Last week, (Feb. 2), I arrived in Wooster, Ohio, just in time to miss the snowy onslaught that took over the country, but also in time for a superb local foods-based dinner at the South Market Bistro and a visit to Local Roots Market and Café, which had opened the previous Saturday. I’d been alerted to Local Roots before my arrival and I wanted to see what it was all about. It appears to be a hybrid effort to supply local, organic foods to its community, offer a winter indoors farmers market, a café that offers locally made pastries, an educational component, a membership element and some other features, such as the ability to order your food on-line. In short, Local Roots is a fresh expression in the growing local foods movement, and just as with farmers markets, it isn’t necessary for one size to fit all when it comes to co-ops.

Wooster, a small college town about an hour’s drive from Cleveland, has a summer farmers market but nothing happens in the winter. The health food store I visited in search of a lipstick didn’t appear to be championing local foods, but Local Roots now fills these gaps. Located in an spacious old store-front that was once the home to farm machinery, there are wooden tables for the various farm products (the farmers need not be there), a cash-register, cold cases, the bakery area and a meeting room fitted out with information on gardens, seed catalogues, pamphlets etc. A group seed order is in the offing, and there is enough space available for future projects, such as a kitchen where people can make jams and other foods for sale. They’ve already shown Food Inc. and held a discussion following the film, something we do at our farmers market in Santa Fe.

Even though the store wasn’t officially open for business the night I visited, I saw eggs from several farmers, many different cuts of grass fed beef and lamb, maple sugar and syrup, honey, sesame crackers and spelt crackers plus some baked goodies for good dogs, corn for popping, little butternut squash as well as giant Musqee de Provence, several varieties of potatoes, beautiful plump shallots, a variety of cow’s milk cheeses and some terrific recycled but freshly printed tee shirts.  I am the proud owner of one that says “Soil, Not Oil”.  After reading Plenty and knowing how badly the authors yearned for flour to make bread with within the limits of their 100 mile diet, I thought it was especially auspicious for anyone trying the same experiment that Local Roots also showcased both spelt and wheat flours.

I thought this was a pretty decent showing of wholesome things to eat for February in cold, snowy Ohio, and it didn’t even include the fresh foods farmers would bring a few days later, (which they did, despite the snow) tatsoi, arugula, salad mix, radishes, turnips, and breads of all kinds.  Wild black walnuts and hickory nuts, two unusual varieties that I recommend in my new book, Seasonal Fruit Desserts along with maple sugar, can also be found here. Maple sugar is hands down my favorite sweetener and hard to find outside of places like this co-op. I came home with both a bag of the sugar and a dozen gorgeous eggs from roaming chickens and have already used both. Next visit I plan to delve into the unusual selection of jams and conserves featuring local wines and other ingredients, such as a Chardonnay and Lemon Verbena jelly, or one made with Merlot and black peppercorns.

Local Roots impressive mission is “to establish a year-round market place for the purpose of connecting consumers and producers of locally grown foods and other agricultural products. Our goals are to encourage healthy eating, expand local economic development, promote community involvement, and sustainable living.”

Membership in the co-op isn’t necessary but is encouraged, as are volunteers, for this is truly a grass roots movement.  The web site, www.localrootswooster.com tells it all. Although the co-op is just getting started and figuring out what it is and wants to be, I’ll bet that within a year Local Roots will have put out runners, and it wouldn’t surprise me if before they know it, they’ll be a model for others who want to serve their own communities. For now, bravo to all who put this wonderful effort together!

A lot of people e-mail me with their questions about cooking about produce, or food in general. Often they’re questions other readers have as well, and while I always answer them personally, I want to answer them in a public way. I’m hoping that doing so will solicit responses (and questions) from you, because I’m very interested in learning what you feel you need to know when it comes to cooking and being comfortable in the kitchen, at ease with vegetables, or presenting a vegetable-based meal.

Here’s a question for the first week of 2010 from a 21-year old college student, who wrote the following:

“Though I’m not a vegetarian, I consider vegetables and other non-meat foods the most interesting and I trying to get as close as I can to cooking all my meals. I want to move away from snacking and actually making simple meals from your cookbook consistently.  Should I develop 3,5,10 recipes I like and just stick with those?” 

Actually, this student asked several good questions in his e-mail, but this is one I know that others struggle with, too. Here is my answer:

Often people try so many different types of dishes when they’re starting out that they get confused and have a hard time developing enough focus to become competent at one or two things. I think your idea of choosing a few recipes to work on is an excellent one. It will give you a base to move from, and confidence, too.

First, figure out what you like to eat. Do you love stir-fries or prefer gratins? Are you a soup eater? (They’re inexpensive to make and leftovers improve in flavor.)  Then choose some dishes that seem interesting to you, but not too many, as you suggest. Cook them until you feel so at ease that you don’t need to keep referring back to the recipe.  About the time you start to get bored with a dish, you’ll be fluent enough with the process to start thinking about how you might change the recipe or move onto other soups, gratins, or stir-fries or whatever it is you’ve decided on.

 I’m pretty sure that one day you’ll want to try something entirely different from the 3, 5, or 10 recipes that you’ve mastered. When you do, don’t be surprised if you find you have some new techniques under your belt. Repetition is very useful when it comes to learning to cook.

After running to keep up with summer’s perishable fruits I appreciate the inertness of dried fruits and nuts. I think of these as slow fruits in that you don’t have to keep your eye on them the way you have to watch a peach. Winter foods are something of a relief to deal with, which is a good thing, because there’s usually a lot going on in December. Here are a few desserts that have the inherent advantages of being uncomplicated, versatile, festive, and not too damaging to one’s figure or health. Of course, they’re good to eat, too.

First there is fresh fruit. Satsuma tangerines begin in November and are especially good around Christmas. Oranges are coming in. There are handsome Comice pears that you buy firm and allow to ripen over a few days before putting out with the walnuts or pecans in their shells, with a cracker. Folks can crack their own. Why not? If you’re a fan of cheese, have a plate of 2 or 3 cheese with your pears —blues, goats, goat blues, hard cheeses like Vella’s 2-year old Dry Jack, or a soft Latour. A small glass of dessert wine is festive, too.

Then there’s dried fruit. I’m thinking of dates, especially Medjools and Deglet Noors. Buy some almond paste, mix it with a drop of pink or orange color and flavor with rose or orange-flower water, then roll the paste into little lozenges and use them to replace the dates’ seeds. Or fold dried figs around a toasted almond or a walnut and enjoy it with a glass of anise liquor and a simple nut cookie.

A winter dessert that’s both festive and practical is chocolate bark. Chocolate barks are easy to make and terrific to have on hand for winter entertaining. You can make them with dark chocolate or white, and you can make them interesting and beautiful in so many ways. Chocolate bark keeps well (theoretically, anyway) covered and refrigerated so you can take it out as you need it. You don’t really need measurements, as you’ll see the first time you make bark.

For the dessert —because it’s not going to just the bark (white chocolate and coconut in this case)—take out a tray or platter and a selection of pretty dishes. Break the bark into jagged pieces and put them in a dish. Fill a small bowl with some tangerines. You might have some chunks of pomegranates on another dish.  Definitely include a pile of luscious Medjool dates, a bowl of walnuts and the nutcracker, or perhaps dried figs stuffed with a roasted almond and anise seeds. You might also include a small cheese. Add anything else you like to nibble on and bring it all to the table.  Pour a dessert wine. You’ll find that people can pick endlessly at all these bites, putting them together this way and that. The conversation continues and no one leaves feeling stuffed—just beautifully fed. 

White Chocolate and Coconut Bark with Lavender and Tangerine Zest

This is one of the prettiest barks you can imagine, and if you love the flavors of coconut and orange, you’ll be very happy indeed.  I can’t resist adding a few green pistachio nuts.  I use salted ones – both because the salt adds to the flavor and because they tend to have the best color and texture.

     2 3.5-ounce bars of Lindt white chocolate with coconut

     1-2 tablespoons green pistachio nuts, finely chopped

     blossoms from 3 stems of culinary lavender – a scant 1 teaspoon

     the zest of a tangerine removed with a citrus zester rather than a microplane so that you get nice, long, thin pieces

Lay a piece of tinfoil or parchment on a tray, about 8 X 10 inches.

Melt the chocolate over barely simmering water.  Keep the heat low and take care not to let it burn by scraping down the chocolate as it melts. 

Spread the melted chocolate thinly over the foil.

Sprinkle over the nuts, lavender and zest and refrigerate until set. Break into pieces and store in an airtight container set in a cool place, or a waxed paper bag set in the refrigerator.

Over Thanksgiving I was at Rancho la Puerta, the most magical spa in Tecate, Mexico. I am not a spa person, but I love this place for its gardens, its kind staff, the chance to walk a lot, practice yoga, and for many other reasons. I always teach either writing or cooking classes when there, and for sure I visit the six acres of organic gardens. All the gardens –those that produce vegetables and those that cover the rolling hills with aromatic Mediterranean and native plants, are at the heart of the pleasure I find in being at the Ranch.

When I do a cooking class, I always partner with the head gardener, Salvador, to take students outside to visit the various plants they’ll be cooking. Salvador is so enthusiastic about all the plants he grows he infects others with his joy. He plucks plants out of the earth, strips away leaves, cuts off bites of what meets his hand— chile, radish, beet, escarole—with his garden knife, takes a bite then, exclaiming, “Is good!” The he offers bites to others. It’s  hard to refuse tasting even an onion at eight in the morning when confronted with Salvador’s excitement.

This past week I was especially struck by the foliage, the huge outer leaves of the cabbages with their raised veins, the thick, dark deeply lobed broccoli leaves, and those that crowned the kohlrabi, that I suggested to the students that we cook them and see what they taste like. I myself didn’t know. It’s not just that we don’t think to cook these leaves, it’s that most of us never even see them unless we have a garden, so to everyone, these enormous leaves were a new aspect of the edible garden. We cooked one kind of leaf in each of three classes, slicing them into thin ribbons, simmering them in salted water, then tossing them with olive oil and crushed garlic. Even though the leaves were leathery and dense, they all cooked surprisingly quickly, in five minutes or so,  into luminous shades of green, from light (the cabbage), to spinach colored (the kohlrabi), to as dark as possible (the broccoli). They were robust tasting, but not bitter or old or rank in any way. They tasted like the essence of green matter —chlorophyll and sunshine— and it felt like eating good medicine. Not a shred remained. They were so delicious that the classes practically wolfed them down. What a surprise, for usually these are the parts that are thrown away. 

If you have a garden with some winter broccoli growing under a tunnel of remay or plastic, don’t overlook the greens. I’ve got an eight-foot bed of red sprouting broccoli and I’m not sure it’s going to make those sprouts. But if it doesn’t (and even if it does) I’ve got my eye on those leaves. In fact, I might not even wait to find out what the rest of the plant is going to do. (Warning: the leaves are feeding the plant, so if you’re tempted, to sample and still want a crop, don’t take too many!)

Everyone in the writing workshop gathered for lunch on the first day in a chilly hall. The young cook, festooned with dreadlocks, announced the menu: it would be gruel. I admit that I wasn’t too excited about gruel, even though I had just been reading about its virtues in Emma. I have eaten a lot of monastic gruel dinners in my life that were not all that appealing. I hoped our chef would do better, but when I noticed there were no burners warming the food, I was doubtful.

But this was different because we would eat with the gruel our fingers. Rasta-chef talked about eating in countries where fingers replace forks, and he was clearly eager for us to have this experience. As a teacher in the workshop I was given a wooden spoon (why the teachers got this option I’m not sure), which I did use before giving in to group pressure. Together we all worked our way through a mound of only slightly warm, stewed root vegetables spooned over cold, stiff blue corn meal, using our fingers to lift each bite to our mouths. Fingers do limit bite sizes more than a fork or a spoon do, but I missed my spoon. We were clumsy. We were hungry. It was food and it was elemental. It was also sticky, but oddly satisfying.

The next day we ate lunch outdoors in the warm sunshine of the school garden. We were brought a small salad of kale, radishes, and onions from the garden, a delicious salad. Then there was nothing. Was this another teaching meal, I wondered?  I was pretty sure it was, and that the lesson today would be about eating little and finding out it’s enough.  I could do that, I thought. I considered how I felt, and sure enough, I wasn’t that hungry. The salad would be enough. It felt good to stop here. I thought this was pretty daring of the (same as the gruel) chef.

But then there was another course, a thin beet soup. It wasn’t too filling and it was full of flavor. Clean and unfussy. I dropped in cubes of a local goat feta and liked it even more. Kale salad and thin beet soup still made a pretty modest meal, but one that was also sufficient. It still felt good. Again, how daring of the chef to stop with so little, I thought.

But then came the winter squash, stuffed with a bison ragout, and the leftover vegetables from the previous day sauced with tomato or yogurt. Was there rice, too?  Although it was organic and wholesome and good, I wished we had been given the lesson contained in the more Spartan meal of thin soup and robust salad. Of course I had been given that lesson, but being a food person, ever curious, (frankly greedy), and too polite to give my plate back to the chef, I ate my meal.  All of it. And the dessert that followed. And I learned once again, that habits often trump lessons, even good lessons. But something stuck, the experience of sufficiency as well as that of too much. It got my attention. And now to practice it.  Hard work when you’re not naturally minimal about food, but worth more than a few tries.

Last week Sandy Simon, (the potter under Growing Connections) told me she was reading his great book about a young woman living in the Oakland slums who was raising vegetables, fowl, and even pigs!  “You’ll love it,” she promised, then she sent me the book.  I read it, and Sandy was right, I did love it. It’s a great read that will make you laugh and make you groan. Novella Carpenter’s adventure as an urban farmer on the mean streets of the Oakland slums is a page-turner.

In Farm City we’re looking at someone who has decided to take on living in a rough neighborhood and farming there. Novella  plants a garden. She is generous with her harvest. She raises barnyard fowl. She witnesses the sad and untimely deaths of some, but causes the deaths of others when she undertakes their slaughter. She moves from chickens and geese onto rabbits, then onto pigs and has all kinds of urban adventures from the scary to the rewarding as she does so.  At one point she puts the 100-yard diet into motion and you feel like you’re losing weight while you go through a hungry July.

Hers is a funky scene; there is nothing precious about it, so anyone could do it —if they wanted to. But there’s the rub, do you really want to spend evenings filling buckets from dumpsters around town to feed your menagerie? If you’re honest, the answers is probably no, you don’t. You’d rather go to a movie, or cook dinner and simply be clean. Urban farming is rough and serious work. The picture she paints will discourage all but the most insanely fervent of urban locavores, for few have the pluck, grit, and ingenuity to go the distance as Novella does.

Despite the humor and the sense that this is an experiment, not necessarily meant to stand in the way of a future writing career, Farm City is sobering and encouraging in turns with regards to what it means to raise food in the city.  It’s something we should be thinking about, not her model, necessarily, but some model – and she points out some viable historical ones – of urban farming. Plus we can all stand to learn from Novella Carpenter’s keen resourcefulness and rising optimism in the midst of discouragement.

Read it and get inspired, that’s my advice!

I was invited to a dinner party last week, a Slow Food Feast sourced from the farmers’ market. I didn’t know anyone who was coming, including my host, Nate Downey, whom I had spoken with only once, a year ago. But why not go?  It sounded like fun, and it was. 

What made it really special was that Nate had decided to cook from my book, Local Flavors.  Gamely, he took on the most complicated recipe, the root vegetable stew with an intense red wine sauce, lentils, and a celery root puree. To be fair, this recipe does come with a warning—the head note suggests that you make this only for a very special meal. I should have added, a dinner for 14, too.  But Nate did it all – the chopping, reducing, simmering, and mashing, and it was delicious. And not only that, he made my carrot top soup. One dish would have been plenty, but to make both was a truly impressive endeavor.  I would never do that! Not anymore, anyway.

Even though I test my recipes thoroughly, the experience of having someone else make them is nothing like cooking them myself.  By the time I’m done, I’m so saturated with the smells and tastes of the food, I can no longer enjoy it. To sit down to someone else’s version is a rare treat. It means I can come to the dish afresh and enjoy it far more than I would normally.  I am grateful to Nate for making this experience possible. I’m sure he had no idea how much this could mean to me. Plus his choice of that soup reminded me what a good soup it is, and I do forget.

Did I say someone else’s version?  I did, because the person cooking always expresses the recipe, not the words on the page, or the picture. Those are just sketches, really. There are bound to be differences —how the vegetables are cut, how much the sauce is reduced, what kind of lentils. Here I use the really dark French ones; Nate used the lighter green Germans. His dish was lighter than my version and perfect for a day that was still partly steeped in summer’s heat. To see how recipes come to life under different hands when they’re my recipes is to be able to experience them again— for the first time.  It’s a real gift. Thank you Nate!

Grape Pie Season

There are a few fall indicators I look too every year—besides a drop in temperature and falling leaves. One is the way plants look so ragged and tired, their now yellow and crisp, their fruits getting smaller, flowers blooming on ever-shorter stems.  Another is the sign that I do have gophers and they’re getting ready for winter in a most annoying fashion, mainly by eating my Echinacea and roses.  A subtler indicator is a sense of stillness that fills the air, even when the wind is blowing. It’s more like breathing and sighing than the destructive idiot winds we usually have.

There are more signs, like the quince turning yellow. But most important is that it’s time for grape pie. Concord grape pie.  Either purple or green Concords will do, but don’t mix them. It’s not so pretty. 

Long one of my favorite desserts, I am sure to make a grape pie at least once each fall.  If there aren’t many grapes, it might be a tart, rather than a pie. If grapes are plentiful you might see a full blown double crusted pie on my table. If I can’t deal with making a crust, a crisp will have to do and it does do nicely.  In any case, this is a dessert worth making and something of an old-fashioned American one, too.  My father, and Iowan, is the one who taught it to me, and mid-westerners know a thing or two about pies.  Choose your favorite pie dough, enough for a top and bottom. Here’s how the filling goes:

2/12 to 3 pounds Concord grapes

½ to ¾ cup sugar

3 tablespoons flour

grates zest and juice of 1 lemon

Wash the grapes as you’ll be using the skins as well as the pulp.  Slip them out of their skins by squeezing them into a saucepan and set the skins aside in a bowl.  Simmer the grapes until they turn white and the seeds loosen, after 5 to 10 minutes, then pass them through a food mill to separate the seeds, working directly into the bowl with the skins. Return the pulp and the skins to the pan, add ½ cup of the sugar, the flour, and lemon zest. Cook to dissolve the sugar, then taste and add more if needed. Stir in the lemon juice and let the mixture cool for about 15 minutes. Use now or refrigerate or freeze the filling to use later.

Preheat the oven to 400’F.  Pour the cooled filling into a pastry-lined pie tin and cover with a second crust.  Join the top and bottom, flue the edges, then brush some beaten egg yolk over the top.  Use the tip of a knife to etch a decorative design into the dough, then cut a whole in the top for a vent.  Set the pie on a cookie sheet and bake in the middle of the oven for 10 minutes. Lower the heat to 350’ and bake for another 35 minutes or until the crust is golden brown. Remove and let cool before serving with cream or a piece of aged Cheddar or Gouda cheese.

I love books and I have always been helpless in bookstores, inevitably buying more than I can expect to read in a reasonable amount of time.   In addition to those I pick out myself, publishers send me manuscripts on a regular basis to write those little blurbs you read on the back. Many of these new books I see are exceptionally fresh and exciting, and here are some I want to share with you.

Jam Today, A Diary of Cooking With What You’ve Got by Tod Davies    (Exterminating Angel Press)

This is the kind of book I love and it’s the way I think of food myself —circumstantial.  It’s snowing out, you look in the cupboard, you scour for leftovers, and you come up with some remarkable dinner that you may or may never repeat. But the telling of such adventures is really plain talk about cooking and life, and this is what Tod Davies’ eccentric little book is all about. It’s a delight, it’s inspiring, and Exterminating Angel is her press, too.

Growing Good Tings to Eat in Texas, Profiles of Organic Farmers and Ranchers across the State, by Pamela Walker    (Texas A&M)

When I was researching my book Local Flavors, Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets, Texas was the state that stumped me most.  I knew there were good things to eat there, but mostly they were in Austin and the surrounding Hill Country. So-called farmers’ markets I visited were selling produce from the produce terminal and no one seemed to know the difference. Pamela Walker, however, has uncovered a host of people growing good food in the Lone Star State from vegetables to shrimp, from cheese to meat, and this book profiles them. It has pictures too, and is an encouraging milepost on the food way.

Cheesemonger, by Gordon Edgar     (Chelsea Green Press) Not out yet, watch for it come February.

I’m just reading this really delightful tale of a cheesemonger in San Francisco. Only sleep forced me to put it down last night, but this morning and resumed with pleasure, nearly missing my yoga class. It’s about time someone from the punk persuasion walked into the food world. And now he’s writing about it!  This is an informative read and an entertaining and refreshing one, to boot.

Deeply Rooted, Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness,  by Lisa M. Hamilton   (Counterpoint Press)

 After I heard Lisa Hamilton read from her book and I lined up to buy a copy.  In Deeply Rooted she profiles three farmers and looks through them towards the past, the present and the future towards ways of farming that lay outside the agribusiness world.  She’s a fine writer and an intelligent observer and her book moves along at surprising clip. You won’t have heard of the farmers she speaks with—they are not obvious heroes. Yet. Much food for thought here.

This is the third or fourth year we’ve had these little gems in the Santa Fe farmers’ market. If they’re not elsewhere, they should be, and they probably will be, is my guess. You can’t go wrong with these wrinkled little morsels.

Japanese shishito peppers are 2 to 3-inches long and bright green, like a green pepper.  Pleats and folds run along the length of their little bodies; the tip is not pointed or blunt, but folds up into itself. These peppers don’t resemble jalapenos or serranos either in looks or in taste.  They’re mild, not hot, though sometimes one will have a little bite. Still, they aren’t quite like bell peppers, either, so know that if you don’t like green bell peppers it doesn’t mean you won’t like shishitos.

These little peppers are absolutely delicious to nibble on with drinks, but people are thrilled to buy them for another reason: they’re insanely easy to prepare. The $10 per pound cost probably works out in terms of time saved. For some, anyway; I see it as expensive! But not yet having succeeded at growing my own, I’m willing to pay. It still probably comes to less than putting out some wedges of decent cheese and is a much more interesting alternative.

Here’s what you do with them.  Heat a little olive oil in a sauté pan until it’s good and hot, but not, of course, smoking. Add the peppers and cook them over high heat, tossing them frequently until they blister. It takes about 10 minutes or possibly longer, for a pan full of peppers.  Whey they’re done, add some sea salt and toss again. Some like a squeeze of fresh lemon, too.  Slide them into a bowl and you’re done.  Serve them hot. You pick them up by the stem end and eat the whole thing.  Minus the stem.

Sure you can probably do fancier things with them and some chefs do, but they’re just terrific like this. If you have leftovers (unlikely), chop off the stems and put them in an omelet. And if you’re a gardener, you can get seeds from Kitazawa seed company and grow your own.