The concept is this

Is anyone up for a lasagna today? I'm thinking a summer-in-the-winter, put-up pesto and tomato sauce and homemade bechamel type of gig. Takers? Yes? Ok.

There's only one hitch. I made this about a month ago, and although I can still remember the fabulous August brightness of the tomatoes and the way the pesto made me feel like maybe, just maybe it might be time for a pond swim that afternoon, I did not exactly write down the recipe. Not that I had a recipe to begin with, which is why I think this might be okay. The thing about lasagna is, you really don't need a recipe. You need to understand the concept, and the concept is this:

Find a box of noodles, the thick, flat kind with crinkly edges made for lasagna (or make some yourself). Get out a 9" by 13" casserole dish, and butter it up. Go down to your freezer, or open your pantry, and pull out a pint of that fantastic tomato sauce you made back when you couldn't even imagine the meaning of the words Wintery Mix. While you're at it, grab a half cup or so of the pesto you made with your neighbor's extra basil. Now root around in the fridge and hope for some milk, and butter, and mozzarella, and grab a few spoonfuls of flour and make a bechamel sauce. (Preferably this one, but if you have your own favorite, you just need a similar amount.)

At this point you could also get out some frozen spinach or pick some fresh from the greenhouse, and cook it down with a little bit of olive oil and garlic. Or maybe you have a freezer full of sundried tomatoes. Or, you could be into sauteed mushrooms. Whatever you're feeling here, go with it.


Finally, heat up a pot of water, add a pinch of salt, and boil those noodles. Now comes the hard part: drain the noodles, put them back in the pot, and drizzle some olive oil over them. The noodles will be hot, painfully hot, but if you're like me, you won't have any dishgloves so you'll go ahead and burn your hands, because you need to work quickly before they all stick together in a glob.

Spread a tiny blob of bechamel across the bottom of the casserole dish. Put a layer of noodles on top. Then a layer of tomato sauce, then more noodles, then maybe a few dollops of pesto and whatever vegetables you've got. Then another layer of noodles, and a smooth one of bechamel, and so on and so on. Until you've got a big, layered sandwich of tomatoes and noodles and pesto and vegetables and creamy, delightful sauce. Then, when you get to the top, layer on some slices of mozzarella and maybe even a bit of grated Parmesan.

And there you go. You've got yourself an oven-ready Winter-Into-Summer Lasagna. Happy Monday, everyone, and happy almost-March. Only 22 days until spring!

The Local Food Report: school lunch finances

Hi! Today's Local Food Report is the final piece in my three-part series on Island Grown Schools. We've talked about warm, locally baked snacks, and farming and gardening in the curriculum, and that was nice. But today, we need to talk about something a little more serious: the finances of getting local food into school lunch.

The way Noli Taylor, the coordinator for Island Grown Schools, explains it, school lunch works like this:

Most schools, across the country, have contracts to get their meals from corporate food service providers. These providers are big, often multi-national companies that provide meals to schools, hospitals, and prisons. They buy huge amounts of food from big, industrial farms at very low prices, making lunch inexpensive for the schools and profitable for the companies. Some schools have exclusive contracts, meaning they can only buy their food from the companies, and others have looser arrangements. Either way, school food budgets are based on these sorts of deals, which means there's very little money available for lunch.

Clearly, this is a national issue that needs attention. And as you probably know, it's getting it—through programs like Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard and First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign. But in the meantime, people like Taylor and organizations like Island Grown Initiative (or IGI, the Martha's Vineyard non-profit that works to increase supply and demand for locally grown food on the island and is behind Island Grown Schools) are working to get healthy, local food into school lunches whether there's funding or not.

Usually, there's not. But that hasn't stopped Taylor. She's set up meetings on the Vineyard between local farmers and food service directors so that they can talk about price and try to find places where island produce is affordable. It sounds far-fetched, but it turned out veggies like greens are actually cheaper on-island. And in the fall, when the tourists left and schools opened up, farmers were awash in extra produce and were willing to drop their prices for the school.

The most successful program, though, has been the Martha's Vineyard Gleaners. The term gleaning comes out of the industrial revolution, when farmers opened their fields after the harvest to the poor to come and glean whatever produce was left unharvested. Each fall now on the island, farms open their fields to community volunteers and students to collect food that wouldn't otherwise be harvested. Last fall, the gleaners collected over 6,000 pounds of local produce for school cafeterias on the island. Not only was this a lot of produce, but since it was free, there was more money in the budget to spend on other local food that might otherwise have been too expensive.

That's just on the Vineyard. Other schools in our area are making efforts to get local food into their cafeterias, too. Wellfleet Elementary School, for example, just put in a hoophouse last year and started an edible gardening curriculum this fall. And once a month, they open the cafeteria to me and my husband, where we cook up a local fish lunch with product donated from his company, Mac's Seafood. Truro Elementary is working with local farmer Dave Dewitt to put in an experimental bio-char garden, and the food service director there also buys from Dewitt. Gardens are popping up at other schools all over the Cape—Nauset High School is one example—and the school district in Westport buys produce from farms like Noquochoke Orchards in Westport and Quansett Gardens and Tavares Hillside Farms in Dartmouth.

Still, few places have as coordinated a program as what Island Grown Schools has going on the Vineyard. But Taylor's hoping that will change. There are ways to get local food into schools, she says, to get kids interested in growing and eating their own food, to get them to care about supporting their local farms. It's do-able, and she wants to help.

So if you're interested in starting a program like Island Grown Schools or just getting local foods on the radar in your school district, get in touch. Noli Taylor says she'd love to talk, and she can be reached at noli@islandgrown.org, or you can find out more on the IGI website.

Our favorite two

You are not going to believe me, but here goes:

We are still pulling carrots I planted on June 24th, almost seven months ago. I know! I wouldn't believe it myself, except that I wrote down the date in my gardening notebook, and that notebook does not lie. I wrote out the varieties—Purple Haze and Danvers and Atomic Red—and drew a little diagram to show which kind I'd planted in each row.

Then I completely ignored them—forgot to thin them, even—until October, when Alex and I pulled the plastic greenhouse cover over the garden and shut the door. Apparently, they liked this treatment just fine, because when I went foraging after Christmas to see what I might find for a chilly afternoon lunch, I found them stout and sturdy, still a head full of green on top and bright oranges, reds, and purples popping up from down below.

A few of them were carried off by lucky rodents—a mouse maybe, or more likely a vole—but for the most part, we've been getting a full harvest from every row. Some are small, little more than pinky-sized, but others are as round as silver dollars, as long and straight as home-dipped candles.

Mostly, we've been eating them fresh—washed and trimmed and dipped into a bowl of homemade blue cheese dressing or bean dip. But at my mother's suggestion we've also been cooking them down into smooth, velvety soups.

Here are our favorite two—perfect for February and March, for seeing us through.

CARROT GINGER SOUP

This recipe is adapted from The Black Dog Cookbook: Summer on the Vineyard by Joe Hall. I like it because it is quick, easy, delicious, and beautiful. The recipe calls for a lot of ginger—don't add any extra (the soup will get bitter), but don't skimp, either. The ginger adds a lovely bright taste.

1/4 cup olive oil

1 cup diced onion

1/4 cup fresh ginger, peeled and grated

4 cups chopped carrots

4 cups vegetable or chicken stock

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons ground coriander

sliced scallions or chives, for garnish

Warm up the oil over medium heat in a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Add the onion and ginger and sauté for 5 minutes, or until the onion starts to get tender.

Add all the remaining ingredients except for the scallions and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to a simmer and continue cooking, uncovered, for about 15 minutes, or until the carrots are soft.

Puree the soup and serve hot with a sprinkle of scallions on top.

MOROCCAN CARROT SOUP

This recipe is adapted from one my mother found in a Moroccan cookbook from Williams Sonoma. The original name was Chorba b'khisou bil kseksou, or Carrot Soup with Spices. It has a stunning orange color and a lovely texture.

2 tablespoons butter

1 yellow onion, peeled and grated

1 heaping pound carrots, washed, peeled, and grated

2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground paprika

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

5 cups chicken stock

1/4 cup dry couscous

2 teaspoons lemon juice

parsley, for garnish

Warm up the butter over medium heat in a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Add the onions and sauté for 5 minutes, then add the grated carrots, garlic, turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, paprika, cumin, and cayenne pepper. Cook for a few seconds, then add the chicken stock.

Bring to a boil, cover, and reduce the heat to low. Simmer for 15 minutes.

Add the couscous, stir until boiling, then cover and turn the heat down to low. Simmer gently for another 20 minutes.

Add the lemon juice and serve hot, topped with a little chopped parsley.

To Jamaica

Hi friends. I just wanted to stop by to let you know that I won't be around here for a few weeks. On Sunday, Alex and I will be getting on a plane and heading down to Jamaica with his brother's family and a few friends. According to my friend Kristen who's already down there, it is 80 degrees and sunny, and soon our biggest worry will be whether to put on SPF 30 or 45. I can't wait!

While I'm gone, there won't be any new Local Food Reports—WCAI is doing a Valentine's Day fundraiser next week and the week after that will be a repeat. I'm not sure what our access to internet will be like, so I probably won't be posting around here either. But just know that I'll be thinking about you, and toasting you with some Ting, and I'll see you when we get back on Monday the 21st.

Oh, and happy Valentine's Day! The flowers are for you.

The Local Food Report: in the classroom

So, do you remember Tristan from last week? Today we're going to talk about his school again. This week, I want to tell you about all the things Island Grown Initiative (IGI) and its program Island Grown Schools are doing to get farming and local food into the curriculum.

Let's start with the garden:

That up there is a classmate of Tristan's, working on pulling weeds and mulch away from the beds. The day I visited, the kids were discovering the results of a winter-long experiment, which involved trying different kinds of mulches on their raised beds and doing soil tests and hunting for worms to see which one worked best.

A lot of schools have gardens, but what's amazing is that thanks to Island Grown Schools, every public school on the Vineyard has a garden. That makes seven gardens in all, plus three pre-school gardens and one inter-generational garden with teens and low-income seniors at Island Elderly Housing. I think that's pretty cool.

Not only that, but the people over at IGI have worked with over 100 teachers in every grade level and in every school on the island to develop food and farm based lessons that work in all sorts of curricula. For instance the third graders at Chilmark, when they study colonial life, also study colonial herb gardens. If you think about it, food and gardening and farming can really connect to anything—whether it's vocab during seventh grade Spanish or first graders learning about area and perimeters.

When I was there, the kids in Tristan's K-1 class were doing a whole unit on farming. They told me facts about pigs—like how six to twelve are born in a litter, and that they come out with shaggy black hair like their parents, and that it takes eight months before they grow up enough to have their own babies. And cows. Did you know that Holsteins produce the most milk?

Anyway. The thing about the Vineyard effort is that it's coherent. A lot of places are trying to get programs going—trying to get local food into cafeterias and gardens into schoolyards and farming into the curriculum—but very few are doing it in such a comprehensive way. IGI didn't just work with the schools to get a local baker offering warm, healthy snacks, or just put in a garden here and a garden there, or help coordinate a few lessons based on farming facts. Because it's working on an island—a place with limits, a specific, bordered place—it's been able to do much more than that. It's been able to make sure, in a careful, step-by-step way, that it's reaching everyone.

That's harder to do on the mainland, for sure. But I think with the Vineyard as a model, it's possible. School districts, after all, have their own borders and perimeters. If you're interested, there's more inspiration over here. Thoughts?

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.

The Local Food Report: locally baked snacks

Good morning. Today, I'd like to talk about school snack.

That up there is Tristan Scott. I took his picture last April, during snacktime at Chilmark Elementary School, when I went over to Martha's Vineyard to do some interviews. It's taken me a while, but I've finally gotten through all the tape I collected that day, and this week's Local Food Report marks the first of three episodes on a program called Island Grown Schools.

Island Grown Schools is actually just one program of many run by a non-profit on the Vineyard called Island Grown Initiative that works to increase supply and demand for locally grown food on the island. It was founded in 2005, and in six short years, it's done quite a bit to get more local food into schoolyards and lunchboxes and cafeterias, including revamping snack time.

At most schools, there are two options: bring a healthy snack from home that's cold, or get something warm but generally less healthy from the cafeteria. IGI thought it might be nice if kids could buy something that was both healthy and warm, and locally made. So it started talking with a local baker, Julie Vanderhoop, and a new vision of snacktime was born.

It works like this: two mornings a week, the kids can bring in a dollar and put in an order for whatever it is Julie is making for snack. Then the school office calls Julie with a tally, and she bakes. Sometimes it's muffins—morning glory or blueberry or pumpkin with local fruits and vegetables and whole grains—or even scones or five grain rolls or whole wheat focaccia bread. While the baked goods are still hot, Julie trucks them over to the school, and meets the kids on the playground to hand them out. They wave and holler and thank her as they run around, she pays attention to see if they like whatever it is she's made, and then she waves and hollers goodbye and drives back the seven miles to her bakery in Aquinnah.

It's pretty cool. Ask any one of the kids and they can tell you Julie's name, and that she runs Orange Peel Bakery, and that on Wednesday nights she hosts a gathering for bring-your-own-topping pizza. Since February of 2010, which is when the program started in Chilmark, it's gotten so popular that Julie's started baking for the kids at West Tisbury Elementary, too. She says she gets an order for about 65 baked goods twice a week between the two schools. At a dollar a snack, the program works financially both for Julie and for most families, although she and IGI are talking about getting grant funding so that it's affordable for everyone.

I don't know what your school snack program was like, but mine was nothing like this. I remember danishes in plastic pouches, bagels slathered in cream cheese, and green blueberry muffins.

But the thing that struck me most about snacktime at Chilmark Elementary wasn't just that the snacks were warm and healthy. It was also the way it changed the outlook of the teachers and kids. Snack, for them, isn't something to rush through or forget. On the days when Julie bakes, it's something they look forward to, and appreciate. And when it comes to snack time, I'm not sure there's any better lesson than knowing your baker, and getting your muffin or roll or scone still warm, straight from her hand.

P.S. IGI is doing all kinds of other fantastic things to get local food into Vineyard schools. Read more about what they're doing—including hosting all-local school lunches, gleaning unharvested food from local farms for school cafeterias, and installing school gardens—over here!

JULIE VANDERHOOP'S FIVE GRAIN BREAD

This bread calls for a fermenting period of twelve hours, so start it the night before you want to bake. Julie makes it into rolls when she bakes it for the kids, but it also makes an excellent loaf of bread. (This recipe makes three loaves.) I'm typing this recipe out just as Julie did for me, so the format is a little different than what you usually see around here, but I think it makes the most sense. Enjoy!

In a medium bowl, stir together:

2 and 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cup water

1 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon yeast

and set aside at room temperature, uncovered, for 10-12 hours.

The next morning, boil 1 and 1/2 cups water and pour into a medium bowl over:

1/2 cup steel cut rye

1/2 cup flax seed

1/2 cup sunflower seeds

1/2 cup old-fashioned oats

Cool.

In a large bowl, mix together:

5 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon salt

1 and 1/8 cup tepid water

1 and 1/2 teaspoons yeast

along with the flour and yeast mixture that's been sitting overnight and the grain and seed mixture. Mix until a wet dough forms. Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled bowl, cover it with a wet dishcloth, and let it rise in a warm area for one hour.

Grease three loaf pans. Working on a lightly floured surface, divide the dough into three equal parts. Shape each piece into a rectangle to fit the pans. Place the dough in the pans and let it rise for another hour; then bake it at 475 degrees F for 40 to 50 minutes.

Tang and pizazz

It was seven degrees here this morning when we woke up. Seven degrees! I would complain, but when I called my mother, she told me her thermometer read seven below. She tends to stop by here, so I have a feeling I'd better keep mum. Anyhow, the good news is that it's now up to a balmy 16.3, and I have tested the waters and found that with two pairs of sweatpants, a turtleneck, and a sweater on, it is warm enough to make soup.

Those specimens up there are a major component of the soup I'm making today, which is the same soup we've been eating now for about a week straight. It's a potato-leek-celeriac soup that I found in an old Bon Appetit cookbook—Entertaining with Style, circa 1996—and it's amazing.

(Celeriac, in case you're not familiar with it, is the knobby, gnarly root that grows under a certain variety of celery. Unlike most celery varieties, it's grown mainly for what's underground, but you can also use the leaves and stalks as you normally would. My friend Tracy grew a bunch in her greenhouse, and we are addicted.)

If I had to pick one word to describe this soup, I would tell you that it is velvety. The celeriac gives it a creaminess that is somehow different—somehow more subtle and more refreshing than the heavy, overdone richness that you find in most potato-leek soup recipes—and that, I think, is what makes it so wonderful. It has comfort food written all over it, but it also has tang and pizazz. I like that.

I also like that it cooks for a while, which means there's a stove burner on, which warms the house up. I have a recipe for Oatmeal Sandwich bread marked, which bakes at 400 degrees, and I'm thinking of making that too. But I'm starting with soup.

POTATO-CELERIAC-LEEK SOUP

The original recipe for this soup actually called for twice as much celeriac as potato, but even as a celeriac lover, I thought that was too much. I swapped the ratios, so that the celeriac to potatoes was 1 to 2, and I thought that was perfect. Also, the original recipe called for olive oil, not butter, but I ended up adding the butter for creaminess later on, so the next time around I never bothered with the olive oil at all. In a soup like this, I think you need the creaminess that butter adds. And for toppings, the original recipe recommended parsley and orange zest and red onions, but we stuck with just the red onions, and I thought they were more than enough. Soup this good doesn't need dressing up. Oh! and it serves 3.

3 tablespoons butter

1 leek, washed and thinly sliced (white and light green parts only)

salt

1 and 1/2 cups chicken or vegetable stock, preferably homemade

1/2 pound celeriac, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1 pound potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1 cup whole milk

freshly cracked pepper

1/2 red onion (optional)

Heat up the butter in a medium, heavy-bottomed pot. Add the leek and sauté for 5-8 minutes, or until it starts to get tender. Season with about 1 teaspoon salt (unless you are using a salty broth, in which case you should wait and season later on). Add the stock, celeriac, and potatoes and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down, cover, and simmer for about 45 minutes, or until the vegetables are soft.

Use an immersion blender or food processor to puree the soup. Add enough milk to thin the soup to your liking, taste the soup, and add salt and pepper as needed. Simmer for another few minutes to let the flavor deepen, then serve hot. We like it with a generous handful of finely chopped red onions on top.

The Local Food Report: Rein's Real Rye

In 1973, Rein Ciarfella found the perfect loaf of rye bread. It was round, boule-shaped, with a thick, leathery crust and a chewy, toothsome crumb. It had a deep rye flavor with subtle undertones of caraway, and it was excellent plain, and with butter. Toasted alongside a bowl of soup, it took his breath away.

It was from a bakery in Guildford, England, just south of London, where Ciarfella was living at the time. He bought a loaf every day for two years, but then it came time to move home. When he came back to the states, he couldn't find a similar loaf of rye anywhere. He thought about the bread all the time—for thirty-five years, he thought about that bread—and finally, last May, he decided to do something about it.

He found a recipe online—a deli rye bread from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois—that he thought looked pretty similar. He played with the flour ratios—rye to all-purpose, even adding a little high-protein flour in, toyed with and abandoned a sourdough starter—in his attempt to get a loaf that was perfect. It took three months—three months of recipe testing and not-quite-up-to-snuff breads—but finally, he got it right.

When he did, he was ecstatic. He was so pleased with his bread, in fact, that he decided to start selling it, as a business: Rein's Real Rye. He bought a 20-quart Hobart mixer and two mini fridges and started mixing up big batches every few days. The bread he developed was a wet bread—one of those no-knead breads that develops its gluten through moisture and time, rather than the stretching action of your hands—and so he mixes it in the afternoon, then leaves it overnight in the fridge.

In the morning, he pulls out the dough to cloak it (a process that involves sprinkling the surface of the dough with flour and stretching it and tightening it in order to give it a strong crust and hold the moisture in), slash the top of it (this helps the loaf expand in the oven), and finally, place it on a cornmeal-covered stone to bake. Then, while it bakes, he uses an expertly jury-rigged steaming system that involves ice cubes in cast iron pans and a hand pump spray system. This helps the loaves get good oven spring, that final rounding rise that takes place in the oven.

It's a lot of work for each loaf, but after thirty-five years without a good rye, Ciarfella thinks it's worth it.

You can find Rein's Real Rye at the Sandwich Winter Farmers' Market, Cotuit Fresh Market, and Amber Waves Natural Foods in Falmouth.

NO-KNEAD RYE BREAD

Ciarfella sent me the link to this recipe, which is the recipe I mentioned above that he started his quest with. Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure I did not make this recipe the way the author intended, but I do not care. It was WONDERFUL. The directions were somewhat confusing, but I think the original idea was to divide the dough up into four parts and bake one part per day over four days, keeping the other chunks in the fridge. I misunderstood that, though, and baked it all at once. It formed a massive country-style loaf, the kind you can buy at PB-Boulangerie & Bistro as a "Farmhouse Loaf," and it lasted us a week. It was fantastic.

3 cups lukewarm water
1 and 1/2 tablespoons yeast
1 and 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
1 and 1/2 tablespoons caraway seeds, plus more for sprinkling
1 cup rye flour
5 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
cornmeal for sprinkling

Mix together the water, yeast, salt, and caraway seeds in a large bowl. Let sit five minutes. Whisk together the flours and mix them in until completely combined. Cover the bowl with a wet dishtowel and set aside to rise at room temperature for two hours.

Sprinkle a baking sheet with cornmeal. Form the dough into a ball and dump it out onto a floured surface. Roll the surface of the ball in flour so that it is very well coated on all sides. Transfer the ball to the prepared baking sheet and let it rest, uncovered, for about 45 minutes.

In the meantime, preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Fill your oven's broiler tray with water and have it ready to place on the bottom shelf when it comes time to bake. Slash the top of your bread diagonally three or four times—making about 1-inch deep cuts—with a very sharp bread knife. Bake for roughly 30 minutes, refilling the steam tray as needed, until the crust is golden and sounds hollow when tapped.

My mother's standby

I'd like to talk about cornbread today. And I'm guessing, based on last night's showing between the Jets and the Patriots, that most of you would also like to talk about cornbread today. Or chili. Anything, really, besides that game. I try to be accommodating.

The cornbread in question is from the Moosewood Cookbook, and it's my mother's standby. She used to make it a lot when my sister and I were younger, I think because it was a way of getting something quick and healthy and homemade on the table, and she always baked it in an old scalloped cast iron pie plate. That was key, because it meant every slice—every wedge, that is, since it was a round pie plate—got a piece of the middle, right on the first bite. The middle was invariably the best part, the most moist, and if the cornbread hadn't been cut this way, I have a feeling there would have been a lot of hair pulling and pinching.

Anyway, I pulled the recipe out for the game last night. My mother annotated my copy of the Moosewood with all of her old notes—things like "Always simmer, never boil!" next to the Russian Cabbage Borscht recipe (the beets will lose their color, apparently)—but curiously, there's no note next to the cornbread. It's one of those recipes, she must have decided, that didn't need explanation or praising.


And really, she's right. It's simple—the secret, I think, is in the cup of buttermilk and the three tablespoons of honey and the quality of the cornmeal you use. Grinding down the dent corn from our grain CSA was still on my to-do list (isn't it gorgeous?!), so when I finally got around to it yesterday, our cornmeal was only minutes old for the bread.

And the bread came out beautifully. The color was a little different—it wasn't so yellow as I remember it, since our corn was also equal parts blue and red—but it had a kind of pale, wintery beauty. And most importantly, it tasted good. So good, in fact, that despite my square pan, it got us through the game—without any pinching, or hair pulling.

STANDBY CORNBREAD

What I like about this recipe is that I'm always almost certain to have all the ingredients on hand. It also takes only about 10 minutes from start to oven, and bakes in about twenty minutes, making it an ideal just-before-dinner recipe. I've made it with both all-purpose flour and whole wheat, and I like both in their own way.

butter to grease the pan
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup all-purpose or whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk, yogurt, or sour cream
1 egg
3 tablespoons honey
3 tablespoons melted butter

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease an 8" x 8" square pan or a 9" pie dish and set aside.

Whisk together the cornmeal, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the buttermilk (or whatever you choose), egg, honey, and butter. (I like to mix the honey into the butter first in order to help it dissolve. It also cools the butter down, which is nice for the egg.)

Fold the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the top starts to get golden around the edges and the center is firm to the touch. It's better to undercook this recipe than to overcook it; the bread tends to dry out when overdone.