KALE RAAB & ASPARAGUS PIZZA // liz

I'm crazy about kale raab. Have you tried it? Quick, run to your farmers market and see if there's still some left! It's available only for a month or so in early spring, and we're getting close to the end of its run. I love to sauté it lightly with onions, then finish it off with a grind of sea salt, a dash of red pepper flakes, and sometimes a little grated Parmesan and lemon juice. So easy, so good.

I've also discovered that kale raab is a fine substitute for asparagus, including in my all-time favorite stir-fry. The stalks have a consistency surprisingly similar to that of asparagus spears. Happy day! Armed with this newfound knowledge, I knew just what to do when Anna and I were salivating over a Smitten Kitchen recipe for shaved asparagus pizza recently and didn't have enough asparagus: we used half kale raab and half asparagus. The result was excellent. What's more, I think we could easily have used all raab and had something just as tasty. 

The discerning eye will notice two discrepancies between the recipe and photo below. Where are the scallions, you ask? We had them all ready to go—and they were gorgeous, straight from the farmers' market that morning—but forgot to add them before we took the photo. Gah. More important, where is the mozzarella?! We'd just bought a beautiful, fresh ball, handmade in Vermont, but it turned out to be bad (a first, in my experience). Alas, we didn't discover this until we were ready to put it on the pizza and I happened to steal a nibble. A few expletives later, we were on our way with Plan B: a combination of feta and grated Parmesan. The pizza was delicious, but let's be honest: it would have been even better with mozzarella. Some days that's just the way things go. Fortunately, we know there will be a next time.

KALE RAAB & ASPARAGUS PIZZA

We tinkered with Deb Perelman's original recipe—of course. (Isn't that what recipes are for?) As for the dough, the sky's the limit. The recipe below is super quick and easy, but feel free to use whatever your own favorite is. As for the raab and asparagus, you can obviously use all of one or all of the other. I'm sure any other raab (broccoli, for example) would also work nicely.

First, the dough:

1 tablespoon active dry yeast

1 teaspoon honey

1 cup warm water 

2 1/2 cups bread flour (I use half whole wheat)

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons olive oil

In a medium-sized bowl, dissolve the yeast and honey in the warm water and let stand until it's nice and bubbly, about 5 minutes. Stir in the flour, salt, oil. Knead well or beat in a stand mixer with the dough hook (hello, e-a-s-y!) until smooth. Cover and let rest in a warm spot while you prepare the raab and asparagus. It's also time now to turn on your oven, to 450 degrees F.

Now, the rest:

1/2 pound total of asparagus and/or kale raab

2 teaspoons olive oil, plus a few extra teaspoons for drizzling on the dough

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

several grinds of black pepper

1/4 cup grated Parmesan

1/2 pound fresh mozzarella, sliced or cut into cubes

1–2 scallions, thinly sliced

Using a vegetable peeler and holding each asparagus spear by its sturdy end, peel the spears into thin shavings. (I was tempted to take a shortcut here and just dice it. Anna barked that I would not be doing that, and she was right. This is not the tedious task I thought it would be.) Gather your raab into a bunch and trim just the teeniest bit off the ends, then slice through the bunch at roughly 2-inch intervals. Put the asparagus shavings and raab in a medium-sized bowl and toss with the olive oil, sea salt, and black pepper. 

Roll out your dough and move it onto a lightly oiled or cornmeal-dusted baking pan or stone. Drizzle the dough with a few teaspoons of olive oil and then put on the mozzarella. Add the asparagus and raab and sprinkle with Parmesan. Bake in a preheated 450 degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes, until the cheese is just how you like it. Especially if your crust is all or partly whole wheat, be careful not to overcook or the crust will be too dry. Sprinkle with scallions, slice, eat, and happily say mmmmmmmmm.

RABE (RAAB) // the local food report

According to my friend Lucas, rabe is the new arugula. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it is delicious, and it's new to me. 

My mom called about a month ago to tell me that she'd made the discovery. "I just bought the best thing at the winter market!" she gushed. "Kale rabe!"

"What's kale rabe?" I asked. She explained that it's the little florets that pop up when kale overwinters and bolts, or goes to seed. It's kind of like broccoli rabe, except a little more sweet. "Great!" I told her. "I just cleaned out my greenhouse and filled up my compost with kale plants growing that exact same thing!"

Oh well. As my mom says, there's always next spring.

In the meantime I've found it at the markets here too. Four or five vendors had it at the first Orleans Farmers' Market of the season last Saturday, and a few had it this week in Wellfleet. And not just kale: turnips and collards too.

Rabe can be loosely defined as the flower bud of anything in the brassica family. This includes turnips, kale, cabbage, Asian greens, mustard greens, collards, and a handful of other veggies. They're biennial, which means they flower in the second year of their lifecycle. So when you overwinter these veggies—which many people do, since they're cold-hardy—you get flower buds the following spring. I've got turnip rabe outside as we speak. According to Ben Chung, a grower from East Orleans, the way to harvest it is to snap up the stalk until you get to the first spot where it's tender. That's the part you want, just like asparagus.

There are all kinds of delicious ways to eat it. Anna Henning of Redberry Farm in Eastham juices it with beets, limes, cucumbers, and carrots. My mom subs it for mizuna and bok choy in this tofu stir-fry recipe. Lucas grills it with olive oil and salt, and Ben Chung steams it and serves it with a little oyster sauce in the traditional Chinese way. I've got my eye on this kale rabe panini, and the other night I sautéed a whole bunch of collard rabe in some leftover bourbon sauce— amazing ! I think it would also be great in omelettes and really in any old recipe where you normally use asparagus or broccoli. 

What do you think? Have you tried it?

Winter harvest

I am planting like a mad woman. It began in the night, beneath a reading lamp with my dog and boyfriend fast asleep beside me. The only sounds as the clock ticked towards two a.m. were those of the pages turning, the trees howling, and the ebb and flow of my own breath.
















It was a book by Eliot Coleman that had me up. Four Season Harvest, it was called. A friend had turned me on to it, touting the text as a sacred book of sorts, a recipe for winter locavore survival in the universe beyond southern California. (You will notice, if you think through the most famous advocates of the trend—Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, even—that none of them lived in New England. Or really anywhere even close.) I have been drying and freezing and canning for winter, certainly, but I cannot expect us to live off of those provisions alone. There will have to be fresh food, too, and for that I had not yet devised a plan.

Until I met Eliot. With his seed lists and cold frames and construct-your-own root cellar diagrams, the winter gardening guru swept me off my feet. I lingered over his words until there was nothing left, until the only respite from learning was action itself. I hurried to the garden store in the morning, picked up a truckload of compost and a stack of seeding flats, and made my way home to place an order. Johnny's Selected Seeds, Eliot recommended. Arugula and claytonia and miner's lettuce and raddichio; evergreen scallions and kohlrabi and nero tondo black radishes. There were candy carrots and Asian specialty greens, celery and celeriac and broccoli raab. While the growing season might end, he reminded me, the harvest season need not.

Plenty of these crops could survive a hard frost. Frozen each night and thawed back to life during the day, they would remain fresh and hardy all winter long. Early spring varieties could be started now, too, ready to emerge once daylight returns.

It was revolutionary this idea of winter garden as Eden. The French do it, and the English, and others with our latitude and climate, but somehow in translation the tradition was lost. Without a custom of winter gardening, it is a difficult reality to grasp.

But there is only one way to begin, and that is to give it a try. I'm not expecting this year's harvest of tatsoi to keep us fed, but I do hope it will help point us in the right direction. Maybe if we spread the word, one of these seasons will bring a winter farmers' market. Until then here's a list of seeds and dates to start growing your own.

WINTER HARVEST PLANTING DATES*

*Note that these planting dates are for Coleman's farm in Maine, which has a slightly shorter season and harsher temperatures. I'd guess they can be extended at least a week, if not two, for Cape gardeners.

BROCCOLI RAAB 7/1 to 8/1
CABBAGE, CHINESE 7/15 to 8/1
CELERY/CELERIAC 7/1 to 8/1
CORNSALAD 8/15 to 9/15
CLAYTONIA 8/15 to 9/15
DANDELION (ITALIAN) 7/15 to 9/1
ENDIVE, ESCAROLE 7/1 to 8/15
GARLIC (FOR SPRING) 10/20
KALE ("WINTERBOR," "VATES") 7/1 to 8/1
KOHLRABI ("PURPLE KOLIBRI") 7/1 to 8/1
LETTUCE 7/15 to 9/1
MIZUNA 7/15 to 8/15
GREEN ONION ("EVERGREEN HARDY WHITE") 7/15 to 8/15
RADICCHIO 10/15 to 11/15
RADISH ("ROUND BLACK SPANISH") 7/15 to 9/15
SPINACH ("SPACE," "WINTER BLOOMSDALE") 8/1 to 9/1
SORREL 9/1