Yes, we can

Peas and strawberries are ready for their starring role at the farmers' market, but they're just going to be the warm-up act for the thrilling abundance of fruits and vegetables July will bring. This won't last long, so we have to do what we can to preserve it. The take-away from the continuously bad news about industrial food should be that it's a shame to waste the fresh taste of farm picked, letting it go by when it could brighten not only your health but a dark winter day. Now's the time to stock up on jam and canning jars--or lids for recycled ones, because they get harder and harder to find as summer moves on.

Preserving food is not drudgery, more work you don't need. For one thing, it can actually be fun, a very educational activity with kids on a rainy day, or after dinner on a foggy summer night. Stir raspberries into vinegar, or blueberries into chutney, or tomatoes into spaghetti sauce-- your way, or soup for the freezer. Then comes the joy of finding summer in the frozen doldrums of February, and having warm memories with your food. Making jam is not rocket science, making chutney is even easier, and preparing, say, tomato soup or red pepper sauce for the freezer almost a no-brainer.

But the more important "do can" reason for putting up with putting up food is psychological. Long ago I started stashing summer away as necessity because the food supply in Maine was severely limited and my ability to get through blizzards to it just as crimped. So it was for health and well-being, but particularly for buttressing those with the mental relief of knowing I had food--honestly good food-- on hand.

Now of course gassed tomatoes from Florida and "organic" blueberries from Chile are available everywhere all the time, but my hoarding habit is so strong, I'm still obsessed with pickling, jamming and sauces. I just can't let the harvest go by unheralded. I want to go in the flow of traditional rhythms for human life, to be participating in the real world as it really is, networking with Nature. I find honoring the seasons, the naturalness, this way to be very grounding, thus mentally relaxing in many ways.

The psychology goes deeper though. The urge to can or jam recognizes that nothing satisfies the human soul as much as the sight of a full larder, a re-assuring supply of something to eat. Our survival absolutely depends on food, which is why people get edgy when there's not much to pick at or up, not a lot of canapes and cheese at cocktail parties, no meals on planes. It has been the great marketing trick of corporations like Whole Foods and tastemakers like Martha Stewart to understand that abundance not only relaxes and removes inhibitions, it creates the buoyancy of joy. Those who walk into a party full of food are full of social spirit and ripe for conversation. Those who open the door to a well stocked pantry smile, for now they have freedom to go to other pursuits.

I am talking about our sense of security. It starts with food. So it's worth twenty minutes here, a half hour there, a few dollars for some jars, to have your own snowy day edible savings. You will have something on hand, know exactly what you are eating and realize what great benefits the summertime farmers' market can offer you.

P.S. If you've never done this before, How to Fix a Leek and Other Food From Your Farmers' Markets has easy recipes for blueberry apple chutney perfect for Christmas ham, the cranberry conserve I've made for 30 years for Thanksgiving turkey and midwinter roast chicken, for marinara (tomato) sauce, for pickled asparagus and dilly beans (favorite cocktail party and picnic food), even raspberry vinegar, and hints for how to make strawberry jam. Think of them as your starter kit and then do your own thing. These efforts make surprisingly welcome gifts for your friends too. I actually have greedy ones who wait to pounce.

Eats Shoots and Leaves

The markets are going green: spinach, baby kale, scallions, lettuce, chard, even in lucky places my special favorite, pea shoots. I fell in love at first bite in one of San Francisco's Chinese restaurants known for serving up huge platefuls seasoned with garlic, then chased them down in Chinese markets. I got so addicted, I badgered and bothered local farmers I knew to start thinning their pea crops to bringing those pulled shoots to market for me. "Plant extra peas just to get those shoots," I insisted. "I'll buy them. I'll get others to buy them. You won't be sorry."

Now, I can say with a "phew!", pea shoots have completed their migration from the East to the West to the east of that West, for now that June is busting out all over, they're showing at New England farmers' markets--and proudly featured too.

This is hugely good news. Pea shoots are not just a seductive prelude to the fully grown pod peas coming in July, but a perfect momentary tonic. Those leafy little sprouts have almost no calories and zero fat but almost the whole ABCs of vitamins: over the top Vitamin K, lots of C, significant A and the various Bs, even E. They're also chockful of antioxidants. Health by the handful but only at this precious moment before those pea vines grow up. So now or never...until next June.

There are shoots from the snow pea, the snap pea and the garden pod pea. The trick to enjoying shoots is to get the smallest, tenderest little tendrils you can find. I am not sure but tend to think they're more likely to come from snow pea vines than garden pea vines. But in any case, the best look like magnified alfalfa sprouts. If farmers wait longer to thin their crop, the shoot begins to get more stem and the stem begins to get tougher, which means more prep work and a sometimes a tough mouthful to swallow. If there are tough stems attached, break them off with your fingers and either contribute them to soup stock, rice water or your compost pile. Some Chinese Americans find fixing these older pea shoots so much work, they only eat them in restaurants--which allows those restaurants to charge plenty for them: up to $11 a dish.

But right now you can probably get tender shoots which are a no-brainer to serve. The quickest way to heat and eat is to rinse them thoroughly, don't drain them too much and put them still wet in a saucepan to steam in those remaining water droplets for 1 minute or two. Salt and serve. You can do this as a side dish with dumplings or chicken or you can throw them over pasta with fresh peas, seasoned with freshly ground black pepper and a hint of mint. Careful though: you don't want to do too much to compete with that lovely grassy pea flavor you can't get elsewhere.

Or, you can rinse them thoroughly and spin them dry so they really are dry. Then to feed 4, quickly stir-fry a heaping pound of them along with 8 cloves of garlic thinly sliced in 2 tsp of canola, soybean or olive oil for 20 seconds. Toss in a tbsp of vegetable broth, rice wine, sake or water, sprinkle on salt to taste, turn heat to high and shaking the pan, cook for one minute until the shoots are wilted. That's it.

You don't have to go to a San Francisco Chinese restaurant, consult gastronomy encyclopedias or give up any solstice revelry time to enjoy this sunny June treat. That just makes me love pea shoots even more.

A Raw Deal

My new discovery at this spring's markets was raw milk. No pasteurization, no homogenization, just udderly thick, yellowy cream straight from the cow to me. Courtesy of the Bahner family farm and the cooler carried from Pittston to the Bath market. (I believe they are in Portland at least on Wednesdays.) I was so astonished by this find, I went right home to whip up a latte in my little machine but that milk was too thick and rich to steam. So I had fabulous cafe au lait--for five days.

When my Tibetan goddaughter, Tashi Chodron who operates the Himalayan Pantry in New York City, decided to make a quick trip to see me, I made a quick trip to the Saturday market to get her that milk. Tibetans go through lifetimes on pure, raw milk, straight up or churned into butter tea or churpi, a cheese harder than the Himalayas. I reckoned she'd be thrilled. So I was seriously disappointed to find Bahner Farm out of raw milk. Perhaps yogurt would do?

That offered another new adventure, one that turned out worthwhile. For starters, it was yogurt that needed a knife, not a spoon. It was more yogurt cheese that spread on bread like whipped butter or perhaps paté. And with a dollop of homemade jam on top...oo la la.
But I digress.

When Tashi arrived, I told her how excited I was to have raw milk and wanted her to make Tibetan tea with it. I bet she couldn't do that in New York. I still had about half the quart but when I opened it, it let out a slightly sour smell. "Damn," I muttered. "It's no good now. I was so looking forward to giving you this." I went to the sink to pour it out, but Tashi raced over to stop me.

"What are you doing? No! Don't lose that precious milk. Give it to me." She took the bottle. "Do you have a large pot?"

"Of course I do."

"Good. We can make yogurt...like my mother did every day in the refugee camp in India. This is perfect."
So she poured the milk into my saucepan and set it to boil and roil. After maybe five minutes, cream started to coagulate at the top. "Wow!" she exclaimed in delight. "This is totally perfect. I'll show you what my mother does." She scooped about four tablespoons of that cream off the top and put them in a dish to cool. The milk boiled away for another five minutes. "Now," she said, "do you have yogurt?"

I opened the fridge, reached past my favorite kind from Trader Joe and handed her the yogurt from the same farm as the milk, telling her that.

"Give me a large bowl. Oh, this is gonna be so good....so good!" Tashi put about a tbsp of yogurt into the bowl and poured in the milk. Then she covered the bowl with a towel and a lid (it was an improvised pot lid since this was not a covered bowl). "Now," she said, "we have to put this in a place where it won't move for 24 hours. You can't shake it or anything."

Once we'd stashed it out of the way at the back of the counter, she put that plated cream into the fridge, clucking to herself with delight. "My mother would be so happy to have this," she said and we went on about the day.

And so the next morning, to my astonishment, like a magician Tashi pulled the lid and the towel off the bowel and voila! it was filled with yogurt! Lots and lots of yogurt. No matter how much we ate, there was still plenty left. Thousands of years from Mongolian nomads to my house in Maine.

That night, Tashi opened the fridge and took out her "cold cream." "This is what we do," she said. "Rub it all over the face and go to bed. In the morning you wash it off and you have smooth, glowing skin." Indeed I could swear she did, because that's what I saw reflected in the sparkle of her eyes.

Fast, Fresh and Fabulous: broccoli rabe is not broccoli

I have been on overdrive for the past week with little time for cooking so I’ve been surviving on one of my favorite fallback fast meals: pasta with broccoli rabe, fava beans, lemon, garlic and olive oil. I top that with freshly shredded pecorino cheese to get to the tastiest health heaven I know.

Happily Six Rivers Farm in Bowdoinham now grows broccoli rabe and brings it to the Brunswick farmers' market. The bunched greens are not really broccoli. They’re in the turnip family so they have a lovely bitter bite and all the goodness of Vitamins A and C as well as minerals and iron to boot. These are killer greens because they are supposed to be able to kill lots of bacteria and cancerous radicals in your body.

I learned to cook them from a professional chef by chopping them coarsely and blanching them in heavily salted (salty as the sea) water for 1 to 2 minutes. This leaches out a bit of the bitterness and intensifies their green. I drain them as well as I can in a colander, shaking and shaking. While they sit in the sink drying off, I heat fruity olive oil in a skillet with a large pinch of cracked black pepper. I dump in the broccoli rabe, standing back because any moisture on it will make the olive oil snap, crackle and spit. I toss in 2 to 3 cloves of minced garlic, stir and sauté for two to three minutes. That’s it. Sometimes I simply salt that and serve as a side dish, which people lap up, and sometimes I store it in the fridge to add to pasta as I have been this past week.

The other key ingredient, the protein punch in my pretty and pretty fast pasta supper, comes from canned fava beans, sold in supermarkets either as pigeon peas, congo beans or ful mudammas, a north African/Arabic staple. This is a very happy development. Fava beans have more protein and tastiness than all other beans, which is why even after the discovery of other beans (kidney, black) in the New World, they remain the core of the Mediterranean diet. And they come cooked in cans!

So…I boil up some really fine Italian pasta like penne, or those squiggles that look like toothpicks. And while that’s happening, I heat more fruity olive oil in a skillet, throw in two handfuls of my already cooked broccoli rabe, another clove of minced garlic, a handful of those canned beans and some cracked black pepper. When the mix is warm, I squirt in the juice of maybe half a lemon and set it to simmer as low as possible until the pasta’s cooked.

It’s important to take a large tbsp of the pasta water and put it in the skillet with the rabe and beans before you drain that pasta. This gives the final dish a creamy effect. Toss the drained pasta into the skillet, salt it to your taste, drizzle it with fruity olive oil and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and blend everything. Pour this onto your plate and top it with freshly shredded or grated pecorino (sheep) or parmesan (cow) cheese. (These are dry salty cheeses.)

What you have is a feast for your eyes and wealth for your health. Try it with a glass of red wine and a green salad with black olives. I’m foolish for this southern Italian peasant food and so happy farmers are now making broccoli rabe available to us. And here's a shout out also to Trader Joe for that fabulously fruity and cheap chic Sicilian olive oil that adds so much to this.

Labor of Fruits

We tend to think heroes are soldiers fearless in the fire of war or pilots with stoic skill that gets a dying plane on safe ground. We give ticker tape parades to guys who stay at bat to win a World Series and gold to those who zoom fastest down a snowy cliff. But what do we give besides a shrug to the farmer who year after year battles the onslaught of killing weather, the plagues of bugs and fungi, and backbreaking labor to get food to our home plate?

I personally think it’s awesome that twice a week at dawn Dick Keough still drives 25 miles to my local farmers’ market to set up a canvas canopy and chat cheerfully with customers who wander in to eye what he can display. For more than two decades, Dick has been the market’s “fruit man,” the go-to guy for whatever in this icy climate grows on trees: cherries, peaches, plums, pears and especially apples. Apples is actually his email name and he’s earned it over the years by showing up between mid August and late October with at least a dozen different kinds of apples you’d never see in a supermarket: Paulired, Tolman, August sweets, old-fashioned Baldwin… . Dick is the one who warned me—and lost a sale doing it—not to buy cider until the apples have been hit by frost. He knows fruit and is so sure of what he produces, he is always giving away samples. The apples he hands over claiming are delicious are not that ubiquitous mushy, tasteless, bumpy- bottom corporate one named Delicious to trick you.

I am a longtime fan of Dick’s plums and peaches as the key to great jam, crisps and tortes, so loyal that I once spent two frantically frustrating hours breaking all the gadgets in the drawer and slicing through my fingers trying to pit a shopping bag overflowing with his first crop of Damson plums (think fancy English preserves in a jar with the royal crown on its label, as I was thinking) because they were olive size. But I forgave him, because that was the year he started showing up with my most favorite apple: the hard to come-by, Mercedes of eating, “winesap.” If Snow White’s wicked witch held one out to me, I’d come hither and bite. I’m that foolish for its tart crunch and sweet juiciness—especially accompanied by a sliver of hard, salty cheese. I am in fact so foolish and they are indeed so hard to find, I once paid Dick to ship a box to me in California. And he took the trouble to do it because he knew how much I loved his fruit and had got used to shipping apples to his daughter after she left for college.

Depending on Dick as I do for my jam, pie and snack fruit makes me blurt at the sight of him back under his canvas canopy at the early May market some really burning questions: “How are my winesaps doing? Will there be lots this year?... And will you have apricots in August so I can make a tart?” Last year there were no winesaps because weather nipped them in the bud. There were no apricots either due to too much rain, and the year before there was only one half full shopping bag, which he gave me as a thank you present for my loyalty.

I cringe waiting for Dick’s answers to my eternal questions, having learned by asking them year after year that his life and livelihood is a crapshoot whose dice are heavily loaded against him. The odds on Maine weather were never all that favorable but climate change has made them hellishly insurmountable. We have no winter snow or a summer of monsoon rain. We have drought compounded by unprecedented heat, which brings new insects that just love new taste sensations. Or there is too much snow and thus too much melt that rots roots or cold that won’t quit until the end of June when it’s too late for trees to set their fruit.

Dick has orchards of lovingly tended trees hostage to circumstances beyond his control. Yet last week he was smiling, optimistically fussing with his display of lettuces when he said: “It’s all over, the apple business. No winesaps, no anything. Last year that surprise May frost killed all the fruit that set in the unnaturally warm April— peaches, apricots and all my apples. This year, I guess they were so weak from being off their clock, they’re all diseased and I don’t have $5,000 to bring them ‘round. I’m over 60 now and told my wife, we’re just too old to borrow money for something like this. There’s just no telling any more.”

“But the plums…those incredible jam plums…”

“Gone, all but the American kinds. Anything with a Japanese strain in it got hit hard by fungus. So, no, no Japanese or Italian plums this year either. …I will have sour cherries but they’re already sold to hotels, so I won’t have any here. No fruit this year, I guess,” he shrugged. “But I’ll be here anyway. Right now I’ve got lettuce, rhubarb and my daughter’s baking,” he added with a proud smile. “I’m gonna get through the season like I always do. I’ll have something. Don’t you worry.”

Making sunshine

I spent yesterday morning slogging jet-lagged through an unseasonably cold, hard rain to hunt and gather my way home from the airport. Frankly, it was a pain to bundle up and wade through sodden parking lots at three different food markets and a wine store, especially after a night of flying through the air without sleep, but provisioning is my passion so each stop actually made my day brighter. I drove the last miles home buoyed by amazingly sunny thoughts that beat back my weariness with giddy joie de vivre.

From the CD player in my car, Paul Simon was singing: "So beautiful or so what? Life is what you make of it”, and I had just made of mine a feast. I had laid my hands on and thus laid in fruity olive oil, fresh local cheese, crisp and salty nuts, luscious Kalamata olives, freshly plucked sweet Vidalia onions, thick and willowy dill, warmly aromatic bread, densely molten chocolate cookies, simple wines, darkly roasted coffee and, for a $5 splurge, a flashy spring splash of red tulips. As soon as I got home, a dear friend who I hadn’t seen for more than half a year would come to share all this with me. We would sit at the table with red tulips, sipping, sampling, savoring this time to be face to face uninterruptedly catching up. This is the best friend I have for, as they say, chewing the fat, one of the rainy day people to depend on.

Food, friends, flowers…how much better can life get?

I was putting my provisions in place when my friend showed up in her boxy red Scion. “I’ve been to the market,” she hollered as she got out, “even in the rain. I had to get good stuff because it’s you.” In she came with an overflowing tote and out came a container of freshly picked Maine crabmeat, handmade pepperoni, soft and dazzling white herb marinated cheese “from a new creamery you need to know about”, and a large bag of lettuce “which I made Dick cut right off the plants he was selling in pots. He did that when I said it was for you.”

My little house had magically become a treasure chest of great riches. I fussed with coffee and poured mineral water into wine glasses while my friend fixed a meal of fresh crabmeat with dill and chives, miraculously renewed in my yard, on a bed of just picked lettuce, that melt-in-the mouth dazzlingly white fresh cheese spread on hunks of the just baked baguette, salty olives and soft chocolate cookies. I sat down at my table with utter happiness, not wanting to be anywhere else or have one thing more. My heart and my mind were that full. On a planet awash in a downpour of horror, hate and heartache, I had before me the freshest food won from Maine land and sea, a dear friend, a faithful farmer, and red tulips popping out of a black ceramic pitcher.

My friend swore I had never looked so good. Well...yes... I was glowing with ecstatic joy, eating and yakking and drinking coffee so I could stay awake to savor this rain of enormous blessings. I wish the same sunshine to everyone.

P.s. That dazzlingly white fresh cheese came from a new micro-creamery in Durham, Maine: Spring Day Creamery and the intrepid farmer who picked the lettuce off his plants was Dick Keough of Keough Family Farms.

Jam Session

I am the only person I know--or probably anybody knows--who can look at her calendar and realize with a devastating shock, she's arranged the next two months in such a way that she is going to miss strawberry season. All four fresh-from-the-farm strawberry weeks, for the first time in 38 years. This means a whole year without strawberry jam. Who can live like that?

I am the only person I know--or anybody would want to know--who can get so distressed about this, she stops everything, and I mean a heaping amount of everything: 1 job, 2 books and charity-- and runs to the next available San Francisco farmers' market to buy 6 pints of strawberries so she can make jam. I spent Mother's Day deliberating resting by doing only what I wanted to do, and that included spending an hour making strawberry jam. Frankly, there is something very old-fashioned and wholesomely mothery about stirring those berries into delight. I felt so much better with six nicely labeled jars good to go. (Thirty eight years have taught me that 1 pint makes 1 pint jar of unadulterated jam.)

The big whew! is that everybody's favorite jam seems to be strawberry. I suspect that's why my friends expect me to hand or send them a jar and my house guests wait anxiously at breakfast. This has been going on for three decades now, so their expectations are well trained. One childhood friend actually bought a bread machine to make toast worthy of it, or so she said.

People always say they like my jam because the freshness of the fruit comes as a delectable surprise. They can really taste it. This is because commercial processing requires mega mega doses of sugar and my body cannot tolerate sugar. Since I started by making jam for myself, I had to do it avoiding sugar if possible, so by experimentation I learned to get by with the least I could get away with and still have its preserving effect. I started adding fresh lime juice whose acid not only kills whatever bacteria hinders the preserving, but also, or at least I think, brightens and thus heightens the zing in fruit. Of course, once opened my homemade jam doesn't last as eternally the chemically botoxed commercial stuff does, but then people don't care because they seem to gobble it up pretty fast.

It makes people happy to not worry about high fructose corn syrup, mysterious natural flavors, or chemical pectin, which the canning jar people recommend because they profit from selling it. So I am a good Buddhist who offers a little less mental suffering by offering nothing but farm fresh strawberries, fresh lime juice, a touch of sugars white and brown, a splash of rose water sometimes and pinches of cinnamon and nutmeg. I let the jam thicken naturally as it cooks. This takes a little longer but...so? We're talking 15 minutes. People who've watched me make a batch can't get over how easy it really is. I think I've taught a half dozen eager children by now, hoping the tradition lingers.

What a great gift a neatly labeled jar of homemade jam makes. I hand somebody one and they trip all over themselves thanking me. It seems so special. I give it to make people feel special. The woman who works on my hair says it's her favorite tip because she gets to share it with her three-year-old daughter. This kind of honest, handmade food sends a message that you care, and aren't afraid to show it. The message stirred into jam is old fashioned unabashed love.

So how could someone who just wrote two food books encouraging people to relearn the beautiful basics of food because their bodies and the minds depend on it, not stop everything to make strawberry jam? How could she let a year go by without it? Especially when people seem to love me very much for offering it to them-- even a small 1/2 pint jar. It's actually been my experience that in our overly manufactured, manicured and manipulated society, a jar of strawberry jam brings more joy to the world, more peace, and more good will back at you than all the travels and travails of my contemporary Hillary Clinton who once rather infamously snapped: "Do you really expect me to stay home and bake cookies?"