Layers

Well, as far as I can see, with one working eye, the blog news is that organic tomatoes really do have more nutrients, farmers' markets are a bargain priced alternative to low income families, most wine is contaminated by fungicides so if you can find organic go for it but don't stop enjoying wine with your meals, and eating grains with beans, lentils, vegetables, fruits, eggs and yogurt is really good for you. In a major medical study recently released, the so-called Mediterranean diets trumps our junk food red meat fiesta yet again.

So here's hoping our farmers are planning right now to plant all sorts of legumes and lentils, root veggies and greens galore to put sunshine inside our bodies.  And here's hoping markets share their wealth with the financially challenged too.

Meanwhile, as spring breaks through in warmer latitudes and winter continues to grip the north and challenge farmers to bring anything to the market, here is something I've been working on as a goodbye salute to the cold season.

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Polenta and Kale Layer Cake

Serves 6

2/3 cup polenta

3 cups water

1 tsp dried oregano

2 tbsp minced roasted poblano pepper

Pinch of red pepper flakes

¼ tsp salt

¼ cup shredded or grated mozzarella cheese

*carnivore options

2 bunches kale

1 med white onion, diced

5 garlic cloves, minced

3 tbsp olive oil

¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper

1 tbsp pine nuts

¼ tsp salt

½ cup ricotta cheese (fat free is fine)

2 lg sweet potatoes

¼ tsp salt

2 cardamom pods, cracked or ¼ ground cardamom.

2 tbsp mascarpone

¼ cup grated parmesan cheese

pinch of nutmeg

1 tbsp olive oil for the pan

Grease an 8 or 9” springform pan with 1 tbsp olive oil and set aside.

Preheat oven to 375º.

Peel and coarsely chop the sweet potatoes. Put in a pot and cover with water.

Add the salt and cardamom pods. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat slightly and cook until potatoes are soft, 12-15 minutes. 

Remove cardamom pods. Using a slotted spoon or spatula, put the sweet potatoes in a food processor. Add 1 tbsp of the cooking water and hold the rest. Add the mascarpone. Quickly puree.  Set aside.

Remove kale leaves from their thick stems. Wash and drain carefully.

Combine kale, garlic and pine nuts in a food processor. Using the pulse button, chop the kale into small pieces as though making pesto.

In a small skillet, heat 2 tbsp olive oil over medium/low heat. Add onions and black pepper. Sauté 5 minutes until onions are soft. 

Stir in the chopped kale mix. Sauté 3-5 minutes until kale is soft but still bright green. Remove from heat. Add salt and ricotta and blend well. Set aside.

In a medium saucepan, combine 1 cup sweet potato water with 2 cups water. Add salt and bring to a boil. Whisk in the cornmeal and continue whisking until it is absorbed and the mixture starts to thicken, 5 minutes.

Add oregano, pepper flakes and minced poblano pepper. Continue cooking over low heat 2 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon. Add mozzarella cheese, stirring as you go and continue cooking 3 more minutes so all cheese is melted.  Polenta should be thick and creamy now.

Cover the bottom of the oiled springform pan with an even layer of the polenta.

Cover the polenta layer with an even layer of the kale mixture.

Top with an even layer of the sweet potatoes.

Top with the grated parmesan cheese and a sprinkle of nutmeg.

Cover the pan with aluminum foil. Bake at 375º for 30 minutes. Remove foil and continue baking 15-20 minutes until top is lightly brown.

Remove from heat. Cool in the pan 10-15 minutes. Remove sides of the pan.

Serve cut in wedges like a cake.

*Carnivores can add ½ cup chopped chorizo or pepperoni to the polenta or ½ cup chopped garlic sausage to the kale.

Food for Dummies

Twenty two years ago, as I was pulling a leek from the supermarket display, an older woman stopped short in front of me and frowned. "What is that nasty thing?" Talk about tipping points. I went home and plotted the first edition of How to Fix a Leek...and Other Food From the Farmers' Market to tell people what ordinary vegetables and fruits were. I wrote it with and for farmers tired of answering the same questions over and over: What is that? How long will you have it? What do I do with it? The ignorance was mind boggling.

Most people weren't calling leeks "nasty" any more but they were still wondering what the hell to do with one when I brought out the second edition a year ago, updated to include the more "exotic" produce northern farmers had somehow managed to coax from their soil, the craze for heirlooms, and more culinary history. People who bought it were encouraged by knowing the differences between goat and sheep cheese, and what to do with kale, since they were now hearing how nutritious it is. A few readers said knowing carrots came from Afghanistan and that podded peas are a relatively new invention, one that Thomas Jefferson was madly tinkering with at Monticello, made food "interesting", which I keep hoping means more familiar and less frightening so they get out there and get more.

Not even the Taliban are as terrifying as our food ignorance. It is so profound and wide-spread that yesterday several educated and well traveled members of my California Dharma group actually asked me over lunch to teach them how to eat seasonally, meaning what could they eat right now in February. Supermarkets had deprived them of all sense of time, and perhaps their health. The discussion started over what we were eating: warm buttery bulgur with carrots, dates and dried figs, almonds, pine nuts and pistachios, accompanied by orange inflected lentil salad and fresh yogurt. I described this as winter pantry food. But I did allow as how farmers' markets would offer some fresh produce also worth a February meal.

Talk of farmers' markets turned to the now dubious use of the word "organic", then heated up when the former nun in our groups said she'd recently been diagnosed with a cancer--after eating nothing but so-called "organic" vegetables from her local Safeway. Yes. All that "organic" out of season stuff grown in South America soil, flown thousands of miles and sprayed before it can enter the country... Enough said. I wrote about it earlier.

"I don't know what's seasonal?" she said, "except maybe what's at a farmers' market, what you get from a CSA."

I asked if she ate the same veggies over and over--a surefire recipe for cancer--and she said, yes, naming the usual supermarket suspects: tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach, potatoes--for lack of knowing what else to eat. She and the three men in the group were astonished when I said the simplest rule was to follow the kitchen cues Nature sends: eat cold weather crops in cold weather (kales, chards, broccolis, lettuces, cabbages and winter squashes) and hot weather crops like tomatoes, eggplant, okra, corn and berries, in hot weather, relying in springtime on wintered over godsends like parsnips and leeks plus early risers like asparagus and peas. I was astonished that my no-brainer seemed such great wisdom, they proposed I take them on farmers' market tours to teach what to eat when and how to prepare it. And this is California!

And so Kitchen Literacy, Ann Vileisis' densely footnoted report of how corporate interests spent the entire 20th Century assiduously and assertively pulling an iron curtain over millenniums of accrued culinary wisdom to manipulatively divorce people from their own instincts, and create a Medieval food dark age wherein fear and ignorance make folks totally dependent on industrial packaged food. This story of food for dummies is best summarized by the famous exclamation of Joseph Conrad's character up the river in the heart darkness: "The horror! The horror!" Our 21st Century factory farms, destroyed land, contamination outbreaks and epidemics of anorexia, cancer, diabetes and obesity are tributes to the triumph of corporate food totalitarianism. So are big Ag's current political victories over food pyramids, modified foods, drug use and getting frozen pizza sauce illogically called a nutritious vegetable. Look out! It is packing 120 years of getting its way. That's a big bang.

We can only get out of the way by getting back what they took away: our food sense. For millenniums humans have relied on their eyes to tell them food "looks all right to eat." This is why the Chinese even today want their fish and chickens alive in the marketplace: they want to see if they are lively with good health. Humans have relied on their nose to tell them something smells a little off, a bit rotten. They have relied on touch to tell them a fruit or vegetable is too hard to be ripe, too squishy to be fresh--or that meat is tender. Hopefully these survival instincts aren't dead yet.

There is of course no finer place to show them off or simply hone them than a farmers' market. Here we can pinch and smell and examine what we are about to put inside our body. Here we can find that light mark on a melon rind that indicates it actually grew on the ground or those cracks around a tomato stem that indicate it was really was sun ripened and not gassed in a long distance truck.

Here we can find out what's growing right now, so it can make us grow. Here we can ask about pesticides or fertilizer or growing conditions and read the face to face answer from the person who produced the product.
Here's where we can find accountability and thus responsibility. And probably not a very large carbon footprint.

Here's where we can take two steps backward in time to the way life used to be in order to go forward the way it should be. What a breakthrough. I think of it as "the end of mystery."