your dreams. If you know what's good for you, you'll make it without delay.

WHOLE WHEAT & BUTTER TART CRUST

Maria manages to make this all whole-wheat by using "white whole wheat flour" and "whole wheat pastry flour," but frankly I don't have the patience or the pantry for these sorts of things. I used part whole wheat flour that I ground myself from our grain CSA and part all-purpose, and the crust came out wonderfully. Do what you please.

3/4 cup whole wheat flour (Maria calls for white whole wheat)

1/2 cup all-purpose flour (Maria calls for whole wheat pastry flour)

1 teaspoon sugar

1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt

7 tablespoons chilled butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

4-6 tablespoons ice water

Pulse together the flours, sugar, and sea salt in a food processor. Add the butter and 4 tablespoons of the water—give this mixture 8-10 pulses. If it seems to be coming together, stop. If it doesn't, add more water and pulse a few more times. 

Dump the mixture out onto a lightly floured work surface. Form it into a ball, then work it into a disk about 1-inch thick. Use a rolling pin to roll it into a 12-inch circle, roughly 1/8-inch thick. Carefully transfer the dough to a 9 and 1/2-inch fluted tart pan (you know, the type with a removable bottom), and press the dough against the edges. Use your fingers to press off and trim any excess dough from the top, prick the dough about a dozen times with a fork, cover it with plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge to chill. Leave it alone for at least 2 hours or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Put the tart pan on a cookie sheet so it doesn't drip butter and start a fire in your oven. Cut a circle of parchment paper roughly the size of the pan and place it in the middle of the crust. Fill it with pie weights or dried beans.

To partially bake the crust, put it in the oven for about 15 minutes, then check it. If the edges have started to pull away from the pan and crisp up, take out the parchment paper and pie weights (carefully! they get hot!) and return the crust to the oven for another few minutes. When the bottom is a little more crisp, take it out and let it cool to room temp.

DARK CHOCOLATE TART WITH WALNUTS

On to part two! It is rare that things I make at home actually look just as good as the pictures in the cookbooks, but this one came out as promised. It is beautiful, delightfully rich, and all around a chocolate-lover's winner.

1/2 cup light brown sugar

1/4 cup whole milk

1/2 cup honey (I used a spring honey, which is fairly mild and runny)

6 ounces dark chocolate (70% cacao), chopped

1/2 stick butter

2 tablespoons nice liqueur (Maria suggested Grand Marnier; I used Chambord and kicked myself afterward for not thinking of the homemade pear liqueur we have downstairs!)

1 tablespoon freshly grated orange or lemon zest

1 teaspoon vanilla 

2 large eggs plus 1 yolk, beaten together

2/3 cup coarsely chopped toasted walnuts

12 toasted walnut halves, for garnish

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. 

Whisk together the sugar and milk over medium heat. When the sugar is dissolved (about 5 minutes), add the honey and whisk another minute until this dissolves too. Turn off the heat and set aside.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a double boiler; then set aside to cool for five minutes. 

Meanwhile, stir the liqueur, zest, and vanilla into the honey/sugar/milk mixture. Stir this into the chocolate, then whisk in the eggs—the mixture will thicken slightly and look like chocolate pudding.

Layer the chopped toasted walnuts over the bottom of the tart crust and spoon the chocolate filling over top, making sure to spread it evenly around. Bake the tart for 15 minutes, then pull it out to arrange the 12 toasted walnut halves around the edge (like clock numbers). Cook another 8-10 minutes, or until the filling is puffy around the edges and just jiggly in the center. Pull it out and let it cool completely before serving (at least an hour and a half). 

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.

An extra large pot

I am a firm believer in the power of soup.

A good soup, I am thoroughly convinced, can fix a lot of things. And in the past few weeks, I've heard of quite a few people in need of help.

For starters, there's Alex. We spent yesterday in the emergency room at Cape Cod hospital. Everything is fine—he just got boarded at his Sunday morning hockey game is all—and they thought he might have broken his clavicle, or maybe a few ribs. But he didn't, and although it hurts when he breathes deeply and his arm is in a sling and he is acting just the slightest bit loopy from all the vicodin, in the big scheme of things, he is a-okay. Groovy, really, compared to what could have been.

There's also the issue of my father. Last week, he broke his nose playing basketball. (Clearly, we need to do something about these mens leagues!) My mother took him to the doctor, who told him he would have to wait a week for the swelling to go down, and then, once he was starting to feel a little better, they would have to break his nose all over again. They recommended he go under general anesthesia for all this, but he courageously declared that if women can endure childbirth, than surely he could do this. (Go PAPA!)

There have been other people we know, too, weathering more difficult things. There's my mother's friend who just had a (successful! curing!) double mastectomy, and Alex's aunt who just survived open-heart surgery. But of course, none of these really compare to the main event going on down in Haiti. Figuring out how to respond to a crisis like that is going to take a lot more than soup.

There is so much to do in Haiti that it's hard to know where to start. People injured in the earthquake need medical help, of course, and food and water most urgently. Children need to be reunited with their families and parents need help searching for aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and grandparents. Even more overwhelmingly, in the long term, a whole society needs to be rebuilt. This will take money and materials and laborers, and it will also take time. Internationally, everyone will contribute what they can, and eventually we will get the job done.

But in the meantime, it's hard to know what to do. Nothing heals overnight—not a country of survivors, or a broken nose, or an opened-up heart. I'm not much good at flowers, or get-well balloons, or even always cards, but I can always make soup. I made a batch this weekend—sautéed onions and carrots and mushrooms and sausage with a rich red wine and beef broth and thick blooms of kale and red kidney beans and farro hanging about. I brought some over to Alex's aunt, and I sent the recipe to my mom to make for my dad, and I heated Alex up a bowl when we got home from the hospital last night. If I could send an extra large pot down to Haiti, I would.

It isn't much, I know, but it's what I know how to do, and it comes with the best of hopeful thoughts in mind.

FARRO SOUP
with sausage, dinosaur kale, and kidney beans

The thing I like about this soup is that it is both delicious and truly good for you. There isn't an unhealthy bone in its build—unless you count the sausage, which I don't so long as it comes from a pastured, anti-biotics-free pig. The only unusual ingredient is the farro, an ancient variety of wheat also known as emmer. We discovered it through the grain CSA we joined this year (thanks to Andrea! more on that soon!), but it is also fairly readily available at health food stores. If you can't find it locally, barley would make a fine substitute. Also, we used ground pork sausage for the meat, because that was all we had, but I have a feeling if you had something more Italian sausage or kielbasa-like, it would make an excellent replacement. Oh! and one more thing: for the mushrooms, we used dried and then rehydrated shiitakes from Julie Winslow, but any other dried mushroom with the same depth of flavor and heft, like a porcini or an oyster, would be fine.

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup yellow storage onions, chopped
1/2 cup carrots, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon rosemary, fresh or dried
1/2 pound pork sausage
1/2 cup mushrooms, coarsely chopped
salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste
1 cup crushed tomatoes
1 cup red wine
3 cups beef broth, preferably homemade
6 ounces uncooked farro, rinsed and soaked overnight
1/2 pound kale, coarsely chopped
optional, but good: some sort of cheese for topping (grated Parmesan, feta, chevre, etc.)

Heat up the oil in a large, heavy-bottomed soup pot. Sauté the onions over medium-high heat for about five minutes on their own, then turn the heat down to medium and add the carrots, the garlic, and the rosemary. When the vegetables have taken up most of the oil and the onions are translucent, add the sausage. Wait a minute or so until it starts to brown, then add the mushrooms and salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste. Continue cooking, stirring frequently, for another three minutes or so, until the mushrooms soften and the sausage is cooked through.

Add the crushed tomatoes, the red wine, the beef broth, and the farro, cover the pot, and bring the soup to a boil. Turn the heat down to simmer and continue cooking, stirring and tasting occasionally, until the farro is almost tender, about 45 minutes. At this point, add the kale, and season the soup again with salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste. Simmer the soup, still covered, for another 15 minutes or so, or until the farro is soft and chewy. Serve the soup hot, and if you decide to go for the cheese, sprinkle it on top.

Pea tendrils: Silverbrook Farm yields the first greens of the season

Today marked the end of my winter countdown. The first farmers' market of the season is always a turning point—the day when the first leafy edibles emerge and our waning faith in summer becomes tangible once again.

So when the morning of the first two markets of the season dawned cool and rainy early today, my mood sank. I had eaten the last of the butternut squash, the last gnarled hunk of celeriac, even the last cranberry. I couldn't wait much longer.

A phone call to the Chocolate Sparrow in Orleans confirmed my disappointment; no white tents were to dot the mid-Cape parking lot this morning. By noon, however, the clouds had scattered. I jumped into the Volvo hell bent on an afternoon trip to Provincetown's Ryder Square.

A quarter hour later I stood beneath a white plastic canopy listening to Silverbrook Farm representative Andy Pollock extol on the virtues of a strong-yolked egg. "A really dark orange means the chickens are eating well," he explains. "Plenty of organic matter."

One woman is searching through the cartoons in hopes of finding a "double." Pollock points her in the direction of his jumbo brown eggs, which he says are more likely to have the double yolk she is hoping for. Some attribute the tendency to lay the long, thin double yolks to genetics, some to good health, and others to a unsynchronized production cycles. Pollock attributes his lucky finds to the hens' good health. "If you find one," he adds, "let us know."

The other producers at the market are equally full of farm-tales and tidbits. I taste a cheese made by two very shy brothers whose mother sent them to France learn to make this one sought-after variety, a handful of pea greens, and a scoop of smoked bluefish dip.

By the time I have made my way through the ten odd stands, my belly is full with local foods and my bags heavy with the week's menu. It has taken me longer to complete my shopping in the square than at the grocer's, perhaps, and I have likely spent more per item. But I have picked up more, too; I learned the lore behind a double-yolked egg, buried my nose in a barrel of Cape grown lavender, and chatted with a dozen friends and neighbors.

This, I remember, is what food shopping should be: a cacophony of tastes and voices open to the air and the sway of the season. It's good to be back.

SIX GRAIN CROSTINIS WITH PEA TENDRILS, THIMBLE CHEESE, AND AGED BALSAMIC

Makes 4 small crostini

Toast 2 slices Danish Pastry House six grain bread; cut in half diagonally. Spread each triangle with one Rosemary Hannahbell from Shy Brothers' Farm (about one tablespoon of soft, briny cheese). Top with pea tendrils and several drops of sweet aged balsamic vinegar. Enjoy immediately as an appetizer or light lunch.

Pizza & pups

Today is my due date. You are not going to get a cohesive sentence out of me, so let's try pictures instead.

Puppies! No Baby Hay yet, but we bred Fisher in July, and his little ones have arrived. My sister and her boyfriend and I went to see them this weekend, and they did a fairly good if temporary job of satisfying our need to snuggle with a small mammal. They're almost four weeks old, big enough to open their eyes and wobble around and chew on each other's chins and tails, but not big enough to do much else. There are five black ones, two yellows, and one tired nursing mama. Fisher came in and took a sniff, but he seemed pretty scared of the whole situation, and quickly backed out. We spent the rest of the weekend teasing him for being such a deadbeat dad.

Oh! and we made pizza.

I'd been wanting to make homemade pizza for a while, and I finally found a good recipe for whole wheat crust. Alex's nieces were over, and my sister was visiting, and it seemed like the perfect night. The only thing was, we didn't have any of the traditional pizza toppings on hand—the tomato sauce was all tucked into the freezer, the basil was dwindling, and there wasn't even a ball of plain mozzarella in the fridge.

And so we went unconventional, and I am so, so glad that we did. Alex caramelized an onion, then stirred in some finely chopped rosemary and a good dollop of homemade fig butter to make a spread. He smoothed this on the crust, then layered on arugula, bits of cooked bacon, pieces of sauteed eggplant, goat cheese, and slices of fig and almond burrata from Kathleen Kadlik. It was sweet and savory all at once, and very, very good.

FIGGY BURRATA PIZZA

This is a pretty loose recipe. We used one ball of the whole wheat crust from the New York Times link up there, and I made fig butter from fresh figs, not dried, following Kim Boyce's recipe in Good to the Grain. This preserve is full of butter. If you use fig jam, be sure to add a few tablespoons of butter when you melt it with the onions.

1 ball whole wheat pizza dough at room temperature

cornmeal, for the peel

1 medium size onion, sliced thin

1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary

1/3 cup fig butter

olive oil

1 small eggplant, cut into thin strips

salt

a handful of torn arugula

4 strips cooked bacon, torn into 1/2-inch pieces

1 ball fig & almond burrata mozzarella

2-3 ounces chevre

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Roll out the dough as thin as you can. We used a half sheet pan, so we rolled ours into a rectangle, but obviously you should roll yours into whatever shape your pan is. Sprinkle the pan with cornmeal and lay the dough on top.

Caramelize the onion in a heavy skillet over medium-low heat. When it's tender, add the rosemary and fig butter and sauté another minute or so, until they're warmed through. Spread this mixture evenly across the pizza dough.

In the same skillet, warm up a glug of olive oil. Salt the eggplant slices and sauté until tender, about five to eight minutes. Layer the cooked eggplant strips evenly over the pizza. Do the same with the arugula, bacon pieces, and the two cheeses.

Bake the pizza for 15-20 minutes, or until the dough is crispy around the edges and the cheeses are bubbling. Enjoy hot.

The Local Food Report: the meat mobile

This cow belongs to our friends, George and Janet. He doesn't have a name, because one day, he will be dinner. Or rather, dinners. There's a lot of meat on those bones.

And that meat is grass-fed. (With a few dropped apples and extra heads of lettuce and stolen hay mixed in, to be sure.) But mostly grass-fed. Which means that Mr. Moo, for lack of a better name, will have to be cooked differently than your average cow. The meat most of us are used to—conventional beef, fed grain and raised in feed lots—cooks differently than grass-fed cuts. Mostly, what you need to know about cooking the sort of meat that would come from Mr. Moo is as follows:

1. You will need to get a meat thermometer, and learn how to use it.

2. You will need to turn down the heat.

3. You will need to learn a little bit more about dry-heat cooking methods and moist-heat cooking methods, to the point where you can decide which to use, when.

4. You won't need to use so many seasonings and sauces. A cut of grass-fed beef can stand up on its own.

All of this is important not because George and Janet have decided they are very generous and would like to give you some of their very own homegrown beef, although I'm sure they would if they knew you, but because we have a new meat vendor in town. Or in Cape, or however you want to say it.

Local, grass-fed meat can be hard to find on a consistent basis. There's Ocean Song Farm, which sells pastured chickens and turkeys and pork and sometimes lamb, and Border Bay Junction Farm, which offers up whole lambs from time to time, and deli cases in places like Far Land Provisions in Provincetown and How on Earth in Mattapoisett that sell cuts from Northeast Family Farms. But beef—chuck and Porterhouse steak and ground hamburger and bristket—good, grass-fed beef can be hard to find. Enter Joe Beaulieu, and his meat-mobile.

All summer, Joe has been showing up at the Sandwich Farmers' Market on Tuesday mornings from 9am to 1pm with every cut of pastured beef you can rattle off. He used to sell whole animals, sides and halves and that sort of thing, straight from his farm, but when the economy tanked off, the number of consumers willing to fork over $900 at a time for beef took rather a sharp downward turn. So he built himself an 8' by 8' by 20' wagon—picture an ice cream truck, or maybe a hot dog stand at the beach—threw in two freezers, a generator to power them, and an old Hobart scale, and turned his business plan around. He's gone mobile, so to speak.

And so far, so good. He raises roughly 20 head of cattle a year, has them processed at a USDA approved plant up in Sanford, Maine, and sells every cut imaginable at the market. (Twenty cows, according to Beaulieu, is roughly equivalent to 16,000 pounds, if you can imagine.) He also sells in Braintree, Bridgewater, and Fairhaven, which is where his farm is. He has 27 acres right off 195, where his cows live naturally, like happy cows, as he says. Business at the meat mobile has been excellent, and he says that everyone has come back for more—a lot of repeat customers—which he takes as a sign that he can go ahead and join in the happiness.

He's so encouraged, in fact, that he'll be taking winter orders even after the market shuts down and showing up at the Gallery Gourmet on 6A in Sandwich the second Saturday of every month, from noon to one, for pick-ups.

Just in case you're lucky enough to end up with a freezer as full as his—a cold cavern choc-a-bloc full of roasts and sirloins and hamburger with a good, creaky hinge—here's a recipe for inside-out cheeseburgers. There are also some cooking tips, but for more—because after all, a burger is not a roast is not a sirloin—check out the links all the way at the bottom. The first goes to a very interesting article in the Atlantic published back when the whole grass-fed idea was brand new (or rather, recycled new), and the second goes to the website of the woman who wrote the book the burger recipe is adapted from. It's all about how to cook with grass-fed beef, and it is, in the face of a meat mobile, necessary and excellent.

So enjoy, eat up, and I'll see you all soon.

BLUE STUFFED BURGERS

This recipe is one I adapted from The Grassfed Gourmet by Shannon Hayes a cookbook devoted entirely to how to cook with grass-fed meats. It was given to us as an engagement present and has proved an incredibly handy tool when trying to eat locally. The original recipe called for feta, but I am a firm believer in the merits of Great Hill blue cheese, so I swapped that in instead.

1/3 cup crumbled blue cheese
1 heaping tablespoon fresh oregano, minced
1/4 cup fresh spinach, finely chopped
1 pound grass-fed ground beef
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Mix the cheese, oregano, and spinach together in a small bowl. Divide the meat into four portions and make three patties, setting the extra portion aside. Place a third of the cheese and herb mixture into the center of each patty, pack a third of the extra meat on top of each, and reform the patties so that none of the stuffing is exposed. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cook using to the following tips.

1. Form the patty so that it is 3/4-inch thick on the edges and 1/2-inch thick in the center. (Yes, even with the stuffing inside). This will help the burgers cook evenly, and not puff up and become round.

2. Be sure that your pan is hot and that you coat it with a little bit of oil. This will help ensure that the meat doesn't stick and get left in the pan.

3. Pan fry the burger over medium-high heat for roughly 3 minutes a side and you will get a nice, crusty exterior and a juicy interior.

4. Don't press on them with a spatula as you cook, or you will squeeze out their juices.


To find out more about the health benefits of eating pastured meats, head on over here. And for more on cooking with grass-fed meats, check this out.