This morning

Denya's playing, the sun is shining, and here's what's for sale:

Pies! (gluten free and regular ol'), chocolate meringues, banana bread, pumpkin jam, tomatillo jam, BACON jam, Corno di Toro sweet peppers, Bee Body Balm, Seckel pears, pineapple tomatillos, arugula, eggplant, peppers, squash (including some big blue Hubbards!), cucumbers, tomatoes, parsley, kale, basil, and a whole lot more. Come on down and join us—

              355 Main Street, 8 to noon, behind Preservation Hall in Wellfleet.

After three

Good morning. We've got pot roast in the oven, the sun's out, and pretty soon we're going to take Fisher for his walk. The house is cool, the dahlias are in full bloom, the lawn is mowed, and on Saturday, we picked 4 pounds of green and purple beans from the garden. Things are good around here.

We've been on a bean kick. Beans, tomatoes, and arugula are pretty much all the garden's turning out right now, so all three have become a staple at meal times. It can be hard to get creative with green beans, mainly because with a little butter and salt it's hard to go wrong. But the other day I came across this recipe, and I think after three lunches straight I can officially declare myself an addict. Sally too. 

We hope you'll join us soon.

GREEN BEANS WITH LEEKS & DILL

Heidi never fails me. This combo sounded unlikely, but the second I smelled the dill I knew she was spot on. I've used haricot vert and those purple beans up there, and I think pretty much any time of summer bean would be good. Just adjust the cooking time depending on how big they are, as they'll need more or less time to cook through. 

olive oil

4 leeks, washed, trimmed, and sliced into 1/4-inch rings

1/3 cup fresh dill, finely chopped

3/4 pound green (or purple or yellow) beans, tops and tails trimmed and cut into 1-inch lengths

sea salt to taste

Warm up a big splash of olive oil in a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the leeks and a bit of salt and sauté, stirring often, until the leeks are browned and tender. (This should take about 7-10 minutes.) Add the dill and the green beans and cook another few minutes, until the beans are just tender. Serve hot.

Note: One day I tossed the hot beans in a bowl with a handful of arugula, a bit of chevre, and a little glug of sesame oil, and it made a delicious lunch! Worth a try if you want to stretch this into a meal.

The Local Food Report: Emerald gems

How about this! for a melon seed description: "Altogether un-approached in flavor and luscious beyond belief." 

The review comes from an old Burpee's customer—someone back in the late 1800s, when the Emerald Gem you see up there was first released. W. Atlee Burpee got the seed from a farmer in Benzie County, Michigan in 1886, and word of the delicious melon spread like wildfire.

My friend Victoria's growing it this year, and she chose it for its flavor and for more practical reasons—it's a fast growing melon, and one that doesn't need a lot of space. We've got a short season and she's got a small garden, so she figured why not? So she planted it underneath her tomato vines, and now that they're dying back, it's growing up. 

The melons are tiny—2 or 3 pounds each, and they look like miniature ribbed cantaloupes. The smell is amazing—sweet, earthy, musky, even. (That comparison, of course, is where muskmelons get their name.) The flesh is a deep wild-salmon orange, and the taste is incredibly sweet. Kids were eating them at the market last week with spoons, slurping the juice out where it pooled in the bottom. 

If you ask me, they're a keeper.

We're here!

It's rainy with a warm breeze, I know, but once you roll yourself out of bed stop by and see us. The market is inside this week, between the four beautiful walls of Preservation Hall. It's tomato heaven with coffee and music to boot. We'll see you soon!

Silky & warm

It's been a long time since I cooked something that really stopped me in my tracks. It's not that we haven't been eating well. We've been eating meals that are good both in the sense that they taste good and they're healthy, but they've all been incredibly simple. 

The thing is, it's hard work taking care of a very small determined person. There is considerably more vacuuming and mopping to do now that there is someone who essentially lives on our floor. Between the general messiness and the diapers, I do at least three times more laundry. It is also significantly more important that meals be healthy, consistent, and timely, and so I end up cooking what I know. 

That's been nice in a lot of ways. I like having a repertoire, a routine. I remember the meals my mom cooked regularly when I was little, and they still make me feel safe and comfortable. I will never eat pesto, for instance, without memories of home.

But it's also nice to come out of the fog every once in a while. The other day I bought two eggplants at the farmers' market in Orleans, planning to make a regular: Eggplant Parmesan. Then I got home and thought—You know what?—no! I went online and started brainstorming, cruising websites, and got inspired. The inspiration came, of all places, from a Martha Stewart slideshow. (The eggplant salad with chickpeas and feta looks good too, no?)

The recipe was for roasted eggplant and chickpea soup. The ingredient list was incredibly simple: eggplant, onion, garlic, chickpeas, chicken stock, olive oil. Salt. I decided to give it a go, and the resulting soup was delightful. It was rich and silky and warm at a time of year when the nights are starting to get a chill. 

ROASTED EGGPLANT AND CHICKPEA SOUP

Eggplants won't be here for long, but I think this recipe would freeze well. It's from Martha Stewart, and it's comfort food, but also unusual. We ate ours with a big green salad and some toasted homemade bread with butter.

2 medium eggplants, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces

1 small onion, peeled and diced

2 garlic cloves, peeled and minced

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil plus 2 tablespoons
salt and pepper

2 cups cooked chickpeas

1 quart chicken broth (I used homemade with no salt, if yours has sodium in it be careful with the seasoning above)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Toss the eggplant, onion, and garlic together in a large bowl. Season with salt and pepper. Arrange in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet, and roast for about 30 minutes, until the eggplant is soft. Meanwhile, toss the chickpeas with the remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil. Spread these over another rimmed baking sheet and bake until they are golden and slightly crisped, about 25 minutes. Set aside. 

Transfer the eggplant mixture into a soup pot, add the chicken broth, and bring to a simmer. Use a potato masher or a pastry cutter to mash up the eggplant until the soup is thick and chunky. Stir in the chickpeas and serve hot.

The Local Food Report: starts & seeds

You know what? It's not too late. You can throw your squash vines in the compost (R.I.P, butternuts) and try to kill the army of borer beetles and what the heck even rip your spent tomatoes out, but it is Not Over Yet. There's still time! There are cold loving plants!

Natalie at Bayberry gave me the rundown the other day. She does all the ordering for the fall seedlings and seed packet sales at the nursery, and she's got some real gems. My personal favorite is Veronica Cauliflower.

Have you ever seen it? It looks like something out of science fiction. The florets are bright lime green and they swirl and point. Natalie thinks it looks like dinosaur horns. However you want to describe it, the taste is mild and sweet and a little bit nutty and a big hit. It's a bit late to start Veronicas from seed, but Natalie has starts.

Beets are another story. Natalie says beets are always better from seed—she likes Jewel-Tone and her dad likes Detroit Red and they also have a few packets of Early Wonder kicking around. Natalie says beets also like bonemeal and plenty of water, that if they dry out they can get a cavity inside. 

Then of course there are greens. Arugula and kale (lacinato up there and curly leaf are Natalie's picks) and lettuces of every shape and sort. For kale you want starts, but Natalie says it's not too late to start arugula and lettuce from seed. She recommends picking a looseleaf variety for lettuces, something that doesn't take as long as the heading varieties like Tom Thumb or Romaine. That way you can start cutting individual leaves pretty early on.

Finally, it's not too late for fennel or bush beans. Fennel will overwinter or stick around until you decide it's time to pull it out, and bush bean starts planted now will produce through the end of fall. 

Things around here are starting to wind down. The squash vine borer beetles hit us hard, and while we have arugula and fava beans coming in and kale and turnips in the ground, there's not much else going on. But Natalie's got me thinking, and what I'm thinking about is a second wind. The tomatoes are about done, the vines will be out of the hoophouse soon, and what's to stop me from transplanting baby lettuces and bean starts in? 

Bring on the seeds and let's march into fall.

ARUGULA BISQUE

It sounds unlikely, I know. But Natalie swears it's delicious, and so does her sister. It comes from their aunt, Christy Milliken.

1 onion, peeled and chopped

6 stalks celery, chopped

1 leek, trimmed and thinly sliced

1-2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

olive oil

1/2 pound arugula

1/2 pound spinach

6 cups chicken stock

1 stick butter

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup heavy cream

Sauté the onion, celery, leeks, and garlic in a little bit of olive oil in a big pot over medium heat. When the veggies are soft and translucent, add the arugula and spinach and stir until wilted. Next, add the chicken stock and bring to a boil. In a separate melt the butter and slowly whisk in the flour to make a roux. Stir the roux into the soup to thicken it, then add the heavy cream. Puree with an immersion blender until smooth. Add more stock if needed. Season with salt and pepper and serve hot. 

Un-interrupted sunshine

It may be August and it may be hot and you may be tired but people RISE AND SHINE! Our farmers' are bringing it in, and now more than ever is the time to stop by. We'll be behind Preservation Hall from 8am to noon, rain or the predicted 73 degrees of pure un-interrupted sunshine. (Amora too.)

Here's what to expect for your meal planning this week:

cherry tomatoes, regular size tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, peaches, Okinawan purple sweet potatoes, yams, fingerling potatoes, squash blossoms, squash, eggs, pole beans, bush beans, eggplants, leeks, purslane, honey, mint, tomatillos, three kinds of pesto, tomatillo salsa, BEACH PLUM JAM, celery, red cabbage, hot peppers, sweet peppers, Turkish eggplants (think tiny plastic jack-o-lanterns), blackberries, and kale (pending a cessation of the rain). 

Oh! and if you're having a dinner party, you don't have to bake. Anabel, Marissa, and Michelle have got you covered with pies in every size and plenty of homemade sweets. 

Happy Labor Day week!

A taste of it

You can feel the change. I wore pajamas to bed last night, and when Alex left for work early this morning, I pulled on another quilt. Sunrise on it's still summer, though. There are still green beans coming in from the garden and there's corn at the markets and the other day we had a classic Cape Cod lobster dinner. 

It was a nice way to pretend, for a few hours, that we're on vacation here. That we're not up early and late and secretly, in a wistful way, counting down the hours til Labor Day. We boiled lobsters and corn and steamed green beans with butter, and then we made a big dish of potato salad. We had beer and chocolate chip cookies with vanilla ice cream for dessert, and when we were done we went straight to bed without doing a single dish. 

It was magnificent.

The next day we had three lobsters left over, and today my sister and I picked the meat and made a top-notch lobster salad. It was a good way to keep the feeling going: leftover melted butter from dipping, a touch of mayo and lemon juice, and a small red onion, sliced thin. We are eating it as I type—Sally's flinging onions from her high chair, Anna's stealing mouthfuls as she clears the dishes, and I'm taking bites in between sentences. We are not, after all, on vacation. Still, it's awfully nice to get a taste of it.

LOBSTER SALAD WITH BUTTER, MAYO & RED ONION

I like my lobster salad simple. This version pairs particularly well with sliced tomatoes and cucumbers and a nice tangy vinaigrette. 

2 and 1/2 cups chopped lobster meat (from about three 1 and 1/4 to 1 and 1/2 pound bugs)

1 small red onion, finely chopped

2 tablespoons melted butter (we used the leftover from dipping lobster meat when we ate them whole the day before)

2 tablespoons mayonnaise

a squeeze of lemon juice

a pinch of sea salt

Toss together all the ingredients until the lobster is evenly coated with dressing and well mixed with the onions. Serve at once.

The Local Food Report: county garden

There's a demonstration garden at the Barnstable County Fairgrounds in East Falmouth. It's an educational exhibit, and it's always open to the public. You ought to go check it out in person—it's a county resource, and it's fantastic. But just in case you have to work for the rest of August or the traffic's too much, let's take a virtual tour:

We're standing in the middle of nine raised beds. The one you see up there is full of soybeans, and the one behind us is freshly planted with chard and lettuces. You can see Russ Norton, horticultural educator for the county, giving them some water below.

You can also see the six huge high bush blueberry plants behind him. They're on the outside of the area where the raised beds are, surrounded on all sides by chicken wire and fence. They're very, very well protected. 

There are also red and white onions:

and purple cabbage:

and sweet potatoes:

Who would have thought they grew like that, in a big tangle of vines? I didn't even realize sweet potatoes grew here, this far north, on Cape Cod without a miracle or a greenhouse.  So long as you get right varieties, they do great. (Those are Bonita, Evangeline, and Beauregard.) 

Same goes for artichokes. Russ says the varieties that do well here are Violetto and Imperial Star:

The garden was also sporting the most fantastic tomato cages I've seen in a long time. They were homemade, built out of stakes, and about 10 feet high. 

I left this place pretty inspired. What do you think? Will you plant ground cherries next year? Build tomato cages? Plant a bed of sweet potatoes and embrace the vines? 

8.27.12 Here's a P.S. photo for anonymous! 

The Local Food Report: blueberries & fowl

Remember Stan? He's still out in the fields at Coonamessett. He's still fighting the good fight—still tying up tomatoes and weeding leeks and tending hens. And he's still innovating. A few years ago he had a pile of fowl he wanted to put on pasture, but nowhere with a fence. He also had plans to fence off and net an acre of blueberries. He decided to kill two birds with one stone, and these days, when you go into the field to pick, there are turkeys pecking at your shoelaces.

Luckily they're friendly, and they don't eat too many berries beyond the drops. Even better, they are Stan's very own army of two-legged mowers, weedwackers (see page 14, front and center), and insectivores. Hurrah for the birds!

In terms of pest control, Stan's not sure exactly how much the birds are doing. They could be eating winter moths or helping with fruit flies (see the bottom left of page 9) or even the new spotted fruit flies that attack the fruit before it gets ripe. All he knows is he had a bumper crop of berries this year, and he's also raising some pretty fine pastured birds. It's a win-win-win. 

Which brings me to the jam. Last week our friends Teresa and Ed were renting out their house. That same week, Teresa received a 10 pound delivery of local berries from a friend. She didn't have a jam-ready kitchen, so she came over to use ours. I had to go to work, so she hung out with my parents and Sally while she cooked, and when I came home there were clean counters and five jars of anise-spiced blueberry jam. It is an experience I would like to have again.

Happily, I can relive it every time I eat the jam. Which will be generously and often, on hot griddle toast with butter-stained hands.

TERESA'S ANISE-SPICED BLUEBERRY JAM

I've never made blueberry jam. I learned from my mother, who makes strawberry and rhubarb and blackberry, and I guess it never occurred to me to put blueberries into anything other than crisps and pies and open hands. This is the jam to change that stance—sweet, big, with warm undertones of lemon and anise.

Teresa got her inspiration from the Blue Chair Jam Cookbook and the French confiture genius Christine Ferber. Finally, an interesting note about using unlined copper jam pots over here.

12 pints blueberries

5 pounds granulated sugar

1 and 1/2 cups lemon juice

2 "stars" of star anise

Combine the blueberries and sugar in a gigantic pot (alternatively, make two batches). Add the lemon juice and bring slowly to a simmer, stirring to be sure the jam doesn't scorch on the bottom of the pan. Once the sugar has dissolved, raise the heat to bring the jam to the boil. Let it bubble, stirring often. You can skim the firm foam that builds on top; as Teresa says, this gives you something to do while the jam jams. It takes about 15 minutes for the jam to begin to look less liquidy and for the juices to seem a little sticky. That's when it's done. Pack hot into hot sterilized jars.

Yield: about 20 pints.