Working With What You've Got

I keep meaning to write about my transition from a typical grocery store shopper to CSA junkie. CSA stands for community supported agriculture; the idea is that the farmer organizes their own distribution system and you, the consumer, pay upfront for a season’s worth of whatever the farm produces. Generally, the food costs more than what you’d pay at the supermarket, but the quality is much higher and your food dollars support the farmer directly.

I keep meaning to write a Manifesto about why I chose to go the CSA route, how it’s changed the way I shop and cook, etc. etc. but I finally realized that it’s just too big a topic for a single blog post. Suffice to say that my cooking has shifted away from a meal planning/listmaking approach. I used to think about what I wanted to make; now I think about what I have to use up.

(This approach to cooking was surprisingly liberating. No matter how much I used to “meal plan” for the week, something would invariably throw the plan out of whack. We’d decide go out for dinner one night, or when Thursday came we just weren’t in the mood for goulash. So there I’d be with leftover groceries and no desire or time to use them).

I keep meaning to write more posts in general, but since I’ve gotten into the CSA groove I’ve been making a lot of the same things again and again. That’s a change for me, too, and it’s not all due to the CSAs – some of it’s because it’s just a LOT harder to make dinner now that I’m a Mom of Two. So instead, I’ll going to try sharing some small stories. If nothing else, my experience will hopefully show a CSA-non-believer how to make it work. And with that, I bring you,

The Pork Problem

Everyone who joins a CSA has a few items that they really don’t like. For example, kohlrabi is not my favorite veggie, but it grows well in New England so it shows up in CSA boxes frequently. Most of the time I can foist it off on my hubby by putting it in a salad. But if not and it spoils I don’t feel too guilty putting it on the compost pile.*

The meat, though, is a different story. We get pasture-raised beef, chicken, pork and lamb from Chestnut Farms. Their prices are comparable to other meat CSAs that I’ve looked at – $8 a pound. At that cost, I don’t want to waste anything. The meat comes frozen and will last a while in the deep freeze, but at some point you’ve got to use it all.

I could try to trade the cuts that I don’t prefer with a fellow CSA member, but to me that goes against the spirit of the CSA. Each chicken has just two legs, and there are only so many steaks in each cow.** So I sort of like the challenge of finding a way to use everything that arrives in the cooler each month.

One item that I’ve really struggled, though, with is Breakfast Sausage patties. I love breakfast sausage, but these are very peppery (too spicy for the kids, and almost too spicy for me) and too salty for my taste. The last time we got sausage patties, they hung around in my freezer for quite a while. I’d give them a guilty glance, then quickly grab something else and shut the lid. At last, however, I had a breakthrough and thought of not one! But two! different ways to make this product into a tasty meal:

Solution #1: Tomato gravy. This one was so obvious that I let out a big DUH when I finally thought of it. My favorite recipe for tomato gravy calls for a pound of Italian sausage, sweet or hot. I substituted the breakfast sausage and added a bit of crushed fennel seed. Yummy!

Solution #2: Meatloaf. Some time ago I started messing around with the ratio of ground beef to ground pork in meatloaf. A 2:1 ratio of beef: pork (we get both items in the CSA) worked best – the pork lightened up the loaf, but it still tasted beefy. So I tried swapping the sausage for plain ‘ole ground pork, and it worked great – and the extra seasoning in the sausage compensated for the salt that I forgot to add to the meatloaf mixture. (DUH).

I’m heartened by my small successes. The next time Breakfast Sausage patties make an appearance in the cooler, I’ll be ready. Now I just need to figure out how to cook Flap Meat (hint: it’s beef).


Recipe: Judy’s Tomato Gravy

I found this recipe in Gail’s Recipe Swap. It’s simple to make and oh so yummy. You can make it with you own homegrown or home-canned tomatoes. The sauce can be frozen so you don’t have to use it all at once.

Olive oil
1-2 lbs Italian sausage, sweet and/or hot (or breakfast sausage), casing removed
1 large onion, chopped
2 or more cloves of garlic, minced
2 28-oz cans Italian whole tomatoes
2 8-oz cans tomato sauce
2 6-oz cans tomato paste
2 bay leaves
Dried basil & dried oregano, to taste (I use about a tablespoon of each)
½ to ¾ cup dry red wine

1. Put the tomatoes through a food mill or blender to puree them (if you prefer a chunky sauce, you can just dump them into a bowl and squish the tomatoes with your hands).

2. Heat a large pot and add a little oil. Add the sausage, breaking it up with a fork or spatula, and cook until it is browned. If there is a lot of fat in the pan you can pour some of it off. Add the onion and garlic and cook until soft, stirring often. Add the pureed tomatoes, sauce, and paste and stir well (you can rinse out the cans with a little water and add that to the pot, too). Add the wine, bay leaves and dried herbs and bring to a gentle simmer. Cook, partially covered, over low heat for at least 30 minutes – longer is better, I usually let it go for at least an hour.


Meatsloaf: A guideline

This is loosely based on a recipe for meatloaf in an old "Best Recipes from the Los Angeles Times Cookbook". It’s a lighter loaf, not dense, that is great for meatloaf sandwiches the next day. It makes one big loaf or you can shape the mix into 2 smaller loaves. Eat one tonight and freeze the other for a busy day. Use as many of the different vegetables as you’d like or skip them altogether – but I recommend that you add them. They add a lot of flavor and they help to lighten the loaf.

2-3 slices of bread (or a leftover bagel, English muffin, whatever)
Milk
2-3 eggs
1-2 tablespoons ketchup or 1 tablespoon tomato paste

Olive oil, butter, or rendered fat (pork or chicken)
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium-to-large carrot, shredded
1 salad turnip, or a 2-3” chunk of daikon or Korean radish, peeled and shredded
½ of a red or green bell pepper, or a couple of slices of roasted red pepper from a jar, minced.
1 small zucchini, shredded, or some thinly sliced and chopped green cabbage, or napa cabbage, or kale, or other leafy green from your veggie CSA that you need to use up
As much chopped garlic as you like, or a handful of garlic chives, or a couple of garlic scapes, finely chopped
About ¼ cup dry vermouth or dry white wine, optional

2 lbs ground beef
1 lb ground pork or breakfast sausage

1. Place the bread in a large bowl and rip it into pieces. Add the milk and toss the bread around, letting it soak up the milk while you sauté the veggies.

2. Heat a large skillet and add 1-2 tablespoons of fat, oil, or butter. Cook the onion over medium heat until beginning to soften, stirring occasionally. Add the shredded carrot, radish, and bell pepper and cook until they wilt and soften, about 5 minutes. Add the shredded cabbage or zucchini and continue to cook until the veggie are soft and limp. Add the garlic/garlic chives/garlic scapes and cook for 2 min more. Add the vermouth and bring to a boil; let it simmer for a couple of minutes and then turn off the heat. Season with salt and pepper and then let the veggies cool a bit.

3. Use your fingers to rub the milk-soaked bread into small pieces – they to break up the lumps, unless you like lumps in your meatloaf. Add the eggs and ketchup and mix well with a fork. Carefull add the vegetable mixture and stir well.

4. Add the beef and pork to the bowl, then use your hands to mix everything together. I like to start by squishing with my fingers and then finish by kneading it together. Wipe your hands with a paper towel and then shape the mixture into 1 or 2 loaves. Place in a baking dish and bake at 350 for at least an hour – use a meat thermometer to check the temperature. I cook it to at least 160F.

5. Let cool for ~10 minutes, then slice and serve.


*I should note that I do try to avoid wasting food. Even though I spend more food dollars on CSA veggies and meats, I think less food goes to waste overall in the use-what-you-have approach to cooking.

** Kim, from Chestnut Farms, explained this a lot better in one of their newsletters (scroll down to November 2009, "Prime shares").

We've Got the Beet

Do you know what red beet eggs are? Here's a clue:



In addition to the glorious fruit I bought last summer, I bought 10 lbs of beets. Why? Well, Hubby Dear loves to have salad for lunch everyday, and also loves pickled beets as a salad topping. Since I am trying to eat more "local" food year-round, making my own pickled beets seemed like a good idea (and one that would assuage my guilt at packing his grown-in-California-and-shipped-across-the-country-salad for lunch every day. Yes, I want greenhouses; no, I don't have them yet).


I'll post the recipe if anyone really wants it (but who would that be? Does anyone besides MY Hubby Dear truly LIKE pickled beets??) but the jist of it was as follows: roast beets. Make tremendous mess that permanently stains hands whilst peeling beets. Prepare brine with vinegar and salt and a few other flavorings. Choke on fumes of simmering vinegar, then quarter beets, add to hot canning jars and fill with vaporous hot brine. Process in a boiling water bath in the heat of August while you question your sanity over the decision to revive home canning as a domestic pursuit ( if the hour of roasting at 400 F doesn't get you, the boiling cauldron of water for processing will).


I bought 10 lbs of beets because my recipe said that 10-12 lbs would give me 6 pints of pickled product. Not true...just half of the beets filled up 6 jars on their own. I had to to do the whole thing over again, ending up with 11 pints and change. That, my friends, is a lot of pickled beets.


There is a bright side, well actually two bright sides. The first is that I did, in fact, accomplish my goal: hubby has been happliy eating locally grown, organic beets on his salads all winter long. The other bright side is that some small part of my brain recalled that my mother used to make red beet eggs. I don't know exactly how she did it, but every so often a jar would appear in our refrigerator which contained a few hardboiled eggs and a slice or two of cooked beets.


I decided to try "repurposing" the vinegar brine from the pickled beets to make red beet eggs. It worked out great...after I finsih up a jar of beets, I add as many hard boiled eggs as will fit into the jar (usually just 3-4 eggs). I let them sit in the fridge for a few days, and them...the eggs shrink slightly in size (due to water loss in the salty brine?) and turn a glorious, shocking pink color (see photo above). They also taste great - the vinegar is not overpowering, the salt is just right. Sliced up, the pickled red beet eggs are also great on a salad. And, as I've just discovered tonight, they make a great snack when a martini has made you feel peckish.

Nintendo > Squash

1. We are awash in squash over here. I had ordered a half bushel of butternut squash from our CSA last fall, and we’d eaten our way through two-thirds of it before I hit a wall and we took a little break from it.

2. My 3-year-old son has had a nasty cold all week. Not bad enough to actually slow him down or induce long naps, but sufficient to meet his school’s criteria for “keep your snotty-nosed kid at home.” So yesterday afternoon we were looking for things to do, and I decided it was time to clean up the house a bit. (This is an Event. I Cook a lot, but I don’t Clean very often).

3. In addition to the nasty cold, my son has some sensory processing things going on. He loves the vacuum cleaner, and it turns out that vacuuming is a “heavy work” activity which improves the vestibular sense. So, for my son, vacuuming is therapeutic. Woohoo!

Yesterday morning, after we’d vacuumed nearly the whole house, we moved on to the little room at the top of our stairs which has housed squash for the last few months. It’s unheated, and if I keep the door closed the ambient temperature hovers around 55 degrees – perfect for squash storage (but a little chilly for ironing, the other major function of the room).

While we were cleaning out the closet room I noticed that some of the half-dozen remaining squash were starting to “go.” Not wanting to waste them, I decided to cook them and freeze the puree for later use. My son very helpfully carried the squash downstairs, one at a time (more heavy work!) and had great fun playing with them in the kitchen. When I cut open the squash, he noticed that the seeds and strings looked a lot like sea anemones (another of his favorite things). I scooped the seeds into a bowl and let him rub his hands in them for - still more - sensory input. (Note: I’m onto something here. The sensory potential of vegetables is completely ignored in “The Out-of-Sync Child has Fun”).

I put the squash in the oven to bake, and while my son napped I scraped the flesh into a bowl. Later, he had great fun helping me make the squash puree by pressing buttons on the food processor. We used some of the puree to make a “pumpkin” pie, and he enjoyed mixing all the ingredients together.

My point? My boy spent almost *all afternoon* playing with butternut squash in its various forms, and had a fine time doing so. This isn't anything new for him, though, as he has akways had a love for vegetables since all he sees mommy doing is cook (remember? I don't clean).

This morning, my son mentioned that a little boy in his class (we’ll call him Benjamin) had a nifty toy with him before school one day. Then he said “Take squash with us.” (We didn’t cook all of them– two specimens are still intact). I asked, Do you want to bring a squash to school to show it to Benjamin? He nodded yes. This was something of a milestone because up until now, he hasn’t really paid much attention to the other kids in his class, let alone wanting to share a squash with them. (Truthfully, I don’t know if he wanted to share the squash, as in “Isn’t this cool!” or show it off, as in “Nyah nyah, I have a squash and you don’t”). At any rate, Mommy got all choked up. My baby is becoming social!

(Aside: hubby just read a draft of this post and suggested that I play up the “milestone” aspect even more. It was a big, big thing that our little boy wanted to interact – in a positive way - with a kid at school).

So off we went this morning, my son proudly carrying his squash into school. As we walked through the doors, he began calling “Benjamin, Benjamin!” in a sweet, pleading voice. He was just sooo excited about the squash!

And where was Benjamin? With a group of five or six boys, clustered around somebody’s older brother who had brought in …a Nintendo DS.

Splat. No contest.

Confit Me

Is there a 12-step program for addiction to pork products? I sure hope so – after eating this pork confit tonight, I may need professional help to keep me from making it every week.

It began innocently enough. I had a small package of country-style pork ribs in the freezer and a pint of lard in the refrigerator. The pork was from our meat CSA; the lard, well, that was an impulse buy at the Polish market when I was shopping for Vigilia in December. I didn’t really know what to do with country-style ribs, but the lard got me thinking: meat…fat…confit.

Have you had duck confit? Artery-clogging, hypertension-inducing confit? Sometimes restaurants put “confit” on the menu, but the plate arrives containing a poseur: true confit is very salty, a little dry, and a bit chewy. Heaven in a duck leg, and it’s pretty good with pork, too. I’d first encountered the pork version on a pizza in Boston. I don’t remember the name of the place, and I don’t know if they’re still in business, but this place near the Brigham made an awesome pie with pork confit.

So I decided to have a go at making pork confit. I used Mark Bittman’s recipe as a guideline, but reduced the amounts of juniper and allspice berries in the brine because even I don’t keep a bucketful of those spices on hand. (I did have a bucketful of fennel seeds, though). The recipe calls for ½ cup of salt, but doesn’t specify kosher vs. regular salt. It matters because kosher salt is “fluffier” and is generally used in greater quantities than regular salt for brining purposes. To complicate matters, I was out of kosher salt and wanted to use up my kimchee salt. So I guessed: I used about 1/3 cup of kimchee salt, which I estimate is a little coarser (and a bit “wetter”) than plain table salt.

I let the pork soak in the brine for 48 hours. In retrospect, 24 hours of brining would have sufficed since I was using country-style ribs instead of a whole pork loin or shoulder. I also could have gone with a shorter cooking time: after 2-1/2 hours, the juices had completely evaporated and the meat began to caramelize a bit. So, 2 hours would probably have been enough time for the pork to become tender.

And oh, how tender it was! I started this last week – put the meat into brine on Thursday, cooked it in the fat on Saturday, then let it cool and stored it in the refrigerator. Today I scraped it all out into a pan and warmed it over low heat, then poured off most of the fat (saving it for the next batch of confit, don’t ya know) and added about 3 cups of drained, homemade saurkraut. (This time, it’s the fresh stuff – I never got around to canning this year’s batch of kraut). Cover and simmer for about 30 minutes until the kraut is tender. Eat and swoon.

And try not to do this again next week…

On Meats and Beans

In addition to the vegetable CSA that I joined last summer, we’ve been doing a meat CSA. For the most part, I love it: we get pasture-raised beef, pork, chicken and lamb (with an option to purchase an Heirloom Turkey at Thanksgiving) on a monthly basis. They charge a flat rate per pound, and you choose the total number of pounds that you want to receive each month.

I won’t get into all the reasons that we decided to go the CSA route for meat – that’s an entire post (or two) in its own right – but I will say that it’s definitely exacerbated my hoarding tendencies. If I’m gonna pay eight bucks a pound for meat, I’m gonna be darned sure that I get as much out of that meat as possible. Every scrap of fat and bone, therefore, gets saved or re-used in some way. It makes for an odd assortment of baggies in the freezer, but that's another story....

…which brings me to Dec 29th, 2009, on which I contemplated a menu for New Year’s Eve. I decided to go with a soup-based meal, since our guests would be arriving at different times and I didn’t want to be locked into the kitchen trying to Make Dinner Happen. I pulled out my favorite soup cookbook – Soups and Stews, by Bernard Clayton Jr.- and began to peruse recipes. The Seven Bean Soup caught my eye because (1) it could be made a day ahead, (2) I had a lot of dried beans on hand and (3) several teenagers were coming to the party and Bernard described the soup as “a large recipe that will feed a boy Scout patrol, a young football team or a crew freshly returned from a sail.”

(Here I will digress about dried beans: I love them for the vegetable garden, because they are soooo easy to grow. Plant them. Water them. Wait for the vines to die off in the fall, then harvest them. I choose which varieties to grow based mainly on what will look pretty in glass jars on the pantry shelf. Oh, all right, I do read the descriptions of taste, too, in the catalogs, but mostly it’s all about the pretty.)

In the pantry, I had some Hidatsa Shield Figure and Good Mother Stallard beans that I grew myself, some Jacob’s Cattle beans from the veggie CSA, and a few other organic varieties that I bought at Whole Foods (black beans, cannellini, and chick peas). I also had a lamb bone in the freezer, leftover from a small leg roast, that I thought would work okay in the broth-making step for this recipe – Bernard says to use veal bones, but I didn’t have any, and there’s another recipe for a lamb and bean stew that made me think the lamb bone just might work here. Some people don’t like the flavor of lamb, but I figured that all the smokiness from the ham hocks and sausage would hide any “game-y” character.

If you don’t have the exact types of beans that are called for in the recipe, you can substitute others, or use different proportions of the cited beans, though the soup does look pretty with all the different shapes and colors. As for my heirlooms, I found that the Hidatsas and the Jacob’s Cattle truly are very tasty beans. The next time I make this I will probably add a little more sausage so that it has a greater presence in the bowl.

Since you make the broth from scratch, it takes a while to complete this recipe. You can do it in stages, however, over the course of a weekend: start soaking the beans and make the ham broth on Friday night, cook the beans on Saturday, and put it all together on Sunday. This soup was really delicious…and it did indeed make enough to feed a crew freshly returned from a sail.


Seven Bean Soup
Adapted from Soups and Stews, by Bernard Clayton Jr.

½ cup of each dried beans: navy beans, pinto beans, cranberry beans, kidney beans, black-eyed beans, garbanzos (chick peas), lima beans
Water
2 smoked ham hocks
1 pound soup bones, preferable veal [or whatever you have in the freezer from your meat CSA]
2 tablespoons butter
2 medium onions, chopped finely
2 medium carrots, chopped finely
4 stalks celery, chopped finely
1 clove garlic, minced
½ cup vermouth or dry white wine, optional
1 28-ounce can tomatoes, including the liquid
1 pound of garlic sausage (Portuguese liguica, Italian sausage, Polish kielbasa or other)
Salt, if desired or necessary [it wasn’t]
Black pepper to taste

Combine the beans in a large bowl and rinse them in cold water, taking care to remove any stones or grit. Add enough water to the bowl to cover the beans by 2” and let them soak overnight.

The next day, place the ham hocks and soup bone(s) with enough water to cover them by 2” – about 10 cups of water. Bring the water to a boil, partially cover the pot with a lid and simmer over low heat for 2-1/2 hours. Skim off any brown film as it collects on the surface.

While the broth is simmering, drain the beans. Transfer them to another saucepan and add water to cover by 2-3” – about 4 quarts of water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for about 1 hour or until the beans are cooked al dente – definitely not mushy. Drain the beans, reserving some of the cooking liquid in the event it is needed to thin the soup later.

Cut the sausage on the diagonal into ¼”-thick slices. Heat a large soup pot over medium heat and add the sausage slices. Cook until the fat is released and the sausage is browned, about 10 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the cooked sausage to a bowl lined with paper towels and discard any excess fat in the pan.

Add the butter to the soup pot and let the foam subside, then add the onion, carrots, celery and garlic. Cook over medium-low heat until the vegetables are translucent, but not browned, about 8 minutes. Add the vermouth, if using, and simmer for a few minutes until the liquid is mostly gone. [At this point, you can turn off the heat and wait for the ham hocks to finish simmering].

When the ham hocks are cooked, turn off the heat and remove the hocks from the pot. Let them cool a bit and then cut the meat off of them, removing the layers of fat. Cut the meat into bite-sized pieces and add to the soup pot containing the cooked vegetables. Discard the fat and bones (if you are preparing the broth a day ahead, you can chill it overnight and remove the fat from the surface the next day. Otherwise use a gravy separator to easily de-fat the ham broth).

Pour the ham broth into the soup pot that contains the cooked veggies. Add the tomatoes and the drained, cooked beans. Add the sausage slices, bring to a boil and simmer over medium-low heat for 30-45 minutes. Taste for seasoning. Salt cautiously, if at all, because the ham will have made its contribution. Add black pepper to taste. Serve with a green salad, a nice country bread, and plenty of butter.