Butternut-chestnut soup

One reason that more people do not chose the vegetarian option is the work involved. Eating vegetables for your nourishment and pleasure requires more time and effort than most people have. Job, family, school, etc. take up so much of daily life that it is tempting to get your grub from energy-packed sources that are pre-processed. Hungry? Need a quick jolt of proteins? Meat, bread from the bakery, frozen peas, and so on are the answer. The vegetarian, on the other hand, must assemble nourishment from a variety of sources, and it is even more difficult for the organic-only vegetarian. Not only are you faced with the labor of turning a pile of legumes into a balanced lunch (proteins and vitamins, minerals and fiber), you have to find an affordable source of makings which are organically grown.

These are the thoughts that will occupy you while cutting up a butternut squash. In fact, the prep is not an onerous task at all, and with a little practice (and with iPod earphones inserted properly and suitable music playing) it can become a moment for meditation. On this occasion, I am happy to report, my thoughts turned from the question of vegetarian labor to the colors and textures in my hands, the scents rising to my nose. Suddenly I realized that I was cutting up a melon. No kidding. And I think it was the aroma that encouraged this line of thought. A little whiff that carried my mind to a summer day and a melon brought back from the bio grocery down in Claira. Once this image had lodged itself in my awareness, I began looking for more signs of the butternut's kinship to the melon. The flesh is the same color, or nearly. This is especially true of the less-ripe parts, especially the neck, but the ripe center, where the seed cavity is found, turns a darker shade of melon, nearly red. The mush that comes out with the seeds is pungent, and the seeds themselves seem, to my memory, the same as melon seeds. Now it is July in December and I am tapping my toe to "Three Little Birds."

working on this . . .

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Christmas soufflé, a new tradition?

During the holidays, we read much advice for organic vegetarians on how to weather the season's food temptations and realized how much of what people anticipate about the solstice period is rooted in meat-centric habits. We've never been slaves to tradition, even in the days when we still partook of the occasional poulet rôti or grilled sardines. For the past couple of years, Juliette and I treated ourselves to a wonderfully tasty Christmas repast of roasted duckling with all the trimmings. We used as much organically produced fixings as we could find in local markets and shops. The result was, given the parameters of the project, a great success. We thought we had found our perfect holiday meal, a true culinary and gustatory delight and a project that kept us occupied all year long. In the spring we noted the effect on local cherry trees of every change in the weather, because the cérises à l'eau de vie (cherries put up in sugar dissolved in alcohol) that we would prepare from the fruit would be a major element of the stuffing for the little bird. We waited eagerly for the announcement that orders were being taken for bio cannettes at the bio grocery. Once the order had been placed, we waited eagerly once again for the duckling to arrive. Then we counted the days until Christmas Eve, which was feast day, followed on Xmas Day by a meal of leftovers in the form of a picnic, weather permitting.

But I digress. This essay is about a new culinary tradition for the holidays, the Christmas Soufflé.

to be continued . . .

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Omelet with hazelnut

This is the time of year when people grab hold of tradition for comfort and strength when the days grow short and the nights cold and damp, a darkness and dampness that can creep into the soul and ruin the holidays, if you are not careful. I wasn't thinking about this when Juliette suggested an omelet the other day, but it occurs to me that traditions are habits that become deeply ingrained. I am often called into service with my trusty omelet pan on days when a quick meal is desired for whatever reason, but especially (or so I like to think) when the day needs a little noontime kicker. On this particular dark and rainy day around solstice time, a jazzy omelet was more in order than usual. I had to deliver, so I quit thinking about it. Soon I was up to my ears in creating what might become a holiday tradition, because it did sparkle up the day.

First I chopped an onion and while it sizzled gently in the omelet pan (olive oil and a good teaspoon of curcumin), I went to the frigo to scout for a side dish and found a small head of broccoli, much too small for us to share. So I dug around and located a large black radish and a couple of good-looking carrots. I cut and sliced until I had a good colorful pile in the steamer. I gave the onions a stir and turned the heat down to let them braise a bit.

But I still had not come up with an idea for a making the omelet sing.

"Do we have any sprouts ready?" I asked Juliette when she passed through the kitchen. A good handful of sprouts, as I well know, can save a dying omelet.

"On the back porch, one tray of mung beans. They're really not what you'd call 'sprouted,' just soft and plump."

"Perfect."

I cracked four large organic eggs into a bowl and while I was absorbed in the dexterity involved, it hit me. Hazlenut powder. This will give the eggs an incredible aroma and flavor, a perfect compliment to the nuttiness I expect from the mung beans. I turned up the heat under the omelet pan and began stirring the hazlenut powder into the sauteed onions. When the mixture began to really bubble, I poured in the eggs. When the omelet was set but still runny in the middle, I put the mung bean sprouts across the omelet and turned the heat down. When the eggs had firmed up and the sprouts were hot, I folded the omelet over onto a plate.

to be continued

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Split pea soup with black radish

The main thing with pea soup is to find a different combination of ingredients. It's not the dullest soup on the planet. It has a delicate flavor. It blends well with a variety of other vegetables. But its delicacy and its blendability may be the reason why potages made with split peas can be bland as an old joke (or hackneyed clown routine).

Juliette is of the school that throwing in large doses of condiments just to give pea soup flavor  is not the way to go, and I concur. The flavors must come from the body itself, from the melange. The other side of this is the well-known fact, now that we're beginning to learn to cook, that what makes for good cooking is being ready, keeping a good back stock of compatible makings.

So it was that on one particular morning just before the holidays, we knew it was time for a good split pea soup using produce from a recent basket. The main ingredient, we decided, would be diced potatoes (three varieties), which is to be expected, along with an chopped onion, a couple of diced black radishes (radis noir), and some diced carrots to add a touch of sweetness and color. Split peas and water, but also a good helping of almond milk, which gives the broth a richness that you can't get with crême fraîche.

more to come

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The Weekly Pannier, December 24, 2009

This week we received two panniers, on account of the holidays. We contacted our farmer, who was taking a week off from delivering baskets, and asked for two, to tide us over until after the first of the year. We were rewarded with a supply of vegetables and fruits that more than satisfied our desire for variety. In this week's pannier: eggs, broccoli, leeks, lettuce, parsley, céleri rave, sweet potatoes, turnips, endives, a butternut squash, fennel, curly cabbage, rhubarb, avacados, oranges, clementines, kiwis, grapefruits, and a box of organically grown chestnut meat.

Not knowing much about rhubarb -- Garrison Keillor and Meryl Streep singing "Be-bop a re-bop, rhubarb pie" is what first comes to mind -- I decided to do some research and found that the plant has quite a story to tell. It's the stalks that you eat, not the leaves, which contain small amounts of the poison oxalate. Apparently, you have to eat huge quantities of the leaves in order to get the toxic effect, but why take the chance. Besides, the leaves are not spoken of as being all that good to eat anyway. Rhubarb figures in traditional Chinese herbal medicine, but mostly for the root, which when dried makes a good laxative. The leaves and stems may have some anti-oxidant value.

Another thing about rhubarb is that it is highly acidic, so it would not be a good food for people who are watching their acid intake. The acidity perhaps explains why the chopped stalks have to be cooked with lots of sugar in order to be worth eating, such as when making the famous Rhubarb Pie.

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The Weekly Pannier, December 19, 2009

This has been a week of cold weather food. Soups and stews mostly, with a version of our version of roasted sweet potato. The Weekly Pannier for the holidays is fruits and green vegetables (with some potatoes and a winter squash of some sort), which reminds us to take advantage of broccoli, winter lettuces, and spinach during a season that can rely heavily on heavier vegetables. Of course, the term Heavy Food hardly applies to vegetables, does it? Keeping the diet light is easy when you think about it. Juliette and I, we don't cook with flour at all (except for bread made with low-gluten epautre flour and seeds) and we no longer eat animal milk products, which means no gravies or other rich sauces. We make sauces with soy products, oils (olive, sunflower, colza, etc.), garlic, and other herbs and spices. Juliette tells me I ought to write a blog essay on the subject. All I could say was, yes, I'd like to do that, but given my busy schedule right now, who knows when it might be. She said, You'll know what to do, and gave me that enigmatic, sphinx-y smile of hers that always baffles me. Was she agreeing with the whiff of procrastination in my voice (Oh, go ahead, put it off, you have all the time you need), or was she posing a secret challenge of her own (Go ahead, put it off, but don't forget, time is precious).

The only new food this week is the potimarron, which is a cousin of the potiron which we have had earlier this year, plus: eggs, a big sack of spinach, lettuce, potatoes, céleri rave, broccoli, oranges, and kiwis.

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The Weekly Pannier, December 12, 2009

Glad to see some old favorites back, such as the sweet potatoes. We have a recipe for patate douce we love: broiling diced patate doux with chopped garlic and rosemary. With these ingredients for which there can be no substitutes, we have to wait until the rare patate douce shows up in order to have it. We can do great things with carrots, but we can get bio carrots almost any time at the supermarket. To have bio sweet potatoes, however: now that's a treat to savor.

In the Weekly Pannier: eggs, broccoli, salad, kohlrabi, fennel bulbs, sweet potatoes, leeks, apples, bananas, and pears.

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Why eat fish

Here is an interesting little piece, written by two ecological economists and one food system researcher, that argues for eating frozen fish rather than fresh, when the choice is between shipping fresh fish (in this case they are talking about salmon) half way around the world by air (the most ecologically unfriendly method) or freezing it where it is caught and processed and shipping by slower, less eco-damaging methods. They make a good point, but the article begs the question: why eat fish at all? Unless you can get it fresh from the fisherman, then you're probably causing severe damage to the ecosystem or yourself (or both).

When Juliette and I went totally vegetarian a few months ago, we clung to the eating of a little fish, some fresh smoked salmon we could get at the local supermarket which was advertised as eco-friendly in some way. It tasted good with slices of cucumber for tapas at dinner time and supplied us with vitamin B 12, which is very hard for vegetarians to get but which is a vital nutrient that comes mostly in meat and fish.

It's a dilemma, how to get the nutrients of fish without eating fish (or dairy products or meat). Frozen fish is out for us. Small freezer compartment in our frigo. No desire to buy A Freezer. So for now, we wonder if eating smoked salmon, even eco-salmon, from our supermarket chain is the best solution.

More to come.

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Winter salad with carrots, black radish, and bean sprouts

The black radish is so fresh right now -- and packed with such a good list of minerals and vitamins -- that Juliette is always looking for ways to use them. The sharp, tangy bite that you get when the radishes are eaten raw, to me this makes it hard to see them as good candidates for a fresh salad to go with a bowl of soup made with this week's butternut squash. The first and only time I tried eating a small bit raw, all I could think of was water and how much it was like eating horseradish.

Juliette came up with a good idea. She cut the radish into a couple of dozen slices and steamed them with a couple of good sized carrots. These she placed on the bluebird plates with a handful of just-germinated sprouts.

At the table, she handed me the little pitcher of sauce that she had made up and asked me to give it a stir with my fork. The sauce: some olive oil and about five or six others in small amounts (colza, hempseed, walnut, etc.) along with some puree of young garlic, soy sauce, and celery salt. The proportions of the ingredients depend on each day's whim and what's available.

Steaming the black radish did the trick. Although there is not much flavor, the slices of radish are firm, even crunchy, but most of all, healthy.

(We have quit using vinegar for salads, or for anything else, except for cleaning things around the house.)

More to come.

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Blette combo for an autumn day

It's not always easy to come up with a name for something new, but this one seems natural enough. This week's pannier was piled high with about a dozen huge blette leaves ready to cook. There being no time to waste, Juliette figures why not just chop up the whole lot, the white stems and all, and cook down in a pot with carrots, potatoes, and onion. Such a good idea, say I, and the work is soon done.

Cutting up the blette leaves, so many all at once, was a thrilling experience. But when I got through, I had a five liter cooking pot nearly full of chopped blette, along with the carrots, potatoes, and an onion. There were three varieties of potatoes, which helped give the potato portion of the mix more interest. Lucky for us, local potato growers seem to know what they are doing. Every spud from the Weekly Pannier is proclaimed the best we've ever tasted, and this is no hyperbole. Still, the humble potato, even at its freshest and tastiest still tastes, well, like a potato, so it was good to have the diversity of flavors and textures.

You would think that chopped blette leaves in this quantity would give the soup a dark bitter undertone, but such was not the case. Yes, there was a definite flavor of cooked greens, but subtle. I recalled my childhood experiences with turnip greens, which are probably the bitterest greens around. My relatives with roots in the South cooked turnip greens in a pot with fatty chunks of pork. The resulting mess was so bitter to my highly sensitive taste buds (a characteristic inherited from my French ancestors) that I would gag on even the smallest morsel that I could force past my lips. After a few episodes of turnip refusal, my mother didn't force the issue and let me watch the rest of the family smack their lips and tease me for being a turnip greens wimp. My God, they even soaked their corn bread in the potlikker and thus ruined the only food my mother ever cooked properly.

more to come

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The Weekly Pannier, December 5

This week's pannier contained few surprises, but that did not detract from its appeal. It was good to see some old favorites (the butternut) and we found a newcomer to our list of vegetables to depend on (the black radishes).

Eggs, lettuce, butternut squash, black radishes, potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, pears, kiwis, and oranges.

The black radish, also known as Black Spanish Radish, is an amazing root vegetable, not so much for its nutritional value (it is high in vitamin C and potassium) but for its reputed medicinal qualities. Our first reaction to its taste when eaten raw was that it was like a crunchy horseradish.

More to come.

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