her able hands

It’s time to plant the garlic so it has a chance to sprout and root before the cold weather comes. If it ever comes. We’ve hovered in the low 90s for days now, and the humidity has socked me into myself and made me feel like I’m menopausal. Maybe tonight when I get home from my after-work meeting with Lila’s teacher, I can get the cloves separated and ready to go. Then Wednesday night I can pick a bed and get them buried.

Two winters ago I wrote an essay about planting garlic that Becca kindly helped me to tame into order. I shopped it around a bit, but had no takers. When I read it again recently, I thought “who cares? so you had a good day planting garlic.”

I love how time can help loosen the grip of attachment I get on my work. How it lets me see things in a new light and with a more practical, logical eye. I also love a few sentences in my essay and hope I find a new way to use them one day.

I straddle the row and bend forward to plant each clove, flat end down, point up. After several awkward placements, my body seeks an economy of motion. The bag next to my left foot, I hold several cloves in my left hand, slide the narrow trowel with my right into the crest of the hill, pull the soil forward, place a clove, twist to set it firmly. I stretch forward, dig and pull to open a new hole and close the previous, place the clove, twist, and stretch forward again. My shoulders ache, I bend my knees, dig and pull, place a clove, twist. My balance shifts, I step ahead, move the bag closer, grab more cloves. Repeat.

This is how I approach my days lately.

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I forgot to post this recipe! I’m not sure where it comes from, but it’s one my sister wrot e out on a recipe card for me while I was visiting her a couple of years ago. It’s my favorite thing to do with apples, now.

These babies came out of the oven and the entire neighborhood smelled like warm cinnamon and apples.

Apple Crostate
Makes 6 individual

Dough:
3 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
1 cup chilled, unsalted butter cut into small pieces
2 eggs lightly beaaten
1/2 cup sour cream.

Combine the flour & salt, work in the butter with a pastry knife until it just forms crumbs (I used the food processor because I had just finished using it to make the dough for the wonderful, blunderful Chard Tart). Combine the sour cream and eggs in a separate bowl, then add to the flour mixture (not in the food processor) and mix until just combined. Then knead until it just comes together. Form into 6 flat, round cakes. Wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Filling:
6 large apples (Cortland, Rome Beauty, — I used Opalescent, a local heirloom variety.) peeled and sliced thin
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 375*
Form tarts to liking– roll out on a lightly floured board, into thin circles about 9″ across. I floured the board with a 50/50 whole wheat and white mix, so the dough picked up luscious flakes of wheat.

Pile 1/6th of the apples onto one side, fold the dough over, fold the edges up and press down to seal. Repeat five more yummy times.

Move them to the ungreased baking sheet as you go.

Bake for 40-45 minutes, until crust is golden brown.

Cut one up into small pieces to appease the kids in the neighborhood who have now gathered around the picnic table.

Eat one yourself in place of dinner. Pick up and eat every little amazing flake of sweet and salty dough that has fallen on your shirt and lap. Lick the plate. Trust me.

Technorati Tags: recipes, apples, apple crostate, flaky dough, sour cream dough, autumn cooking

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You all had some interesting thoughts on my last post. I don’t think I was very clear in my writing (as is often the case when I do a first thing in the morning post and don’t sit on it to edit and clarify later).

I am in a deeply frustrated place with several things that are going on in my life and in the lives of those I love most in the world. I feel hamstrung and hog tied and corralled and basically like a piece of livestock being pushed along to the slaughter. I see a greener pasture, and I want to jump the fence to get over there in the tall prairie grasses and clover. Or something.

But I also love my life. I get it that the garden was just right for me for right now because dudes, I am so overwhelmed with the details. I get it that yes, I can pull into the driveway and knock on that door if I feel to. Really feel to. Or not. And that’s okay too. That heaping metric tons of bullshit guilt on myself isn’t going to make me or anybody feel any better.

Really? I think I’m going just a little bit crazy because I feel a big change coming and nobody I know wants to talk about it. They all look at me wall-eyed and wary, like I’m about to drink the Kool-Aid and they think I’m forcing a cup into their hands. I don’t know how to talk about it rationally and logically and my mind is always racing to figure out what I can do to get ready, to make it better. I’m not convinced that spending all of my time in a cubicle is it.

But! I’m going to drop that for now, because I can’t back it up with anything concrete or of value. It’s just…uh…deep dread. Instead, let me tell you something funny! On my way home today, I saw a young man in that garden bent over a bunch of buckets. He had picked the tomato plants clean!

You saucy thing!

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I see a huge vegetable garden on my way to work every day, set in the sunny side yard of an old farm house. I began to track my jealousy in early spring when the vast, rectangular patch of dead weeds got turned under and became a perfect blank slate of soil. All through the spring, I slowed my truck as I passed so I could check out the various additions. By early summer, the entire bed was set with precise rows of beans, tomatoes, peppers, squash, eggplant, okra, cabbaage, leeks, garlic and goodness knows what else. That’s just what I could see from the road. All of the plants were neatly tied to perfectly straight stakes. The walking rows in between remained bare dirt all season long. Someone either spent a lot of time on hands and knees, or they walked a small tiller down between the rows almost daily.

I never witnessed a single person in this garden, not in the morning or during my commute home in the evening. Never saw anyone bent over the plants, or yanking weeds from the between the rows. But this garden thrived. The plants grew enormous and set what looked—from my distance—like prize-winning fruit. State fair worthy. Oh, how my jealousy thrived on this double-daily reminder of what my garden is not, of how my pantry will go unfulfilled for yet another winter because I don’t have enough sunlight on my vegetables.

It reached a nearly unmanageable level, my jealousy, once the tomatoes began to ripen. I nearly drove off the road every day as I gawped at the fat, red globes of love hanging in clusters from every available inch of row after row of healthy, hearty, robust plants. Why can’t I have that? Why can’t I move my big backyard garden at the old place into town?

But recently I’ve noticed that the fruit is rotting on the vine. Hundreds of tomatoes and peppers unpicked, just wasting away before my very eyes. Where is the gardener? Why are the rows all overgrown with choking weeds? The purslane is now half as tall as the pepper vines. What’s happened? Has the gardener lost interest? Was it only ever about making them grow and not about the end product? Or is something wrong? What if the gardener has become somehow incapacitated and has no other person to help harvest and process all of that food?

Now every day I drive past and fantasize about pulling into the driveway to ask if I can help. But what would I say, exactly? And when would I carve out time to do whatever it is that I think needs doing? I press my foot deeper into the accelerator and drive on past, late for work again. Then I slow as I pass on the way home, picturing myself with my stranger’s offer to harvest and can the crop, then split the bounty. Instead, I hurry home to get dinner started. And this fact gives me a bit of a tummy ache. This makes me think about what Jim Kunstler said about redirecting our culture more toward things-we-do-with-other-people. How are we, the average people, going to do this when we’re all living at full-speed?

I don’t know. I try every day to make some effort towards a more simple life. I’m teaching myself to say no more often to the gadget-credit-have-it-now lifestyle I had become addicted to, and that feels like a solid step in the right direction. But there’s so much more to it. I’m driving past it every day. On my way to what, exactly?

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This is a fairly straightforward recipe, but there’s one important step and that’s the step I skipped. When you roll out the dough, you’re going for a nice, even 15 inch circle. Easy enough, right? Except the recipe says to roll it out in between two sheets of wax paper so you can then lift it onto the baking pan without it tearing to ribbons. Well, I didn’t do that. Not only did I not do that, I also then piled my wet ingredients right on top of the thin dough, right there on my cutting board.

Then I folded the edges up, working counter-clockwise around the tart, until I had a neat little tarty package to pop in the oven.

Except, whoops! How am I going to move this nice neat tart onto the baking sheet? Hmmmm, braniac?

After some pulling and turning and dumping out of ingredients all over the place, I did manage to shift it onto the pan without tearing it asunder, though now it looked like a wrinkled old ball sac filled with chard. Sorry, but it’s true. And I kind of like it better. It’s even more rustic in appearance, with more texture than usual.

It was bittersweet making this recipe as it used up most of the rest of my chard. My fall plantings of greens have officially become the local buffet for another group of rabbits, so I won’t have any greens at Thanksgiving direct from the yard. Thank goodness Hilgert’s will have kale and collards.

So, on to the recipe!

Chard Tart
serves 4-6

Pastry
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon salt, preferably kosher
1 1/2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
In a food processor, combine the flour, salt, oil, and butter, and process briefly. Drizzle in 1/3 cup cold water and process briefly. Test to see if the dough sticks together. If not, gradually add more water, a tablespoon at a time. Remove the dough from the processor, knead it a few times on a lightly floured surface, and form it into a ball. Flatten it a bit, wrap it in wax paper, and refrigerate for 1 hour or as long as 6 to 8 hours.

Filling
8 large Swiss chard leaves, stems removed, thinly sliced
Salt, preferably kosher
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 leek, white part only, washed and thinly sliced (I skipped the leek, but added a few baby shallots).
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
1 medium potato (or 1 large red), boiled until tender, peeled and cubed (I used 4 fingerling potatoes from the garden with skins on).
2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/3 cup cubed Fontina cheese
Salt, preferably kosher
Freshly ground black pepper
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (I used thick shaved Romano).
Preheat the oven to 375F. Place the Swiss chard in a colander, sprinkle with 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, and set the colander aside over a bowl for 30 minutes.

In a small saucepan, heat the 2T olive oil over medium heat. Add leek and onion stirring until softened, about 5 minutes. Transfer to a large bowl. Add the chard to the bowl, along with potato, parsley, feta, Fontina, salt and pepper, eggs, and 2T of the extra-virgin olive oil. Mix well.

Lightly flour a sheet of wax paper, and place the dough on it. Flour the dough lightly and cover with a piece of wax paper. Roll the dough out to form a 15-inch circle. Remove the top piece of wax paper. Invert the dough round onto an oiled baking sheet and remove the other piece of wax paper.

Spread the filling on the dough, leaving a 1 1/2-inch border all around. Fold the border over the filling, overlapping itself slightly every 2 inches or so. Brush the dough with 1 tablespoon of the extra-virgin olive oil. Sprinkle filling with the Parmigiano-Reggiano, and drizzle with the remaining 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil. Bake for 30 minutes, or until the crust and filling are lightly browned. Slice, and serve hot or at room temperature.

All this dish needs is a bright salad and a glass of chilled Rose to make it a perfect meal. But it’s also quite scrumptious eaten while standing over the hot pan.

Technorati Tags: recipes, chard, chard tart, feta cheese, eat local, locavore, garden, kitchen garden

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