C'est vachement bon!

In a recent rambling with a colleague and friend, Josh discovered a place called Appelton Farms in Ipswich, MA. Our friend is a member of the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) there, and she also buys her meat there. Getting our own share of grass-fed beef from free-ranging cows was as easy as calling the farm, driving over there, forking over the cash (which was surprisingly not that much), loading the box into the car, driving it home and filling the freezer with the packages. Here's what a regular-sized refrigerator freezer looks like with 40 pounds of beef in it:

We had ridiculously warm weather this weekend with highs reaching into the mid-80's, so after an afternoon of working under the hot sun in our garden and a small jaunt in our canoe out on Lake Cochichewick, we figured a barbecue was definitely in order. And a beer.

Here's how it all starts: place a barbecued beef patty on a slice of toasted wheat bread. (This is about where the peasant-like part of the meal ends... the rest of the stuff, though fresh and organic, is nonetheless nothing we could have found grown locally at this time of the year... but we never said we were slaves to eating only as peasants do!)

Top with a few slices of avocado...

and then with a generous serving of fresh salsa (see recipe below).

Served with a green salad, makes a lovely, light, hot-weather meal.

Salsa (two generous servings):

2 roma tomatoes, diced

A heaping tablespoon of finely minced onion

2 garlic cloves, minced

Finely minced chili pepper (to taste)

Zest and juice of 1 small lime

A handful of fresh cilantro, minced

A little olive oil

Cumin, salt and pepper to taste
Note: the salsa gains flavor the longer it sits. Overnight is best.

Old dog, new trick

Beets. Crimson, sweet, healthy, hardy... but what do you do with them? There's always roasting, steaming and pickling, but this can get old after a while. So I've been thinking lately of new ways to cook these most lovely veggies. And today, when I was least expecting it, an idea flashed through my mind: stuffing! Yes, stuffing! For cabbage leaves... or collard greens, since that's what I actually had in the fridge.

What you need: 3 carrots and 1 large beet (peeled and shredded), half a finely chopped onion, collard greens, brown rice, rosemary, salt, pepper, juice of one lemon, garlic. (Note: in retrospect, the beet-carrot mixture ended up being way more than I needed, so you can cut it in half or make the whole thing and have leftovers... I highly recommend the second option!)

Cook the rice (I had leftover, which is best). Sautee the onions in olive oil until soft, add the carrots and beets, salt and pepper. In the meantime, bring a large pot of water to boil. Snip the stems of the collard greens, rinse and submerge in the boiling water for a few mintues, a few batches at a time).

Line the bottom of a glass dish with enough collard green leaves to cover. Mix about half the beet-carrot mixture with the rice (maybe a cup or so) and rosemary. Lay out a collard green leaf on a cutting board, cut off about 3 to 4 inches of the stem, place 1 or 2 good spoonfuls of the stuffing on the leaf and roll it up like you would if you were making a burrito or a sandwich wrap, and line the stufffed leaves tightly into the pan.

Peel some garlic cloves and place them down the center of the two rows of stuffed leaves, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Pour the lemon juice evenly over all as well as some of the collard greens cooking water. Cover and bake at 400 for about 40 minutes.

Served with rice mixed with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper, these stuffed collard greens made a great light, late-night dinner.

First grill of the season!

The stars were aligned for this date to be the first grill of the season. First, the weather reports have been predicting warm temperatures in the 60s and 70s for today and tomorrow. Second, the rearranging of the contents of our tiny freezer two days ago to make room for the 40 pounds of grass-fed beef we picked up yesterday at Appleton farms in Ipswich meant that we had to take out a few of the packages of venison to thaw and eat. Third, we just felt like grilling.


The cut of the venison here is sirloin, and the marinade we concocted is quite simple: the juice of one lemon, powdered ginger, a couple tablespoons of soy sauce, and lots of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. We marinaded the meat for about 3 hours, but an overnight marinade would no doubt yield the best flavor.

We ate these delictable little nuggets with some steamed carrots and spinach, and bok choy sauteed with garlic and onion. There was plenty of meat leftover (2 skewers), so we'll have some leftovers to work with tomorrow.

Gleaning, take #1

A few evenings ago Adele and I prepared hors d'oeuvres for an environmental lecture at the school where we work. Our goal was to show that without intensive labor we could offer a variety of healthy snacks for a very low cost (we spent under $50). We ultimately prepared three bowls of different flavored hummus (cilantro & cumin; tomato & basil; garlic, lemon & pepper) with whole wheat crackers and carrot and celery sticks, as well as three different types of beer bread that we cut into toothpickable, bite-sized morsels. About fifty people turned up for the lecture by green architect Bill Reed, and afterwards students swarmed into the lobby to devour the snacks. Though Adele and I had initially worried that the food would run out, there were plenty of leftovers after the students had gorged on the beer bread (it sounds naughty, but it ain't) and grazed guiltlessly on the veggies and hummus (plural: hummii?). At home, we assembled the leftovers and realized that we had to do something with the several dozen celery sticks and a handful of carrot sticks that hadn't been eaten. Eating them raw seemed out of the question: gleaning to prevent waste is one thing, but eating something that's been out in the open air and picked over by a bunch of people is another. The obvious solution was thus to boil them down and make a cream of celery soup.

The ingredients are pretty basic: celery, which you see boiling here in just enough salted water to cover (the carrots are undercover...), and some chopped onion and minced garlic, which you see sauteeing in a pat of butter.

When the celery is so soft it turns to mush under the slightest touch, throw it in a food processor with the water, the onions and garlic, and process until smooth. Pour some cream into the pot the celery was just in and heat it up for a few minutes. Add the cream to the celery through the feed tube and process again for a few minutes. Adjust salt to taste.

Serve piping hot topped with a bit of dill weed for color and some fresh, hot biscuits. The ones you see here are Sister Esther Perkins' recipe from Shaker your plate: of Shaker Cooks and Cooking which I modified by replacing half the flour for almond meal.

Wicked easy cornbread

One whiff of cornbread fresh out of the oven and I'm immediately transported back to my grandmother's kitchen in the hill country of northern Georgia. It's one of those powerful Proustian involuntary memories that grabs me in the gut and sends me back in time. The farm dogs bark outside, it's 81 degrees and cooling, flies linger around the screen door, my grandfather tells one of his famous policeman stories as I wipe the sweat from my brow, and the smells of fried okra, black-eyed peas, chicken strips, and cornbread permeate the kitchen. That's a bit of what cornbread conjures up for me...country roads, take me home, to the place, where I belong...

Adele cooks her cornbread in a cast-iron skillet as her aunts taught her, and that's exactly the way my grandmother used to do it as well. The cast-iron skillet makes cornbread into a nice round shape and is quite aesthetically-appealing, with the yellow bread constrasting the black skillet.

Cornbread is so easy that Adele doesn't have an official recipe for it. Rather, like her aunts and my grandmother, she just has it in her head (until now!).




This recipe fills an 8-inch skillet. Dry ingredients, to be mixed in a medium-sized bowl:
3/4 cup corn meal and 3/4 cup flour (preferably white whole wheat)
2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
(Sometimes I add some cumin, or dried cilantro)

Wet ingredients, to be mixed in a separate bowl:
1 egg, beat lightly with about a tsp or so of sugar
About 3/4 cup of milk (rice milk works fine)
A little under a 1/4 cup of oil

Heat the oven to 350. Put a good-sized pat of butter in the skillet and place it in the warming oven until the butter has just melted. Take the skillet out of the oven and turn it carefully so that the butter evenly covers the bottom and sides.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones and mix with a wooden spoon just until all the liquid is absorbed into the dry ingredients. Pour into the skillet and bake until a knife comes out clean, about 30 minutes.

Serve with chili, like we did here. Also makes a nice and simple, healthy dessert, with butter and honey or molasses. I'm sure it would make great breakfast fare as well, but it usually never makes it that long in this house.

Chili con venison

I once tried Molly Katzen's vegetarian chili recipe. It was good, but I remember thinking how much better it would be if it just had a pound of ground beef, the kind that's a little on the fatty side so to give the dish good flavor. And a sausage or two. And more salt, more cumin, more chili pepper. I also remember thinking how if I put the pot in the fridge overnight, the flavor would stay exactly the same rather than mature the way it would if it had some animal fat in it. I could have made the recipe again and again until I'd acquired a taste for it, maybe even prefering it to chili con carne. But I didn't. Sometimes, for flavor's sake, you just can't pass up on the meat! When I lived in Quebec City for four years, juggling my graduate studies, work, and my personal and social lives, chili was one of my staple dishes. I'd make a big pot of it on a Sunday night and have enough to bring to the university every day for lunch for at least a week. What could be easier and more economical to make than this one pot dish of simple ingredients? Nothing! And because I lived only a short walk away from rue St-Jean's local butchershop, Moisan, I never had to worry about the quality and integrity of the beef I used to make it.

The what: 1 pound ground venison, 1 pepper and a small onion, roughly chopped, a couple cloves of garlic, roughly minced, tomatoes (those are my mom's garden tomatoes), 1 can each of black and red kidney beans, a couple chili peppers, cumin, salt and pepper.

The how : In a dutch oven, cook the meat in hot olive oil with the garlic and spices. When the meat is just brown, remove and store in a bowl. Add a little more oil to the dutch oven and sautee the onions and pepper for about 5 minutes. Put the meat back into the pot, add the tomatoes and drained, rinsed beans. Simmer, covered, for as long as you want. Longer simmer time equals better flavor, but ultimately you'll get the best taste if you put eat it the day after it's been made.

Serve with cornbread, of course. (Stay tuned for my own cornbread recipe to appear at some later date...)

Total prep time: about 15 minutes

Total cook time: The longer the more flavorful, but at least an hour

Cabbage in the corner

We've had several cabbage halves in the corner of our fridge for a few months now and tonight we're finally putting them to use for a hearty carrot, leek and garlic side dish. Cabbage is wonderfully cheap, nutritious and easy to cook, but I always associate it with miserable scenes of Irish poverty from Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, in which a drunk father and dozens of kids sit down to a pitiful meal of cabbage soup prepared by a downtrodden mother. Adele thinks of the bouillé choux her mother used to make often throughout the summer, though while perfectly well-prepared, was one of the least exciting dishes that ever made its way on the table. Also, we both grew up in papermill towns that seemed to be infused with a rotten-egg, cabbage-like odor on overcast days. Thus our reluctance to embrace the cabbage.

But tonight we've decided to make amends. Or, to put it another way, we decided we had to eat this stuff soon or risk having it go to waste. And there could be nothing more straightforward than this side-dish: half a cabbage, sliced; three carrots, peeled, halved lengthwise and sliced thinly; a couple inches of a leek, sliced; 2 garlic cloves, minced; salt and pepper.


Sautee the leeks and garlic in some olive oil until soft. Add the cabbage and carrots, salt and pepper to taste, and cook, stirring occasionnally, for about ten minutes. (Cook more or less, depending on your taste for crisp vegetables or not.)

We ate this with some leftover brown rice seasoned with sauteed onion, currants, chopped hazelnuts, cumin, ginger, tumeric, salt, pepper and olive oil. In the end, we were pleasantly surprised by the combo of these two dishes, particulary with the taste of the cabbage side-dish, and we're happy to say that the compost pile didn't get to this thing before we did.

Total prep and cook time : about 30 minutes

Approximate cost : about 3$ for two people

Faux Curry Cream Sauce

Looking for a way to turn broccoli stalks and the stems of other greens into a hearty meal? A few nights ago we ate broccoli and collard greens in a simple stir fry and saved all the stalks and stems to make a broth. Once the greens were all boiled down and we'd transfered the rich, translucent green water into jars for storing, we looked at the ghosts of the vegetables we were about to throw out and decided against it, thinking that the most peasant-esque thing to do would be to make use of the whole shebang.


Here's what you need: Boiled-down brocolli and greens stems, some of the water used to boil it, a large potato, peeled and cubed, onion, garlic, salt, pepper and curry powder.




Boil the stalks and potatos in just enough of the water to cover and salt. Meanwhile, chop an onion into fairly small pieces and mince a couple cloves of garlic. Heat some olive oil in a dutch oven and sautee the onions and garlic with a teaspoon or two of cumin until very soft.


When the stocks and potato are so soft they fall apart at the slightest touch, throw them into a food processor with the steel blade. Add the onions and spice mix. Cover and blend, adding the water slowly through the top shoot until you get a very thick, creamy consistency.



Return this faux cream sauce to the dutch oven and add about a cup of spinach. When we made this, we didn't have any fresh spinach on hand, so we used frozen and it came out fine. Adjust seasonings.

We ate this sauce over brown rice and with a side of roasted name.

Total prep and cook time : a few hours (largely unattended)

Total cost (for the sauce) : not even a dollar

Total cost for the whole meal you see above for two people : about 4$