Making It

It hit a surreal 78 degrees (25.5 C) here almost two weeks ago.  Too hot in the sun to even lie in the hammock, let alone do any work.  Last week was grey and miserable, with high temperatures in the 40's, and a dump of the dreaded "wintry mix" precipitation.  We've had sub-freezing temps overnight ever since, and this week is sunny but cold.  Sigh.  Where'd my spring go?

I'm trying to make the best of it and have been quite productive lately.  I got a lot of outside work done during that warm week, while the sun shone.  Now there are many seedlings to attend to indoors.  And I spend a little time outside during the warmest parts of each sunny day.  Otherwise I've been keeping my hands busy inside while I bide my time, however resentful of the vanished warm weather.  Here's a rundown of the projects I've been working on lately.

I painted the nesting box we made all from scrap wood.  Bright colors of course, because if the wood needs protection from the elements, I might as well use colors that make me happy.  Now that we're more or less set up for the broody hen, I'm eager for her arrival.  Still no firm date for that yet.

I finished two new two planting templates - a cool looking hexagonal one for the three sisters planting, and another one for the garlic planting on 6" centers.  I've been using an 8" planting template for the garlic, but after getting carried away with some 350 garlic plants last fall, I've rethought my spacing for this crop.

I also worked on finishing a few projects started with the help of our WWOOF volunteers.  The first is a greens feeder for the chickens.  The idea here is that you plant greens the chickens like to eat under the feeder.  The plants then grow up through the caging and the girls can eat what pokes up.  But they can't tear the roots out of the soil, so the plants in theory should re-grow and continue to feed them for a long time.  Since we move the hens daily throughout most of the year, I plan to use this in the yet-to-be-constructed hoop house which will house the girls next winter.  In the meantime though I'm also hoping it will shield some tiny catnip seedlings from the ravages of cats - both ours and the neighborhood ne'erdowell toms.  The caging for this project was repurposed from a tomato cage that will be replaced with a trellising system this year.

The second is my solar cooking station.  This still needs a bit more work, but it's good enough to supercharge our seedlings with tons of sunlight at the moment.  It mounts to the scaffolding for our solar heating array.  A piece of rebar supports a wooden countertop from the back, and a wooden upright supports it in front.  It's reasonably easy for me to set it up or remove it by myself.  I'm hoping that the solar array doesn't completely shade it out in summer.  I'll watch this, and if need be, lower the station a bit to get it out from under the shade.  All of these projects - templates, nesting box, greens feeder and solar cooking station - were made with salvaged lumber and other free materials.  Only the paint, screws, nails and some other hardware were, in some cases, purchased.

Hand carved wooden spoon and a spoon blank

I carved a wooden spoon (from a spoon "blank") using the awesome woodcarving tools that my husband received recently as a gift.  It's a rather addictive occupation, despite being tough on novice hands, and definitely one best pursued when the weather is fair enough to allow all the shavings to fall outside.  Last year we broke our last two wooden spoons, so it's nice to be able to make some for ourselves.  This one isn't very large, but it could be used with smaller cooking pots.  I put a nubbin on the back of the handle end so it won't just slip into the soup if I set it against the rim of the pot.

Based on a good tip from The Urban Homestead, I made a baking soda shaker from a glass jar with a metal lid.  This is for dish washing, as baking soda is a mild and non-toxic abrasive.  Just take a nail and make lots of holes in the lid, then fill with ordinary baking soda.  The gaffer's tape bands around the jar were my own tweak.  They're there to provide a better grip to wet hands.

Also, a couple of knitted dishrags.  These are made from cotton butcher's twine and based on a pattern for a baby blanket I made many years ago.  Look for large spools of this stuff in a restaurant supply store.  It's much cheaper than buying the small rolls of a thinner gauge kitchen twine in a supermarket.  I recommend you get a couple of spools.  Keep one someplace clean for kitchen uses, and the other one with your garden tools.  You'll find a thousand uses for it outside, but it's not easy to keep the twine clean if you take it to the garden.  These dishrags can be made fairly quickly on days when you're cooped up inside.  They don't wear out as quickly as scrubby sponges, and if you throw them in with the laundry they won't abrade your clothes.  Also, they're thin enough to sterilize just with sun exposure.  Google for a thousand pattern options.  And I'm sure there are crochet patterns as well if that's your fiber art.  I may experiment with dying these later as I have a dying project in mind and these could just be added into the soak.

Pelmenyi.  These are meat dumplings from central Russia.  I've been meaning to make them for ages now.  Some unpasteurized whey graciously donated by Sandy, defrosting my freezer, and unfriendly outdoor temps, were the impeti to finally undertake the project.  And they are a project, believe me.  It would be much more fun and go so much faster to have another set of hands to help with assembly.  But I'm on my own this week.  My recipe uses the whey plus one of our eggs in the dough, and three kinds of ground meat (pork, veal, and lamb - discovered while defrosting the freezer, and all local and pastured, of course) plus onion and spices in the filling.  Traditionally these are kept in huge sacks on balconies over the many months of the Russian winter where there's no danger of thawing or spoilage.  They are boiled and then served either with vinegar, or with the super high fat content smetana, to which our closest equivalent is sour cream, though it contains only roughly half the fat of smetana.  Green onions are sometimes added as a garnish with either topping.

Unfortunately, while working on the greens feeder I manage to bash my thumb with the hammer.  I've never been unlucky or clumsy enough to do this before, and I can assure you that it's an experience I neither recommend nor care to repeat.  It didn't seem like that hard of a bash, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve.  It hurt like the dickens, and still requires a lot of caution when doing everyday tasks.  I'm really hoping that I don't lose the nail, 'cause that would seriously screw up the fast approaching heavy spring workload.

It's very satisfying to see a few things made with my own hands that will endure and be useful for many years, mostly with very little expense.  My head is full of little homesteading projects I want to undertake this year.  Last year about this time I had the sense that things were finally starting to come together on the homestead.  And indeed, things did run better last year; more things turned out the way I hoped.  I have that sense this year too.  It's a good feeling, though hard won.  If my productivity holds up (and I freely admit that it's extremely fickle), it could be a great year for progress on the homestead.  We'll see.

I will probably do a post on the three sisters' template around planting time.  If you simply must have more details on any of the other projects, leave me a comment and it may inspire me to get into the nitty-gritty.

Harvest Meal: Potato and Cabbage Soup

You know what?  There's no way that I have found to make potato and cabbage soup look attractive in a photograph.  Admittedly, my kitchen has lousy lighting, and my camera is hopelessly obsolescent by the standards of our time.  Likewise, there's no way to make "potato and cabbage soup" sound anything other than dreary.  My soup tasted good, and I'll get to all that in a minute.  Right now I'm just going to tell you that the cabbage itself was gorgeous, and the picture above doesn't begin to do it justice. 

It was a mild Sunday, and I was out in the garden, checking things out.  Little shoots of garlic poking up, pathetic looking leeks and cabbages that had never been harvested.   Short rows of tatsoi that looked like they may have actually overwintered.  No sign yet of the long awaited asparagus.  But there among the bedraggled heads of cabbage was one that had a robust red-purple color and some physical integrity.  One of its outer leaves curled protectively over the head like a bonnet.  Did appearances deceive?  I reached down and gave it a gentle squeeze.  It was firm and dense!  Maybe it wasn't the biggest cabbage, but it was ready to eat.  And I was ready to eat it.

I came inside and started putting a pot of soup together.  I hardly even bother researching recipes these days, because meals pretty much come down to eating what we have on hand.  And late winter is lean pickin's, I don't mind telling you.  So.  Candidate ingredients to go with the cabbage included our potatoes and garlic, boughten onions and carrots, a tiny bit of pork sausage (pastured meat from a local farm), some homemade canned stock, and spices.  From there, the recipe wrote itself.

Take the sausage out of its casing, break it into little bits and brown them in a soup pot.  When that's done, set them aside and cook a big, finely diced onion in the remaining pork fat with a bit of added butter.  Sweat, sweat, till soft and golden, adding white pepper, kosher salt, caraway seed, and bay leaves while it cooks.  Then stir in some minced garlic to cook a bit.  Add a quart of stock and a pint of water and heat it slowly, so as to have time to scrub the potatoes (purple!) and chop them into bite sized pieces.  Add the potatoes (~1.25#/~0.5 kg) in the warming liquid, then finely chop half of the cabbage head.  Add that in along with the cooked sausage as the liquid starts to simmer.  Grate a couple carrots with a cheese grater.  Pour a glass of wine, reduce the heat to minimum, cover the pot, and walk away for a few minutes.  Come back, add the carrots, and taste to adjust the seasonings.  A tad more salt.  Perfect.  Serve and eat.  With crusty bread if you like.

It was good soup, even if the potatoes were not the best variety for soup.  The stock made from the Thanksgiving turkey that was smoked with rosemary and apple wood chips really made the soup pop.  I'll even acknowledge the possibility that without superb stock, the soup might not have amounted to much.

Good though the soup was, harvest meals over the winter tend not to be very exciting.  The word "stodge" often lurks just below the level of utterance.  Maybe it's the fact that we're mostly locked in to relying in a very small number of foods that don't change much for months on end.  Spring, summer, and fall are different; the variety is wider and ever changing.  I'm still working on learning how to eat from our own stores through the winter months, with many failures and hard lessons.  But mostly I'm just ready for spring.  I cannot wait for the first snow peas, and arugula, and chives, and asparagus - fresh green things.  In the meantime, I practice gratitude that we have plenty to eat.

Sustainable Cooking: Curried Chickpeas with Tomato

I've made very little progress towards my goal of using our rocket stove and solar oven more frequently this year.  Of course I have excuses, and they're semi-legitimate, but they boil down to the universal excuses for everything that's wrong with our culture: I'm busy, and it's not convenient.  I'm working on making it more convenient to use either the rocket stove or the solar oven, but in the meantime, I need to just suck it up and cook out there anyway.

It helps that the heat has been infernal lately.  Who wants to cook inside with such weather?  So on Saturday evening I soaked a bunch of chickpeas.  On Sunday morning, I cleaned up the solar oven, and added a bunch of seasoning ingredients to the chickpeas.  The day was blazing hot and sunny almost all the time.  The dish didn't come out perfectly: I'd left a lot more liquid in with the beans than was really needed.  But they cooked through quite well and were tasty.

I wasn't working with a recipe, but here's what I did.  First I drained the soaking liquid the chickpeas were in and then recovered them with fresh water.  I chopped up about five cloves of garlic, and minced about an inch of a fat section of fresh ginger.  These were added to the soaking liquid along with a palmful of dried minced onion, and some spices, roughly in descending order of quantity: cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, black pepper, cayenne, and amchoor.  I also added a good drizzle of oil and a coarsely diced fresh tomato.  This left my cooking pot for the solar oven absolutely brimming.  It went into the solar oven around 9am, and as I checked the temperature in the oven throughout the day it varied from 150-255 F (66-124 C) as the outdoor temperature climbed to 94 F (34 C) and clouds occasionally scudded across the sky.  I only added salt when the chickpeas were done cooking.

Towards the end of the day I put some basmati rice to cook in the steamer out on the porch.  I also went out to the garden to rustle up a quicky relish to go with what is essentially a beans and rice dish: roughly equal parts fresh cilantro (including soft stems) and spearmint (leaves only) along with a whole scallion, a pinch of salt, and a bit of lime juice.  Everything whizzed together in the food processor, with the sides scraped down a few times between bouts of whizzing.  This crude relish isn't shown in the picture but it added a lovely bit of green both visually and taste-wise.  Very refreshing it was too, on a hot evening.  I think adding a zucchini or two to the chickpeas for the last hour or so of cooking would have added a nicer balance of veg too.

I'd make this again but definitely reduce the amount of liquid that goes in the cooking pot.  It worked as a somewhat soupy dish because the rice could soak everything up.  But more concentrated flavor would be better.  Cooking in a solar oven is definitely an experimental endeavor for me.  It's a bit like baking in that you have to set things up and then relinquish the possibility of intervention once the actual cooking begins.  Because the cooking containers are very nearly airtight, I'm having to learn how much liquid to add.  And this is an iterative process.  Also it seems to me that flavors in solar-cooked dishes are more mellow and more diffuse than I would expect from conventionally cooked food.  The flavors in this dish reminded me of leftover curry that had been cooked a few days previously - all the seasonings had spread themselves out and reached a point of equilibrium among all ingredients.  So I might also learn to be a little heavy handed with the seasonings as I continue with the solar cooking goal for this year.

Oh, and by the way, Happy Solstice!

On Meal Planning with a Garden

I've been thinking lately about the ways that producing our own food has changed our eating and cooking habits. Although fresh foods are somewhat scarce for us right now, in the depths of winter, in some ways I have more freedom to choose what I feel like cooking. When the garden has passed its peak output for the year, and much of what it produced has either been eaten or preserved, the pressure eases off. Oh, there are still things out there to harvest; parsnips and a few hardy plants in the cold frame. But all these things can hang out for a while. They don't present themselves with the same urgency as summer crops, which will rot, bolt, turn tough or bitter, get eaten by varmints, or simply overwhelm through sheer numbers if not harvested promptly.

What arrives in fall and stays through early spring is a measure of free choice in what I cook and what we eat. Sure, there are the harvested pumpkins, and squash, and potatoes to use up, but they too give me more latitude than summer's bounty. All summer long and into early fall I cook and preserve food in a race to keep up with what's coming in. That comes about from - and requires - a change in the way I think about cooking, and this was no small thing for me.

See, I trained as a chef. After mastering the fundamentals, we were taught to approach cooking as a creative challenge and as an expression of "personality." It was about sexing up a chicken breast to make it seem less trite, or assembling flavors in novel ways to tickle a jaded palate. We weren't taught to think about seasonality or regionality very much, unless it was something that could be translated into marketing text on a menu. And yes, we were very much taught to look at menus as marketing tools. Back then, the concept of local food was nowhere near the surface of national consciousness; it had only a small novelty value to a few menu-scrutinizing gourmands. Food miles never entered the discussion of my culinary training - not once.

That way of thinking took hold strongly in me. I've lived in areas where high quality ingredients were available to me at any time, irrespective of food miles or season. For years just about any exotic ingredient you could imagine was at my fingertips, ready tools at the service of my artistic vision in the kitchen. When thinking about meal preparation, it was routine for me to thumb idly through a cookbook, looking for a recipe that caught my fancy. Or I might simply sit back and ask myself what I felt like eating that night, and then proceed to acquire the necessary ingredients from the store. This was a deeply ingrained habit of thought, and it's one that runs counter to the realities of a food garden. This meant that when I gardened back then, I was a dabbler, and the food I produced myself was always adjunct and secondary to the "real" source of food - stores and farmers' markets. If I didn't feel like eating what was ripe in my own garden, I didn't. And I did no preserving in those days. I'm ashamed to say that (while some of it got eaten and some given away) too much of that homegrown food simply went to waste.

When I became more serious about producing my own food and frugality in general, the harvests soon collided with my habits of thought around cooking. It was no longer about what I felt like cooking; wasting home grown food was no longer acceptable. The game had changed, and the challenges were now based in real life and not the creative life of a "culinary artist." It took a while, but I came to consider the garden and my pantry my primary sources of food. Purchased food, from any source, is now secondary. The differences are significant. I now understand the value in single-ingredient-themed cookbooks. When you're getting upwards of 25 eggs per week, or have just harvested 100 pounds of potatoes, cookbooks devoted entirely to egg or potato dishes seem like a really good idea. I used to find such cookbooks boring. Not any more.

Now meal preparation begins with an assessment of what needs using up, whatever the season. That's not to say my cooking is a constant state of triage in which I find ways to salvage food that's beginning to go off. No, I'm talking about staying ahead of the curve and eating or storing foods at their peak. I still have plenty of range for creative expression in my cooking. But now I start with the given of the foods we have, and I take pleasure in finding interesting things to do with these high-quality building blocks. I still use cookbooks, but I'm much more likely than previously to substitute ingredients based on what we have.

Even in winter, the food put up in canning jars, the freezer, or simply hanging out in cool storage needs to be tracked and eaten. Those foods have a shelf life like any other (natural) food. Even if they aren't about to go off, I need to know what I have on hand in order to plan the next year's garden crops and how they will be eaten or preserved. We got almost no tomatoes in 2009, so this year I'll try to put up two years' worth of sauce, just in case we get hit with blight again. On the other hand, we made enough jam to last us a couple of years. So we'll use up the fruit we produce in other ways.

Another difference is that for most of the year we eat fresher, more nutritionally dense food, and we eat in the seasonal sequence of produce gluts. During the winter, we eat food that was processed (by me, at home) at optimal nutrition and freshness. I'm working on making fresh foods more available in the cold months through season extension with cold frames too.

Here are a few ingredient-themed cookbooks I've found useful in helping me cook from both the garden and preserved or stored foods.

Simply in Season
The Compleat Squash
The Bean Bible
The Good Egg
One Potato, Two Potato


If you can recommend any other cookbooks that help use up garden gluts or commonly stored foods, please let me know in the comments.

Harvest Meal: Lamb Tagine with Winter Squash

It's a rare meal these days that doesn't include something either homegrown or something I made from scratch, often with local ingredients. Still, not every meal has a critical mass of ingredients to warrant "harvest meal" status. Last night's dinner did though.

I made a tagine, my first ever, with a variety of homegrown, homemade, and local ingredients, plus a few that were none of those things. The lamb was pasture raised and very local, raised by a friend in fact. The cuts that had remained the longest in our freezer were the neck bones and the shanks - two cuts which happen to be traditional for Moroccan tagines. The tagine, after all, has all the hallmarks of peasant cuisine: slow cooking in one pot, vegetables augmenting meat, a fair amount of liquid, and it's traditionally served with couscous or flatbread. The nobles, we must suppose, got the leg and the rack.

I posted last year about making lamb stock from bones given to me by my lamb-raising friend. She gave me some more this summer, so I now have a nice quantity of canned lamb broth from a sustainable, local source. I used only about a pint of this to make the tagine. As stews go, tagines are light on the liquids.

Into the tagine pot (really a dutch oven) also went a tiny bit of our homegrown garlic, a very large leek from the garden, the last of our "summer" carrots, a little of the parsley that is still holding on out there, and one of the stella blue Hokkaido squashes we grew this year. This was our first taste of these winter squash, and my husband liked it. Stringy, fibrous winter squash gives him the squicks, and I had purposely planted this squash variety for its reported "fiberless" qualities. So it made me smile when he remarked on how acceptable it was to him.

Purchased ingredients in the tagine included some slivered fresh ginger, half a can of tomatoes, prunes, golden raisins (or "sultanas" for those of you visiting from overseas), cinnamon, black pepper, kosher salt, and a bare drizzle of olive oil. I didn't really follow a recipe, so I can't provide you with one. But I started it on the stovetop, giving the meat a very light searing before adding most of the other ingredients. Once the liquid (just enough to cover) was in and simmering, the tightly covered pot went into a very low oven (275 F/135 C) and stayed there for several hours, only getting pulled out to add a few ingredients, and to check the flavor. The squash and the raisins went in only for the last hour or so of cooking, and I added just enough extra broth at that point to again cover the ingredients. One of the shank bones came clear out of the meat when I gently stirred things about. When it was done I added more minced parsley and served it over some Israeli couscous cooked up with local shallots. The slow cooked cuts of lamb were incredibly tender. And the gelatin naturally present in the shanks gave the tagine a slight thickness. Very satisfying on a chill evening when the dark draws in early.

In retrospect, we might have preferred to serve the tagine over some homegrown mashed potatoes. That wouldn't be authentic, but neither was the Israeli couscous, and my husband didn't think that suited the tagine. It would have been nice too to try a little corriander and cardamom in the tagine, or lemon juice spritzed over each serving, but the flavor was surprisingly good with just the flavoring ingredients listed. Lemons are on our list of things to start growing next year (in a container), so maybe at some point I'll be able to include homegrown lemon in my dishes!

I like the combination of vegetables with dried fruit and a meaty broth. I could easily see making a tagine without any cut of meat at all. There are a ton of different tagine recipes out there, with a huge variety of vegetables. So lots of exploring to do!

Autumn Harvest Meal: Philippine Rice & Egg

Rather a hectic day today. Contractors at work in the house. Husband needing a ride to the airport. A warmish day after the first frost of the season, and gardening tasks beckoning. I topped the Brussels sprouts today, which apparently will convince them to get busy building what sprouts they have set. I hope it works. The sprouts out there are mostly nubbins so far. This is what happens the first time you try to grow something.

But those tops I cut off...they look ever so much like cabbage leaves - no surprises there as they're all one big happy family. I brought them in and wondered what to do with them and the last two tomatoes I found hidden on a trailing tomato vine on the ground. There was sushi rice leftover from packing my husband some lunch to travel with. And of course there are always eggs from the girls.

So I decided to make a dish that is either traditional in the Philippines or else invented entirely by me on the basis of rumor and innuendo. I've never been to the Philippines, nor studied their cuisine, nor even known anyone of Philippine origin beyond the most cursory acquaintance. But I seem to remember hearing that they like to eat fried eggs over fried rice with garlic and red chili pepper flakes. This may be a figment of my imagination, or a misinterpretation, a mis-remembering, or whathaveyou. But nonetheless I adopted this dish and added quick cooked greens as a very easy dinner when the stars are all aligned. I've made it with beet greens and mustard greens. It's all good, as were these Brussels sprout tops. The tomatoes tonight were a novel addition.

Philippine(?) Fried Rice, Eggs, and Greens

Start with a clove or two of garlic, some chili pepper flakes, leftover rice and a generous bit of neutral cooking oil. Thinly slice the garlic and saute it for a minute or two in the oil over medium-high heat. Let the garlic begin to brown, but don't allow it to burn. Add a pinch of chili pepper flakes and then almost immediately the rice. Stir the rice around until it heats through, adding a dribble or two of water if the leftover rice is dried out. When it's warm, portion it out on the plates. Add a bit more oil to the pan and add some tender greens. Cook over medium-high heat, adding a bit of water if necessary to help them wilt. Sprinkle with salt or a dash of soy sauce. If the greens are from the cabbage family you may want to cover with a lid and let them wilt properly for a minute or two. When warm and wilted, add the greens to the plates alongside the rice. Finally, reduce the heat to medium and add just a touch more oil, if needed, to the pan. Fry one egg per person, adding a smidgen of chili pepper flakes and salt to the eggs as they cook sunny side up. When the eggs are cooked to your liking, add them over the greens and rice. Garnish with finely chopped scallions or chives if you have any.

I particularly like using leftover sushi rice for this dish as it adds a nice vinegar tang to the flavor profile. This isn't high brow food. It isn't food from my upbringing. But this is quintessential soul food on a chill autumn evening. The tops from the Brussels sprouts provided the perfect amount to serve just one tonight, and only one dirty pan. It hit the spot.

P.S. If you know anything about the Philippines' cuisine, please enlighten me.

Instant Cobbler

A little while ago, Kathy wrote about homemade "convenience foods" and included a recipe for a very simple crumb topping for cobbler. It sounded pretty good to me, so I whipped up a batch. It's a rather large yield recipe, so if you don't eat dessert very often or if fridge space is limited, I'd recommend cutting it in half. You might have to make it in half batches anyway, because you'd need an awfully big food processor to handle these quantities all at once. Also, I found it a tad on the sweet side for my tastes, so I think I would modify it slightly the next time around by both cutting the sugar and upping the oatmeal. Her standard batch came close to filling two half-gallon canning jars, which I have to admit are a little tough to find room for in the fridge right now.


Still, it was wickedly satisfying to slice up a few late plums we bought at the farmer's market this weekend, supplement them with some volunteer ground cherries from our garden, plop them in a small pie plate, and top them with just the right amount of my homemade convenience food. Since I'd used my small pie plate for the cobbler, it fit in the toaster oven. About 45 minutes later, it was done. I didn't even bother to thicken the fruit. Some might call this more of a crisp, though the addition of oatmeal isn't standard in crisps. Whatever you want to call it, it was delicious!

The beauty of having plenty of this topping on hand is that it truly is convenient. Quantities sort of become irrelevant. If I had just one plum and a hankering for something sweet, I could put just that amount of fruit into a ramekin and make a single-serving cobbler/crisp. Having this kind of stash pretty much vaporizes any sort of weasely justification for giving in and paying for store-bought pie or dessert. Once the topping is waiting in your fridge, it's trivially easy to cut up fruit, top it, and get the dish in the oven. Five minutes, max. So you'll buy the fresh fruit instead of the over processed and over packaged pie. And this'll work with just about any fresh fruit too.

Try it! You'll probably like it. I know I do.

Harvest Snack: Garden Escabeche

The Chantenay carrots I grew this year are coming in well right now. They don't look normal, do they? Gardening has so many of these "real world" opportunities for discovery. Yet even if their tops are nibbled by rabbits, and they're not exactly supermarket models, these big fatties give me a whole lotta carrot to deal with. So I've been making escabeche with them, our recently harvested garlic, and some poblano chili peppers that are also ready in my garden about now. In my usual, rambling, inexact way, I present my methodology/recipe for this dish. The steps may sound a little complicated, but I find that I can hand wash a few dishes or attend to other things during the hands-off periods in the progress of the recipe.

Chili Pepper and Garden Fresh Carrot Escabeche

You will need:

a garden with carrots growing in it
olive oil
1-2 bay leaves
fresh chili peppers, of whatever potency you prefer
2 cloves of garlic
oregano, dried or fresh - chopped if fresh
rainbow peppercorns (optional)
distilled white vinegar
kosher salt or sea salt

First, dig up some carrots that are ready to come out of the earth. Rinse 'em off, compost the greens, and trim off any wispy side and bottom roots. Once inside, scrub the skins very well with a scrub brush, and trim off any nibbled areas, but do not peel them.

Select a saucepan according to the quantity of carrots you have. You'll want the carrots to fit (just) in a single layer in the bottom of the pan after a very coarse chopping up. Put this pan on the smallest burner you've got. Into the cold pan, pour sufficient olive oil to form a shallow pool that covers the bottom of the pan. You want more oil than just enough to coat, but only a very shallow pool, about 1/8 inch or so. Add one or two bay leaves (fresh are spectacular if you can get them) and put the heat on under the pan at the lowest possible setting. Let it heat for about 6 minutes.

Meanwhile, coarsely chop the carrots. Slice a couple of chili peppers open, and knock out any loose seeds. You may remove all the seeds if you prefer. Smash and peel two small cloves of garlic, and have some oregano on hand. (Don't overdo the garlic; it should not be the dominant flavor in this dish.) Optionally, rainbow peppercorns can also be used, so if you want those, have them handy.

Remove the bay leaves from the oil and discard them. Increase the heat to medium high and add the chili pepper slices and the crushed garlic. Cook the peppers and garlic in the oil for 2-3 minutes, turning once or twice. Remove the chili peppers and reserve. Add the chopped carrots, the peppercorns if you're using them, and a very hefty pinch of the oregano. Increase the heat to high and immediately add enough water to just barely cover the carrots. Put the lid on the pot and bring the liquid to a rapid simmer.

When the water simmers well, turn off the heat. Without dumping the contents of the pot into a colander, fish out the carrots and remove them to a bowl right away, and add the reserved chili peppers to them. Douse with a generous splash of distilled vinegar while the carrots are still hot. Toss the vegetables well in the vinegar. When they have cooled slightly, skim some of the cooking liquid out of the cooking pot and add it to the bowl with the peppers and carrots. Aim for about a 50-50 mixture of vinegar and the oily cooking liquid. Sprinkle with salt to taste.

I know you can't see the liquid in this picture, but they're soaking in it.

Serve the escabeche while still slightly warm, or chill and snack on them from time to time. They'll keep for a week or so in the fridge, and they're a nice addition to summertime smorgasbord-type meals. Also good with open faced tomato and basil sandwiches. These barely-cooked carrots have a nice firmness to them that is almost crunchy. Toothsome and satisfying. Brave eaters can enjoy the peppers. (And shhhhh! Don't tell anyone they're vegan!) Pretty tasty, if I say so myself.

Summer Harvest Solution: Borsch

I've had a request for a "tried and true" borsch recipe. This chunky soup which hails from Russia is quite adaptable, so there's little that can be said with absolute authority about borsch. The only thing that always holds true with borsch is that it contains vinegar, and usually cabbage. Americans tend to associate borsch with beets and the vivid color they impart to the soup. But in Russia this is considered an option, not a given. The soup can be served hot or cold, and may contain meat or be vegetarian. I see this versatility as an asset rather than a problem. Best of all, borsch as I like to make it helps to use up many vegetables that are coming in from the garden at more or less the same time.

I don't have a set in stone recipe for my borsch, since I tend to use what we have on hand. But since I was asked for one, I'll give it a shot, in my usual narrative fashion.

Kate's Borsch

cooking oil
2-3 onions, or onion equivalents (leeks will work), depending on size
1 large or 2 medium, very ripe tomatoes
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper to taste
a good fistful of carrots, say 5-6 medium or large ones, peeled and medium diced
a small head of cabbage, or part of a large one, cleaned and chopped small enough to fit on a soup spoon
3-4 medium beets, preferably already boiled or roasted (wrap in foil, 45 minutes @ 375 F), peeled and diced
1-2 cups leftover cooked beef or chicken, cubed (optional, and substitute as you wish)
4 cups of broth (beef/chicken), or water, with or without bouillon cubes
2 cups of water
1/3 cup of vinegar, preferably distilled white or apple cider vinegar

To garnish when serving: fresh dill (or parsley) and sour cream, both optional

Medium dice the onions and cook them in the oil in a large soup pot, over medium heat. Stir well and cover with the lid of the pot. While they simmer, take the tomatoes and cut them in half from stem to blossom end. Place the cut face of the tomato against the small holes of a cheese grater over a dinner plate and gently grate the fruit. The skin will protect your fingers pretty well from the grating holes, so get every last bit of flesh off the skin, working gently. The pulp will collect in the plate. Uncover the onions and stir them well again. They should be well softened, but without much color. Add the tomato pulp and increase the heat to medium-high. Cook for several minutes, stirring as needed, to let this liquid cook off. Add more oil if the sugars start to stick too much to the bottom of the pan. Compost the tomato skins. Add the bay leaves, and salt and pepper to taste.

You're ready to continue when the tomato pulp has mostly disappeared and the oil itself has taken on the color of the tomato. Look carefully at your dish thus far. This is an important step and contributes a lot of flavor to the soup, so don't skip it or change it. Really, this is the only authentic borsch trick in my arsenal.

Add the carrots and stir them around. After a few minutes, when they have warmed up, add a cup of the liquid and deglaze the pan of any sugary brown bits that have stuck to the bottom of the pan. Add the remaining liquid and bring it to a good simmer. (I like to use a quart of meat broth and 2 cups of water to dilute it a bit. But vegetable broth or all water works too.) When it reaches a steady roll, reduce the heat and let it cook for about 3 minutes. Add the chopped cabbage and let it simmer for another 5 minutes. Now add the chopped and cooked beets and any leftover meat you want to include in the soup. Continue simmering for about 5 minutes. The beets will color the soup vivid deep pink.

Add the vinegar, stir well, and taste the soup. If the soup is too chunky for your preference, dilute it with more liquid. Adjust the seasonings of vinegar, salt, and pepper to your preference. Fish out the bay leaves if you can find them. Serve immediately or cool the soup very well to serve it chilled. Garnish with freshly chopped dill and sour cream if desired.


-Feel free to improvise with the ingredients in this soup. Celery isn't used much in Russia, but it's a fine addition to borsch. Ditto for peppers. Extra diced tomatoes can be added if you happen to have a lot of them. Potatoes are usually added in Russia, but I tend to make borsch earlier in the year than they are harvested. I had pretty disappointing results when I tried canning this soup. Fortunately, it freezes beautifully. We usually have several quarts of it on hand in the chest freezer. It's especially nice as a chilled dinner on sweltering summer evenings.

On the Pleasures of Being an Adult

I've been very bad lately.

As background, I'm more of a vegetable person than a fruit person. That is, I can easily go without fruit for several days in a row, and can easily go for weeks or even months without fresh fruit. Whereas going without green veg for more than a day makes me feel low and crave vitamins. This is a handy set of preferences, given my locavore ambitions, since fruit is in shorter supply and has a shorter season than the wide range of vegetables that grow in my area. While we've planted several types of perennial fruits, they take so much longer to mature than annual vegetables.

But, oh! when I get my hands on fresh local fruit ... I do tend to go to excess. This past week my husband brought back three pints of sweet dark cherries from the farmers' market. He called to let me know what he'd scored before he even came home. So I whipped up a pie crust and had it ready to roll by the time he got home. While he pitted the cherries, I rolled out the dough and picked some anise hyssop from the garden (on which, more to come soon) for an accent to the rich cherry flavor. As he stood there watching me arrange the filling in the pie he asked, "What's for dinner?" I gave him a quizzical look and answered, "With dessert like this, who needs dinner?" Arguments? None. Man, do I love being an adult!

Then, just yesterday, we returned a borrowed chipper to some gardening acquaintances. These are the sort of people you can never do any nice thing for without having them turn around and do something twice as nice for you. So I always go to them bearing gifts. Yesterday it was eggs from our hens and some sprigs of the aforementioned anise hyssop. They in turn sent us home with a pint of their homegrown blueberries.

Now, we're rather low on the few foods we still buy from the supermarket just at the moment. There were no leftovers from a proper meal that needed to be finished off. This is an unusual situation in our house. But I did have an extra pie crust from when I made the cherry pie. (I always make a double batch.) And I had two lemons in a nearly empty fridge. What else did we have? Well, eggs from the girls, of course. Is it obvious where this is going? It was obvious to me. Honestly, it hardly felt like I had any choice...

Lemon curd tart with blueberries.

This didn't quite end up being dinner, but it was a close thing I can assure you. Nor, let the record show, did I indulge in it for breakfast today. I had to finish off the few blueberries leftover after making that gorgeous thing. They disappeared rather quickly with my mueslix this morning. These are stupendously good blueberries, possibly the best I've ever had in my life. Now I'm really, really glad I put in those blueberry bushes this year. As for the lemon curd, it's surprisingly easy to make. (I use this recipe.) I know it's got sugar and butter and eggs in it. I'm well versed in the conventional dietary wisdom, thank you very much. But I challenge anyone to take a bite of freshly made lemon curd and tell me with a straight face that it's bad for us. Go on, try it! You cannot possibly condemn it. Lemon curd and fresh blueberries together are just so right.

Yeah, I could and probably should eat my fruit with less sugar. It's just that fresh fruit is such a rare commodity in my diet that I can't help but want to celebrate it. Summer is the season of sweetness, after all. The frugal angle? Well, I dunno if there is one, I just felt like sharing. But if it's really examined, the lemon curd-blueberry tart hardly cost me anything. I paid for organic butter, sugar, lemons, and flour. The eggs and blueberries were free (or nearly so). And I have a plan to grow my own lemon tree starting next year, hardiness zone 6 be damned! With luck, that will be one more product that becomes both homegrown and local for me.

Chores Pleasant and Otherwise

We're sure having a lot of rain this spring. That means that I'm spending more time inside, doing housework and other indoorsy sort of things than I would normally in June. I hope the rain tapers off here so that summer can get underway. The tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants could do with some properly blistering days.

Today I harvested all the remaining garlic scapes, those fleeting late spring delicacies. I left a few scapes intact from each of the varieties of garlic I'm growing, except for the chesnok red. See, removing the scapes is supposed to make the bulbs bigger (logical), but leaving them in place is supposed to give you smaller bulbs that store longer (possible). Since my garlic all started sprouting in December last year, I'm hoping that I can store a portion of this year's harvest a bit longer. We'll see how it goes. I devote what is probably an excessive amount of thought to extending the portion of the year when we eat our own garlic. I'll let you know how this experiment works out. Oh, and I cut all the chesnok red because it is supposed to store for less time overall than the other five varieties of garlic. While I was out there harvesting, I had to beat back some nemorosa sage (an ornamental for the bees) that was sprawling all over the garden and into one row of garlic in particular. You'd think it owned the place or something. It makes for nice bouquets.


Anyhoo, I was planning to make garlic scape pesto, which all the gardeners seem to be raving about these days. But shock and horror! My supply of nuts to make pesto was unconscionably low. So I whipped up one batch with the few walnuts I had, and then another slightly larger batch with a slightly larger supply of pecans. Oh man! This stuff is maddeningly good! Why didn't I make some of this last year? (Because I'm hopelessly unhip, obviously.) It couldn't be a simpler recipe: equal parts by volume of nuts and coarsely chopped garlic scapes, plus a big pinch of salt, all pulverized in the food processor, then add generous amounts of olive oil to reach a decent consistency. I know it's vague, but you'll do well, grasshopper.

Seriously, I could have eaten this stuff with spoon until it was gone. Instead I contented myself with a few scoops on carrot sticks. I definitely preferred the walnut version. Then I dutifully froze both batches and whipped up a pasta dish for lunch from the remaining garlic scapes and a jar of last summer's roasted tomato sauce. I'm going to save the garlic scape pestos for dinner with company. The only trouble will be trying to decide whether to used it on pasta, or on pizza, or in a dish of scalloped potatoes, or whether it's better as a crudite dip. I think it could be bulked up and tamed at the same time with some bread crumbs and water for those garlic-shy folks. Me, I like the full bore stuff. But then, I've never lived in fear of vampires.

Other than that, I caught up on folding several loads of laundry, vacuumed, cleaned the kitchen and a pile of ziploc bags, and fed my worms. They seem to be doing well, but it's really hard to tell with worms. Then I caulked a few more windows around the house until my wrist complained.

I'm ready for some drier weather now. The second crop of parsnips needs to be planted, and there are still more onion family seedlings to set out. The fennel needs to be transplanted as well. If it doesn't stop raining soon, the funk may get some of those garden plants. If you've got more sunshine than you need, please send it my way...

Tiny Tip: Parboil Your Pasta

I've been trying out an energy saving cooking technique lately, and it's been working great for us. It consists of boiling our dried pasta for only a fraction of the recommended cooking time, and then turning off the heat and letting the pasta "coast" to doneness. It works well when I bring the water back to a boil after the pasta is added and give it a few good stirs to make sure the noodles won't stick to each other. This takes just about three minutes and then the burner is turned off. I find that the noodles generally need one more minute to cook than they would if the pot were kept boiling.

For instance, last night I made a batch of my pumpkin-sage pasta (with dehydrated pumpkin from last year's garden). I brought the water to a boil, added the fusilli, stirred well, and set the timer for three minutes. Just before those three minutes were up, I gave everything another good stir while it was boiling. At three minutes I killed the gas, and covered the pot with a towel. The package said the pasta needed nine minutes of cooking time altogether, so I set the timer for seven additional minutes of coasting. The pasta came out perfectly cooked to our taste.

I'm pretty sure I heard of this cooking method from several different sources before I tried it. The English have a dish called "crimped shrimp" in which shrimp are added to hot liquid and then the pot is covered and removed from the heat. I believe the method is specifically mentioned for pasta in the highly enjoyable Depression Cooking with Clara series. If you haven't seen any of the episodes with this 93-year-old home cook yet, it's well worth checking out for some seriously frugal cooking suggestions. There are probably other dishes that could cook by coasting too.

I'm not sure how much of the total energy is saved by this method, but I would guess it's somewhere in the neighborhood of one-quarter. Obviously, the most energy is used to get the water up to boiling in the first place. Keeping it boiling after adding the pasta is probably relatively cheap. Still, this technique saves me six minutes of running the burner, so that's something. It's also less likely that the pot will boil over, which means less cleanup. And it only takes one additional minute to cook everything. This is an especially useful trick now that the weather is warming up and the house is hot in the evenings. Less heat added to the house in the process of cooking dinner. Try it and see what you think!


More tiny tips: More Sunlight in Your Garden, Repurpose Your Credit Card, Make the Most of Old Man Winter, Broccoli Stalk, Scallions

Stop Food Waste - Salad Scrambles

The lettuce is up and it's salad season again. Salad is a cornerstone meal for healthy eating, and one of the most obvious ways to include raw foods in your diet. But leftover salad presents some home economy challenges, especially if that salad is already dressed. I've heard that some people like to make green smoothies out of leftover salad. Personally I've found a different strategy works for me.

I make salad scrambles the next morning. There are few ingredients that might go into a salad which would be totally out of place in an omelet. Tomatoes, peppers, herbs, onions, cheese, croutons - not to mention spinach and other greens - all these harmonize well with beaten eggs. I especially enjoy leftover Caesar salad in scrambles, or any salad that has goat cheese in it.

True, if you favor sweet dressings, or if you like to add fresh or dried fruits to your green salads, it might be a weird flavor combination. But in general this strategy works well because it's usually the earliest opportunity to use up leftover salads. That means that if the greens have been dressed, the vinegar doesn't have an extra eight hours to continue breaking down their cell structure, and turning them icky. It also helps if you dress your salad very lightly (a healthy and frugal practice anyway) and then store the leftover salad in the coldest (i.e. lowest) part of your refrigerator.

Making a salad scramble is simple. Beat however many eggs you want to use, adding salt and pepper or any flavorings you like. Preheat a pan over medium heat and put in a tiny dash of oil if it's needed. If your leftover salad is heavily dressed you probably won't need extra oil. Depending on the type of greens in your salad and how heavy your pouring hand was, it may take a few minutes to wilt the greens and drive off some excess liquid. Romaine lettuce can stand up to a surprising amount of cooking, butterhead not so much. When the greens wilt, increase the heat to medium-high and add the beaten eggs. Push a wooden spoon or soft spatula gently through the eggs every few seconds so that the eggs form soft lumps. When the eggs are just set, you've got a frugal and healthy breakfast. (In case you're wondering, those purple things in the picture above are chive flowers - part of last night's salad. They're quite oniony when raw, but mellowed a bit in the scramble.)

I actually whipped up some of these when we were houseguests last Thanksgiving. My husband's aunt made a lovely spinach, feta, and cranberry salad to serve with dinner a night or two before the feast. Our hostess was just going to toss the leftovers, but we assured her we'd eat it for breakfast. The next morning she was all but agog when we made some salad scrambles. It sure seemed to make her stop and think for a moment. Maybe she thought we were freaks. Or maybe she was mentally revisiting a childhood of extreme frugality, growing up on an Indiana farm raised by a survivor of the Great Depression.

So...am I a freak? Do you have clever solutions for using up dressed salad, or other awkward leftovers? Please share in the comments!

Other ways not to waste food:
Tiny Tip: Broccoli Stalks
Sour Milk & Potato Biscuit-Muffins
Chocolate-Zucchini Cake
Tiny Tip: Scallions
Homemade Apple "Cider" Vinegar

Harvest Meal for a Gray & Dreary Day

It's been raining steadily for four days, and the forecast promises more of the same. I worked outside in the garden for a good part of Sunday nonetheless, but I just couldn't face the steady drizzle on Monday. Instead, I did my best to remind myself of the virtues of living in an area with precipitation sufficient such that I almost never have to water my garden. And I caught up on housework, which generally falls to the absolute bottom of my to-do list once gardening season begins. Yardwork or housework, but not both - that's my motto at the moment.

In addition, I took the opportunity today to make my own version of Maya's stunning homemade spinach pasta (much prettier than mine, I might add.) The arugula sylvetta is going gangbusters out there. It's one of my favorite crops because I hardly need to do anything other than harvest it once it establishes itself. And I love the flavor. I also collected some chives, sage, a tiny bit of baby spinach, and a few ramp leaves. So with our own eggs and our own garden fresh greens, I whipped up a batch of very rustic pasta, using an organic wheat flour that includes the germ but not the bran. Homemade pasta is something I know how to make. But somehow it just doesn't happen as often as it should. So thanks, Maya, for the nudge and for giving me a good rainy day project.

This mound of flour has ground up arugula and other greens already in it. I dried them as well as I could, then put them through the food processor with most of the flour. The eggs are fresh from our hens.

Blend, blend, blend

The ball of dough after a few minutes of kneading by hand. I probably should have added an extra dose of flour to the dough. The herbs added quite a bit of moisture, so the dough was pretty sticky.

There's not a huge amount of precision when it comes to making your own pasta. A general rule of thumb is to use 2 cups (27 cl) of flour to four eggs. But since the size of eggs vary and the moisture content of flour also varies with the ambient humidity, it's always a subjective, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants endeavor. I added about 2 cups, or 4 ounces by weight, of raw herbs and greens, and ended up incorporating quite a bit more flour during the kneading stage. After kneading, the dough needs a little rest in the fridge before shaping it. A pasta roller makes the shaping a breeze. (I picked mine up, with a linguine/fettuccine cutting attachment, at the thrift store for $8.) But you can roll it by hand with a rolling pin and cut it with a knife if you need to. I did that many times before finding a cheap pasta roller.

These chewy, dense noodles cooked in no time, and didn't last much longer than that. All they needed was some olive oil with sauteed garlic and a bare grating of Parmesan cheese. I can tell that fresh herb noodles are going to become a springtime tradition for us. It's a dish that can be pulled together with what few things the garden and hens give up generously at such an early date.

First Harvest & Early Pizza

On Saturday I gathered my first few leaves of arugula sylvetta from some plants that had overwintered in the garden. Last year my first harvest came in April, and it was from some incredibly hardy overwintered Tuscan kale that put out a few small new leaves before going to seed. As usual, the chives are up an' at 'em early as well. I decided that pizza night would put this tiny harvest to best use.

In the interest of my resolution to keep better harvest records this year, I duly weighed that harvest. My baking scale of course couldn't handle such trivial quantities, so I had to get out the tiny metric scale. I'd harvested a whopping 5 grams each of arugula and chives. I felt pretty silly about this. But there it is, nonetheless, on my side bar: my first harvest tally of the year.

We added other things from our garden to the thin crust pizzas we made. Each one had a different combination of last year's smoked cherry tomatoes, pesto made from our homegrown purple basil and garlic, the freshly harvested arugula and chives, cheese, and some of the local pastured bacon I bartered for recently. The pesto and the smoked cherry tomatoes had both been frozen. I like to make these tiny pizzas because they cook in about four minutes on a baking stone, and we can try lots of different toppings. Except for the chives, this one pretty much has it all:


It's best to add the arugula when the pizza comes out of the oven, and just let wilt a bit. Some of the cherry tomatoes were still juicy enough to squirt warm tomato juice on our faces when we bit into them. Ooops! Is that too much like food porn for a family blog?

I'm looking forward to when more of our harvest ingredients are from this year. Have any of you northern folks managed to have a harvest meal yet? Do tell!

Pumpkin-Sage Penne Pasta

I'm trotting out another harvest meal, close on the heels of my Kale & Barley Soup post of just a few days ago. This one is too good not to share. The idea comes from the traditional pumpkin ravioli of northern Italy, which are sauced lightly with a sage and butter sauce. I had lovely intentions of making pumpkin puree and handmade sheet pasta, and assembling ravioli to eat fresh or freeze. But we all know how far good intentions go.

So I decided to try a variation on the filled pasta and see what I could come up with. Sage is my favorite fresh herb, so different from the musty, fusty dried stuff. And it complements the earthy sweetness of winter squash beautifully, as the Italians pointed out to me. So I fished the absolute last of our sugar pumpkins out of the garage, and set to work.

It took a little tweaking to get the pumpkin to pasta ratio right, and I think it would be okay to use more pumpkin than I've listed in the recipe below. Too little pumpkin is definitely not good. And I first experimented with using Pecorino cheese instead of Reggiano parmesan. Pecorino is a great cheese for many pasta dishes, but it did nothing to help this one. The king of parmesans, Reggiano, brings a lovely deep balance to the light and sweet notes of the squash.

I wish I had developed this recipe earlier. Pumpkin is one of those crops I grew for its storing virtues, and not so much because we love to eat it. I'm not a fan of pumpkin pie, and my husband is rather particular about how he likes to eat pumpkin too. This simple dish pleases both of us, and we would happily eat it on a regular basis. Now that I've discovered a great use for this long-storing vegetable, I feel more confident about growing it again this year. I love the deep yellow-orange color of the pumpkin. It almost looks like the pasta is studded with egg yolks.

If the methodology looks a little complicated to you, I will confess that I'm not a fan of too many different preparation methods or too many dirty pans in the preparation of one dish either. But the steaming is all fairly straightforward, and from there it proceeds like any skillet-prepared pasta sauce. The few flavoring ingredients in this dish are pretty simple, and to come together in a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts, you need to use good stuff: quality parmesan cheese, fresh sage, freshly ground pepper, and real butter and cream. You won't regret it!


Pumpkin-Sage Penne Pasta

2 lbs. (about 900 g) of fresh sugar pumpkin, which will be trimmed to about 1.5 lbs. (680 g)
5 tbsp. (75 ml or 70 g) butter
a generous bunch of fresh sage
1 tsp. (5 ml) sugar
salt to taste (I used kosher)
freshly ground white pepper
1 cup (about 225 ml) heavy cream
1 1/2 cups (about 350 ml) freshly grated Reggiano parmesan cheese

1 lb. (about 450 g) penne or other shaped pasta
salt for the pasta cooking water

Cut the pumpkin in half and then into quarters. Remove the seeds and pulp. Lay a slice of pumpkin on its side, with the skin facing away from you. Cut the skin off by slicing downward from halfway up the slice of pumpkin. The turn over the slice and cut away the skin remaining on the other half. Repeat this with the other slices. You should have 1½ lbs. of trimmed pumpkin remaining.

Pumpkin slices of two different thicknesses will partially cook in the steamer.

Take two of the pumpkin quarters and cut them into thick slices, about 1½” thick. Cut the other two quarters into thinner slices, about ¾” thick. Put all the slices in a steamer and let them cook for 15 minutes. Let them cool until they can easily be handled.

Two piles of sage. One is gently fried in the brown butter, the second is chopped up just before tossing into the cooked pasta with the finished sauce.

Meanwhile, melt 2 tablespoons (30 ml) of butter in a small skillet over low heat. Clean the sage leaves. Separate them into two equal piles and chop one pile. When the butter is melted, put in the chopped sage leaves and increase the heat to medium low. Fry the sage leaves gently, just until the butter begins to brown. Remove from the heat and set aside. Clean the rest of the leaves and set them aside until just before the pasta is done.

Two piles of steamed pumpkin. The smaller pieces will disintegrate to thicken the sauce. The larger pieces will remain intact to provide some texture contrast to the pasta.

Bring a pot of salted water to boil for the pasta. Meanwhile, melt the remaining 3 tablespoons of butter in a large skillet over low heat. While the butter melts, chop the thinly sliced pumpkin into small pieces. Chop the wider slices into larger cubes. Increase the heat under the skillet to medium high and sauté the pumpkin pieces in the butter, stirring well so that all pieces are coated with butter. Sprinkle the sugar and a generous pinch of kosher salt over the pumpkin. Grind some white pepper over the pumpkin and stir well. Add 2 tablespoons (30 ml) of water to the pumpkin and cover the skillet for 5 minutes.

When the water boils, put the pasta in to cook. Time the rest of the dish according to the pasta cooking time. When the pasta is 8 minutes from being done, heat the pumpkin over medium-high heat, uncovered, for 3 minutes. Add 1 cup of cream and simmer rapidly for 5 minutes. Finely chop the remaining sage. Reserve ¾ cup of the pasta cooking water before draining the pasta.

When the pasta is al dente, drain it and put it in a warmed serving bowl. Add to it the fried sage in brown butter, as well as the pumpkin in cream. Toss well, then add the grated Reggiano cheese and chopped fresh sage. Loosen the sauce or the leftovers with the reserved cooking water as needed. Serve piping hot. Serves 4-6. Leftovers are as good as any leftover pasta ever is.


Other harvest meals:
Saag Paneer
Garden Pizza
Pyttipanna
Peanut Noodles with Garden Vegetables
Egg & Chard Curry
Fusilli with Tuscan Kale in a Creamy Tomato Sauce
Kale & Barley Soup

February Frugal Action Item: Kitchen Competence

Time for another month's Frugal Action Item. This month, in honor of the chilly winter weather we're having in the northern hemisphere, I am challenging my readers to improve their kitchen skills. My goal with these Action Items is to provide concrete steps that both renters and homeowners can take to improve their household budgets. By the same token, this month's item highlights areas for skill expansion for all but the most serious professional cooks and homesteaders.

If you already know how to cook well, congratulations. Now skip down to the Alternative Action Items below. If you don't know how to cook well, you've most likely been using this as a ready-made excuse for eating out, or picking up ready-to-eat meals at the grocery store. Both of these practices are a serious drain on your food budget, and they also tend to steer eaters to less healthy food choices. Additionally, highly processed and over packaged foods contribute significantly to the production of greenhouse gasses, and thus global climate change.

So this month, I urge you to check out a few basic cookbooks from the library. The goal here is not to wow anybody with fancy meals or exotic ingredients. Instead, look for a few dishes that can provide a basic but healthy meal in a single item. Candidates include casseroles, twice-baked potatoes, soups, pasta dishes, fritattas, and so on. None of these dishes are difficult to prepare, and they can all be made to include green vegetables. Challenge yourself to prepare at least one such dish each week. Keep an eye out especially for dishes that use plenty of vegetables, or meat dishes that are readily supplemented by vegetables or starches. Don't be afraid to add extra vegetables to a dish with meat. These types of dishes will help you stretch your food budget farther.

If you are really new to cooking, I recommend that you begin with pasta dishes and soup. A good way to build skills is to start slow and plan to repeat dishes with some variation. For instance, this week you might begin with a pasta and tomato sauce dish. In the second week of February, make a broth-based soup. In the third week, you could prepare a pasta with an olive oil sauce. And in the final week of this month, prepare a chowder soup of some kind. So two types of pasta and two different soups in a month.

Recommended cookbooks for beginning cooks:
The New Best Recipe, by the Editors of Cook's Illustrated
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman
Joy of Cooking, by Irma S. Rombauer
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, by Marion Cunningham

I can specifically recommend the following dishes from these cookbooks. They're all delicious and easy to prepare:

Chicken with Dumplings, from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
Cabbage Stuffed with Lentils and Rice, from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian
Twice-Baked Potatoes, from The New Best Recipe
Pulled Pork, from The Joy of Cooking

If you want to try a simple meal of roasted chicken, have a look at my walkthrough of this dish at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op.

My hope is that the joy of mucking about in your own kitchen will prove addictive enough that you become an instant convert. But I recognize that not everyone enjoys cooking as much as I do, and that learning to cook may be a daunting enterprise to some. So I will allow as how the monetary savings would likely also be a powerful motivator. Or, you might find inspiration in the knowledge that you are preparing wholesome food for yourself and your family, thus contributing to better health. Perhaps parents could also show children that developing new life skills can happen at any age. In the end, there are many reasons to improve our kitchen skills.


Alternative Action Items: Accomplished home cooks are hereby challenged to learn how to bake bread, and to bake at least one loaf each week of this month. It's a good time of year to bake; you'll be warming your house up at the same time. See below for some basic resources.

If you already know how to bake bread, then I would suggest learning some form of food preservation, such as canning, fermenting, homebrewing, cheese or yogurt making, or dehydrating. (Heather had a great post on easy-peasy jelly making just a few days ago.) I include this suggestion only for those who are already quite advanced in their food preparation skill set. Canning, fermenting, cheesemaking, brewing, and dehydrating will all required you to invest in some fairly specialized equipment, and that's not an investment I think everyone should make...yet. But if you have all the cooking and baking skills you really need, it's certainly something to think about. If you're at that point, you probably don't need any advice from me, which is just as well since I'm far from an expert in all of those subjects. We're still working on canning and homebrewing.

If you already bake and preserve food routinely, your challenge for the month is to pass on some of your impressive kitchen skills to a young person. Equipping the next generation with basic skills for their own self-sufficiency is a noble task and a generous gift of knowledge and self confidence.

Suggested resources for baking skills:

Breadtopia.com - This site has fantastic tutorials on my favorite easy method of bread baking: no knead. Try this method! It's easier than you imagine and the bread is fantastic!

The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart - Highly detailed book on the fundamentals of bread baking, fabulous recipes too.


I want to hear your reports on this month's Frugal Action Item! Please leave a comment and share stories of your efforts. We're all in this together, so let's support each other.


Other Monthly Action Items:
January: CF Bulbs & Pipe Insulation
March: Rein in Entertainment Spending
April: Go Paper-less
May: Solar Dryer
June: Raise the Deductible on Your Auto Insurance
July: Stay Cool Without Touching that Thermostat
August: Repair It!
September: Insulate
October: Preventative Health Care
November: Frugal Holiday Wish List
December: Plan Next Year's Garden