What We Need Is Here

Make it Real - my only cooking advice

I love making big breakfasts once in a while.  They can look so pretty, and it’s easy to make things delicious. This weekend's included fresh strawberries (fancied up with mint leaves and Johnny jump-up flowers), orange juice (Warren Henderson’s suggested blend of murcot tangerine and Valencia), crustless quiche with garden chard and snowpeas  - and buttermilk pecan pancakes.

Orange juice squeezing

Pancake mixing - child's play

I have the reputation for being a good cook, which is really undeserved.  I do cook a LOT – often and in huge quantities, which can be impressive. But the taste is all about the ingredients.  I like using good stuff  -  fresh, local things and straight-from-the-garden veggies and herbs.  And for baked goods, it’s got to be butter - the Fat of the Gods.   

Pancakes are one of my specialties.  Even I, who love to go out to breakfast and eat food other people have cooked for me, have never tasted better anywhere. The secret? Real butter and buttermilk - and never, NEVER Bisquick (or any of its sad variations).  

Where did the idea of Bisquick come from? According to legend and Wikipedia, it sprang forth in the 1930s when a General Mills sales executive met a dining car chef who pre-mixed the dry ingredients for biscuits with lard – thus eliminating the need for refrigeration.  This makes no sense to me since biscuits require milk and pancakes the addition of both milk and eggs.  I imagine it was promoted as labor-saving – no need to melt that butter (or lard!) or fetch that salt, sugar, or baking powder. Clearly our forebearers were hoodwinked.  

Go to the little extra trouble of mixing the pesky dry ingredients yourself and dealing with the butter for just a minute or two, and the results are so much better.  

We usually add things to the pancakes. We cracked some more pecans last week so used those (John’s favorite addition). And soon we’ll have blueberry, everyone’s favorite, and sweet potato (mine).  

My pancake recipe from my grandmother’s 1950s red-checked and tattered Better Homes and Gardens "New" Cookbook: 

Favorite Griddle Cakes

1 1/4 cups sifted enriched flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 beaten egg
1 cup buttermilk
2 tablespoons melted butter (they also recommend bacon grease...)

Whisk together flour with baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt. Combine egg, milk, and butter. Add to dry ingredients, whisking till smooth. Bake on buttered griddle. Makes 6-8 cakes (I double this for four or five of us.)

A blurry photo of the finished product (all photos of my little assistant tend toward blur)

Soup Art

I'm a little ashamed to say that I was not excited about the Wednesday Cafe soup-making this week. I felt like I used to at the end of the semester when every paper seemed like a variation on a theme, a formula that needed only a few new items keyed in. I looked to some cooking blogs for inspiration - French blogs since I was hoping to do double duty and practice my French as well. 

Et voila! I found a soup that looked so pretty, although with different ingredient than I had on hand (I could see baby corn and mushrooms floating in theirs) - but with a lovely embellishment: an ice-cream size scoop of rice on top. Oo la la! I did have some lovely vegetables to play with - bright orange sweet potatoes, pink-skinned white potatoes, deep green collards that I knew would look pretty in a curry-tomato base. A quick phone call to a friend/volunteer to bring some dried parsley to add a finishing touch to the rice, and the soup was ready for the tables. 

It was tasty, pretty, and festive, and it made the whole preparation process fun and... fulfilling. The servers seemed to enjoy the reactions from the guests who had the nicest things to say about it. But they always do; it's a great crowd to cook for. 

The whole thing reminded me that a lot of things can swing between "drudgery" and "art" depending on what you bring to it interiorly. The exteriors - the beautiful ingredients - are absolutely necessary, like quality paint for a blank canvas. But the outcome of any creation takes and gives some of the "artist's" heart. It's so much better to have one's heart in the work. 

Good Morning Orange Salad

We are really enjoying the orange bounty this winter. Thank goodness for the Hendersons at the Saturday market who are keeping up stocked up. Last week we came home with a box of parson browns and red navels to share with folks at the cafe and at the labor pools - and to enjoy ourselves.

Fruit salad or "ambrosia," as the Martin family and other southerners call it, is a holiday staple. My dad always made it early on Christmas morning and added all kinds of things, including canned fruit cocktail (fruit cocktail-less recipe here). We pare it down for everyday breakfasts by adding what we have on hand. Most mornings that's oranges and pecans. And it is enough. Beautiful, delicious, sweet, with the crunch I like (and Grace does not). 

The pink fruit you see in the photo is not a grapefruit (Martins don't use grapefruit in the ambrosia), but a red navel. It's the end of the season for them, but get one if you can. So sweet and delicious. I'm looking forward to brightening up a few more mornings with this stuff. 

 
 

A Little Bit of This, A Whole Lot of That - How to Make Soup From What You Got

Yesterday morning, I woke up early to face the crates, buckets, and baskets of food on the kitchen table and figure out how to turn them into soup. While we buy what we can from the farmers market, our "cafe soups" are dependent also on the copious produce they gift us with at the end of the markets. Good stuff, top quality, and always an interesting mix, some of it gets stored for later in the week, some gets processed (freezing or canning) when we have a whole lot. 

Yesterday morning what we had the most of was roots - carrots, rutabaga, turnip, green onions; some tubers - sweet potatoes; and another bunch o' greens. 

I imagined a slightly sweet soup with rosemary (which is growing in our garden). So I chopped up enough to fill our four pots and cooked it up. The trick is the order. One huge difference between homemade soups and canned soups is the freshness of the vegetables. While cooked enough to chew, they should still retain their individual flavor (the canning process tends to overcook everything). So add the vegetables to the soup pot in order of their required cooking time.  

But first the flavoring: Sauté onions and garlic if you have them and sprinkle with seasoning (rosemary this time). Then add the hardest stuff - for us, diced rutabaga and sliced carrots - cover with water and boil for about five minutes. They need just a tiny headstart over the turnip and sweet potato which come next. I boiled this until it was almost tender (about 7 minutes). Then I added a shredded cabbage to each of our very large pots and boiled for another few (I could have used the collards or mustards  if I added a little extra time, but I am saving these for later in the week).  The water has now become a nice vegetable broth; taste it, and salt to your preference. Then I added canned tomatoes and pre-cooked kidney beans and rice, heated it up, and voila! The kidney beans added protein and some more hardiness. The rice was unnecessary, especially since we were serving the soup with bread, but I just fancied the tomato-rice-rosemary combo.  Giving the soup one last, hard look, I realized it could use some dark green, so I raided our little spinach patch out front, chopped some leaves up, and added it to the pot. At this point, guests were about to arrive, so I didn't even turn the burner back on, just allowed the already-tender spinach to soften itself in the hot broth. 

It was good, and relatively quick for twelve gallons of soup. It would take less than an hour to prepare a family-size pot if you have cooked beans and rice on hand. You could leave those out, especially if you're serving the soup as part of a larger meal. I can see this soup served with grilled cheese sandwiches - much tastier than the traditional Campbell's tomato. 

I like the challenge of using what we've got and making something good out of it. It takes a little practice, but what a great skill our grandparents had! Making do and making it delicious is the root of what we think of now as "regional" cooking. You don't get more regional than Mid-February Embrace-Your-Roots Soup.

Perfect Storm

It was so cold and rainy last Wednesday, we were afraid no one would show up for the cafe. We had an abundance of produce that didn't quite fit into soup, so we deviated from our normal fare and used what we had the most of: greens (collard, mustard, and bok choi), lettuce (spring mix), and potatoes. We made beans and greens and baked potaotes (sweet or white) with cheese or butter. For those who weren't fans of the greens, we offered a "chef salad" made with the lettuce topped with boiled eggs from Henrietta and Charlotte, goat cheese from Kelley's new-mother goats, oranges sections from the wonderful Hendersons, pecans from Mr. Polopolous, and my special, fancy dressing (1/2 oil, 1/2 rice vinegar, a little salt). The slight warmth of the boiled eggs and the way the goat cheese "melted" into the salad dressing reminded me of the "wilted lettuce" salads my one northern grandfather (Indiana) taught my mother to make.

It was a really good meal and a bunch of people sat down to enjoy it. I felt proud to serve it - so healthy for folks who are particularly in need of healthy food and from such great sources, several of them friends! Once in a while it all comes together and this was one of those days. I highly recommend this meal during these days of cold, collards, potatoes, and citrus. 

Simple and Good: Tomatoes in Tabouli

We've had quite the "Indian Summer" this fall which, in general, I don't like much. But the lingering of summertime vegetables helps dull the pain a little. Some summer tomatoes are still fruiting and fall ones are on their way. This kind of weather, which we've had up till today (it is 18 degrees cooler upstairs than it was this time yesterday - a brisk and welcome 61 degrees) has just begged for salads.

So on Tuesday we dined on arugula and romaine salad, the last of the goat cheese on bread, and sweet tabouli. Tabouli is as cool to make as it is to eat - no cooking, even of the grain!

And, may I add that it's nice on a week like this to ponder how some things - like sweet, red tomatoes popping out of vines - are just plain good. No deep reflecting, sifting, or ruminating required to see that. We all enjoyed them.

Good ol' Tabouli

2 cups cracked wheat (aka bulgher wheat)
2 cups hot, nearly boiling, water
a basket of cherry tomatoes, quartered or sliced
1/2 cup mint, chopped
1 1/2 cups parsley, chopped, if you have it (we didn't)
1/2 cup lemon juice
some olive oil (the recipes I have seen always call for more than I'm interested in adding; just a few tablespoons works for us). Pour water over wheat and wait about 30 minutes till wheat is softened. Add remaining ingredients, serve at room temperature

Attack of the Seminole pumpkins

Seminole Pumpkins are everywhere! I like them for so many reasons: They are native to this region; they grow in the summer; they are very productive; they're fairly high in calories for a vegetable (a good thing if you are aspiring to live off what is grown here); they're high in vitamins and minerals; and they are pretty tasty. Their only flaw: They are ridiculously hard to peel. And for that reason we had collected quite a few on our pantry shelf before I decided to make use of them.

The sloth's method of peeling pumpkins? Cook them first. We halved ours, removed the strings and seeds (for the most part) with a metal spoon, placed them insides down in a baking pan filled without about an inch of water, and baked, uncovered, for about an hour. Then we put them in the fridge to cool off. I understand you can do this in a microwave as well, if you have one, for less time - about ten minutes.

For Wednesday's "cafe," we made another soup inspired by the wonderful Mollie Katzen (in Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special), but substituting pumpkin for a number of other ingredients. Here's the recipe, in the loose style of our grandmas who used what they had in the amount that they needed. I have found again and again that the actual ingredients and amounts don't matter very much. It's very freeing to create the amount you actually need with what you've got on hand! And it's worked for generations...

Spunky Punkin & Potato Soup

Ingredients:
onions
butter or olive oil
finely chopped potatoes (between a chop and a dice)
water
salt
cooked pumpkin (see above), peeled and chopped
frozen peas (we don't do this often, but till there's more local "green" at the market...)
spunkiness: chopped olives, pickled jalapenos or banana peppers, capers, or a mix of these
optional: sour cream

Directions:
Chop finely enough onions to cover the bottom of your pot by 1 or 2 inches. Saute in a little butter. When onions are soft, fill the pot to the halfway point with potatoes, bring to a boil and simmer for 20-30 minutes, until potatoes are so soft they are falling apart. Remove from burner for a moment and, with a potato masher, gently mash potatoes in the pot until they are fairly pulverized (there will still be pieces of various sizes). Put back on burner and add chopped pumpkin to the 2/3 mark, while bringing back to a boil, add some frozen peas - and a little water if necessary. Finally, add something "spunky" from the list above. We used a mixure of green olives and pickled jalapenos. Sour cream produces a creamier - and very pretty - soup. To use it, place it in a mixing bowl and stir in a ladle of soup. Add the mixture back to the soup and stir. Salt and pepper to taste.

Baked Bean Soup - another vegetable drought recipe

 

This time of the year, the pickin's are still pretty slim at the market and in the garden. It's been hot, mostly, and dry. Fall seedlings planted in early October are not quite ready - so you see sweet potatoes and peppers... and not much else.

Our cafe menus reflect the situation. More beans, less veggies... even the muscadine grape harvest has ended. While the farmers at the market assure us that the bountiful fall harvest will begin in 4 - 6 weeks, we are digging into the back of the recipe box for hardy soup that's heavy on the dried bean. Baked Bean Soup is a favorite.

Ingredients

2 cups chopped onions
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 cup chopped green peppers
1 cup chopped, peeled sweet potato
2 Tbsp. chili powder
4 Tbsp. Dijon mustard
2 cups water
1 14 1/2 oz can diced tomatoes
2 cups white pea beans (about 1/2 cup dried, soaked overnight and boiled till soft)
2 Tbsp. vinegar
2 Tbsp. molasses
salt to taste

Saute onions in olive oil till transparent. Add chopped green peppers and sweet potatoes, sprinkle with chile powder and stir in oil for a minute or two. Add water, mustard, and tomatoes, and bring to a boil. Add beans, vinegar, and molasses. Salt to taste. Serve with grated cheese if desired.

We served ours with oat-flax bread and our own variation of Boston brown bread (and the last of the muscadines...).

You need a swig of Jamaica

It is so very hot here - nearly breaking a 100 year-old record. Today the heat index is forecast to be 102. We have also had half as much rain as we normally do so far in October. AND the owner of our empty lot garden has turned off the water. So. Only the hardiest of heat-loving plants are surviving.

One of these is "Roselle" aka Jamaican Sorrel or Hibiscus sabdariffa, among other things. It is a beautiful plant - red stems and calyces, dark green leaves, lovely yellow hibiscus flowers with pink centers. In the past we have harvested these in the late fall and early winter, but these are already producing the prized calyces (stress?) and so we are picking them now. 

These calyces - the base of the flower - are the source of a famous Jamaican holiday drink called "Jamaica" (pronounced huh-my-cuh). There are a number of recipes for this but all involve boiling the sepals (removed from the calyx) for 10 minutes or so and adding spices and sugar (and often rum). Here's a typical recipe; you can google to find others. 

We made a lighter drink by removing the sepals from about 40 calyxes and boiling in a quart of water for ten minutes, straining the sepals out, adding sugar (quite a bit) and then another quart of cold water. It makes a nice tea, reminiscent of Celestial Seasonings Red Zinger. Very pretty and delicious over ice. A nice island treat for this extended summer we are having.

Santa Fe Chowder

This soup was eaten so quickly, I didn't have a chance to photograph it!

It's a variation of a wonderful recipe from a book of wonderful recipes: Moosewood Restaurant Daily Specials.  I'm often inspired by recipes but always end up making changes due to the quantities (multiplying by 20 or 30) and our desire to use local ingredients. This is the early October version:

2 tablespoons minced jalapeno peppers
1 cup chopped onions
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon oregano
2 tablespoons olive oil
5cups of sweet and white potatoes (we had a mix this week, but if you only choose one, choose sweet)
3 cups water
2 cup sweet green peppers
1 16 oz. can diced tomatoes
1 cup frozen corn
1 cup yellow squash
2 ounces cream cheese
1 cup milk
salt to taste

Garnish:
chopped cilantro
cheddar cheese
hot sauce (but of course)

Saute jalapenos and onions in oil in soup pot for about 10 minutes - until onions are translucent. Add spices and saute a minute more.

Add the potatoes, pepper, and water and bring to boil. Lower heat and simmer covered for about 15 minutes. 

Addd tomatoes, corn, and squash. Bring to a boil again and then simmer for about 5 minutes.

Remove about 3 cups of the soup from the pot and combine with cold milk and room temperature cream cheese. Pour into a blender (the milk will lower the soup temp which will be better for the blender). Puree, then add back to soup. Gently reheat if necessary, stirring constantly.

Garnish with cilantro and cheese if desired, and a dash of "hot sauce" if you like it spicier.