See you

Tomorrow. In Wellfleet; 355 Main behind Preservation Hall. 

We'll have cukes, squash blossoms, beans, peaches, fingerling potatoes, cherry tomatoes & big ones too! honey, zucchini, baked goods, greens, Pattypan squashes, eggs, basil, leeks, onion braids, pineapple tomatillos, and maybe, just maybe, Turkish eggplant. 

And this just in from our musicians: a few compostably packed home-made Wellfleet songs plus live music and a petition for green energy.

Be there! (8 to noon, rain or shine) —we will.

Ratatouille pie

Anonymous, are you out there? 

I got your note about the pie. I'm glad you wrote it, too, because I don't have much else to offer here today. Alex has been working like crazy, I've been working an extra shift, and we've both had enough family in town that we haven't had to cook much. We've been surviving on their kindness and simple salads from the garden: cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans. The salad dressing is homemade, and that's about as close to cooking as we get these days. 

Soon enough things will calm down—two weeks, I think—and when they do, ratatouille will be first on my list. I've got green peppers coming along in the garden and plenty of heirlooms, and I've seen the first of the eggplants and the big meaty onions at the market. 

I usually freeze all of my ratatouille, but this year, I think I'll make a pie fresh. Sally likes a good egg, and it'd be nice to serve it up with bacon and veggies and a pie crust that's homemade. 

When I do, Anon., I'll be thinking of you. Thank you for the reminder, and for being here, as always.

RATATOUILLE PIE

When I asked my mom for this recipe, she first told me she didn't have one. She did eventually dig it up, but the point is, it's very open to substitutions and variations. If you don't like bacon, it's perfectly good without it, although as a bacon fan I have to say it adds a nice hit of flavor. 

7 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled

2 cups ratatouille

1/4 cup grated cheese (cheddar or mozzarella both work well)

1 bottom pie crust, partially baked

4 eggs

1-2 tablespoons milk

1-2 tablespoons flour

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Combine the bacon, ratatouille, and cheese and spread this mixture over the bottom of the pie crust. Whisk the eggs, milk, and flour together in a small bowl and pour the egg mixture into the pie crust over the veggies. Bake for 40 minutes, or until the eggs are set and a big golden on top. Serve warm or chilled.

The Local Food Report: summer beans

There is a bean for everyone. There are beans for people with cool soil. There are beans for chefs. There are beans for grandmothers and there are beans for everyone in between. What's your bean profile? 

To find out, I made you a quiz. That's right, Seventeen style. Enjoy & report back! (If you click on the quiz, it opens up bigger in a new window.)

(You will note that the yellow Yes! variety is missing. You can find it below under Indy Gold. Sorry about that!)

Haricot Vert: These French fillet beans can be fussy. Chefs love them, but with most varieties you have to check on them and pick daily—or even hourly—to get them while they're the right size. 

Provider: Your grandmother's standby. Germinates well in cool soil and is resistant to many pests and fungi. A very high yielding variety with an early crop.

Empress: According to many seed catalogs, you have to plant this slightly later than Provider but it's just as good for yield and better for taste. Crisp and great for canning and freezing.

Royal Burgundy: Purple on the outside but green on the inside. Thanks to a chemical reaction these beans turn green when cooked. Crisp and nutty with great yield. Delicious!

Indy Gold: Comparable to Provider in terms of hardiness and yield and resistance; good for shelling or eating fresh.

Dragon Langerie: Flat purple and green streaked pods—stunning. Crisp and great for eating raw. 

We grew Masai Bush Haricot Vert this year. The bulk of our crop came in the other day, and to celebrate we made a nicoise salad. It seemed only fitting for a French fillet bean.

SALAD NICOISE

This is a summer salad by definition. It calls for fresh green beans, waxy new potatoes, local quail eggs, and pan-seared bluefin tuna. They key to the dressing is the anchovies, which provide a serious kick of salt. 

1 recipe anchovy vinaigrette (see below)
2 6 oz tuna steaks
salt and pepper
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 head butter lettuce, washed and torn
a handful of parsley leaves
1 pound new potatoes, scrubbed, diced, and boiled til tender
a handful of capers
8 hardboiled quail eggs, peeled and halved
a handful of cherry tomatoes, halved
1 pound haricot vert or fresh green beans

Season the tuna with salt and pepper. Warm up a skillet or cast iron griddle over high heat; pour on the oil and let that warm up. Sear the tuna for about 2 minutes per side. Set the fish aside.

In a large bowl, toss together the butter lettuce, parsley, and anchovy vinaigrette. Layer on top the new potatoes, capers, quail eggs, cherry tomatoes, haricot vert, and tuna. Serve at once.

ANCHOVY VINAIGRETTE

2 large garlic cloves, peeled and minced
1/2 small shallot, minced
2-4 anchovy fillets
salt, pepper, and parsley to taste
juice of 1/2 lemon
2 tablespoons warm water
a pinch of sugar
1/2 cup olive oil.

Pulse all ingredients together in a blender until well-mixed.

We're here. You?

The Local Food Report: gourmet trucks

J'aime Sparrow thinks that fast food should also be local and fresh. 

Here she is, peeking out the window of the new food truck she and her husband Christian opened on the side of Route 6 in Wellfleet. He's a designer; she's a chef, and together they've created a road side restaurant that is tasty, affordable, and stocked almost entirely with local food. They're working with people like Ron Backer and Lucas Dinwiddie in Brewster, Peter Burgess in Truro, and Andrew Cummings in Wellfleet. Right now the menu looks like this:

And they're not the only ones. Heidi Pleso opened a gourmet food truck called Fiddlestix in Sandwich, where she's serving up things like an all-local Caprese salad with mozzarella from Fromage A Trois and Crow Farm veggies.

The gourmet food truck movement started in New York City and Los Angelos, but lo and behold it has made its way to the east coast, Paris, and even Cape Cod. Last year, Zagat even added a food truck review category. 

There was supposed to be a food truck festival at the Barnstable County Fairgrounds at the end of August, but unfortunately our leg of the journey was cancelled. (The tour is still going on, though, and is getting as close as Rhode Island, Hingham, and Framingham, so check here for dates and locations around New England.)

You can find out current menu and location info for Sunbird and Fiddlestix on Facebook. You can see a photo gallery and read more about top gourmet food trucks around the country over here, and there's more about the movement over here.

At the market this week

Blackberries, potatoes, tomatoes. Oh my! 

All ours

I was standing in the kitchen the other night, pressing garlic to add to a pan of mashed potatoes, when I realized everything for dinner had come from our garden. 

There was garlic—I planted two long rows last fall, just after Sally was born. I pulled the heads a few weeks ago, when the tops started to yellow and fall over, after we cut the scapes, and dusted them off and brought them in. I cured them in the basement next to the dehumidifier, and this week, I trimmed them and peeled off the purple- and dirt-bruised skins.

There were potatoes—new potatoes from the patch we planted in mid March. They were leftovers, boiled and put in the fridge, and now mashed and pan-fried with butter and garlic.

There was also zucchini—from last year's garden, pulled from the freezer upstairs to make room for this year's batches. It was shredded for zucchini bread, but we had company and I was worried we wouldn't have enough potatoes, so I mixed it in to stretch them.

There was a salad of arugula, carrots, and radishes.

And it was all ours! It made me grin.

PAN-FRIED POTATOES WITH ZUCCHINI AND GARLIC

There is nothing fancy about this dish; it's comfort food, through and through. I made it with leftover boiled new potatoes and very fresh garlic. If your garlic is older, you may need to use more—I find the flavor is stronger when it's fresh.

3-4 tablespoons butter

2 pounds potatoes, diced, cooked til fork-tender, and drained

1/2 cup shredded zucchini

2 large cloves garlic, minced

sea salt and fresh cracked pepper to taste

Melt the butter in a large, cast iron skillet over medium heat. Add the potatoes and squish them a bit. (I used a pastry cutter, but you probably have a better tool.) Mix in the zucchini and the garlic and turn the heat down to low. Cook, stirring every once in a while, for 15-20 minutes. The potatoes should get a little bit crispy in spots, but mostly stay soft—like underdone homefries. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve hot.

The Local Food Report: from egg to bird

Their names are Sheldon and Egglantine. They're Susan Knieriem's baby chicks—Miss Scarlett's—and they came Saturday to the market in Orleans. They were only a few days old—Silver Sussex or Wyandottes—Susan wasn't sure. They got their names from Heather's girls—Heather who sells the healthy baked goods, the muffins and scones. Those two toted the chicks around all morning, opening up their basket of sawdust and feed and water for people to peek. 

I am kicking myself for not bringing my camera with me. 

If you can picture it though, they were palm size, pale gray and fluffy. Tiny beaks. Here's Susan, to give you something.

She and I got to talking, and I learned a lot about raising chicks like Sheldon and Egglantine. 

Susan does it using an old-fashioned incubator—can you hear her?—a fabulous old antique. The trays come in and out and it looks like an old wooden icebox, she says, and it holds about 100 eggs. She collects the fertile ones—which is most of them since she's got roosters—and dates them and lays them on the trays. There's a bit of water for moisture—temperature is important, and so is humidity—and the incubator keeps things around 100 degrees. After 21 days the eggs hatch. Susan's in the barn, doing something else, and suddenly she hears it. peep. Peep. PEEP. PEEP! Babies.

She raises different varieties for eggs and meat. There are dual purpose birds—birds that are good layers and good for eating—but Susan prefers to choose most of her varieties very specifically. For layers she likes Araucana and Rhode Island Red and White Leghorn and Polish and Cuckoo Marans—these give her blues and whites and chocolate browns, so she gets a good color variety—and Label Rouge (which is a method) for meat. 

I'd like to get hens here eventually. I like the idea of dual purpose birds—breeds that we could raise as layers and for meat. And I like the idea of going for an old breed—one that hasn't had the mothering instincts bred out of it, one whose hens would sit on the eggs, who are broody.

Harvey Ussery—have you ever read him?—recommends keeping a few broody hens in with more productive layers. The old-fashioned, broody breeds will take care of anybody's eggs (he recommends Old English Game, Kraienkoppes, and Malay, to name a few) so you can easily incubate and hatch all sorts of different varieties of chicken. You don't have to do the work of incubating and mothering, but you can still keep a good number of more productive layers (a hen who is broody won't lay while she's incubating, or even while she thinks she's incubating) around for consistent egg production.

I'm just getting into this. I'm guessing many of you know more about keeping chickens than I do—my sister-in-law, for starters—but I'm curious. Do you keep hens? What breeds do you like? Do you have a rooster? Do you get your chicks in the mail, or do you raise your own flock from eggs? Do you feed them cereal? Keep them in a chicken tractor? I'd love to hear.

It's high

It's high season at the market. Say hello to:

Garlic, baked goods, peaches, cucumbers, leeks, chard, onions, garlic, beans, honey & bee balm, cut flowers, squash, eggs, mint, kale, carrots, beets, mixed greens, arugula, basil, parsley, all sorts of seedlings, blueberries, the first cherry tomatoes of the season, and possibly even blackberries.

It's going to be a good week.

They're in

Those dark sweet berries on the old dirt road. Sally and I walk over every afternoon with the dog; we bring old strawberry-stained quart containers in a basket and a hat to keep the prickers from my hair. 

I am allowed to leave the stroller parked on the edge of the gully and venture down under one condition; I must come back sporadically, every handful or two, and feed the beast. One berry at a time, stains on her face and thighs. Now she's squeezing juice down her fists; now she's sucking seeds from her toes.

What have your afternoons been like?