her able hands

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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I woke up Saturday morning to the cold and thought to myself, I think we’ll go out to the farm and pick peppers, tomatoes and beans. Then I’ll have to go buy a small freezer. Roasted red peppers, oh my.

I lay in bed with the sun streaming past the window (the bedroom window faces southwest) and relished the idea of being out in the fields in the warm sun and the cool air, but had to invent the warm part because goodness was it cold on Saturday. The kind of cold that’s the harbinger of what’s to come, where the husband bolts out of bed at four in the morning to dig the down comforter from the stack under the desk—and tosses it on top of the resentful, perimenopausal wife who was in the middle of a great dream and just fine under the flannel quilt, thankyew—he shivering and mumbling something about how f*cking cold it is, and holy crap what happened to summer. We woke up to 38*, but the forecast promised a high in the mid 60s. Perfect picking weather. And fortunately, no frost here because I totally forgot to pick the rest of my tomatoes the night before.

It was 90* just last week, wasn’t it?

After breakfast, the kids and I packed up a few snacks, some water and my camera (which I forgot to use but for a couple of shots of the future*) and made the half-hour ride out to Hilgert’s. We started with tomatoes, but the woman running the buckets and cash looked at me ruefully and intoned, “Plum tomatoes are hard to come by right now.” as she waved her hand at the rows of plants all flat on the ground with thousands of semi-ripe and overripe, rotting tomatoes just lying on the black plastic in a vinegary, fermented haze. Yuck. We picked half a bucket and decided to pay the extra $4 a bushel for picked tomatoes at another farm stand.

When we paid up, I saw a bucket with some lovely globe-shaped eggplants and asked if they were for sale. I could have as many as I like for 50 cents a piece, but she had to cut them for me because people tend to rip the plants right up out of the ground. Goodness, who knew people could be so brutal?

Harvesting is not just a skill, it’s an art. One must know exactly how a ripe fruit or vegetable looks and feels before attempting to separate it from its parent plant. Force it before its time and you could lose both. Eggplant is definitely better harvested by sharp knife blade than by yanking it from the vine. And tomatoes will tell you when they’re ready if you just gently tug on the plump fruit. The flesh will give ever so slightly under your fingers and you’ll feel the breaking point in the stem before it even snaps. As if the tomato wants to go to the kitchen now, thanks. Maybe a little salt and pepper?

So I thanked her as she trudged off into the eggplant rows, then thanked her again for her help as I imagined several more containers of my roasted ratatouille (yes, I know, I make it sans zucchini) stacked neatly in my freezer (yes, I know, I’ll need to clean out the freezer if I want to see any neat stacks of anything) and drove off to the pepper fields with a dozen dark purple globes of love.

I really wish I’d taken some pictures of the pepper fields, because here I’ve been all these four years in northeast Ohio, convinced that a local red pepper was a figment of my imagination. But no! Row upon row of sweet, ripe, firm red peppers stretched out before me and it only took about 15 minutes for us to fill two five gallon buckets.

This evening I got home and fired up the grill and filled the sink to wash off the clay spots.

This was the contents of one bag, an overflowing bucket’s worth, all had for $8. A little jar of roasted red peppers in oil at the grocery? Anywhere from $2-$5, depending on how gourmet the marketing shtick. I still have one more big bag of sweets and one big bag of medium hots. I’m intending to dry some hot peppers for chili powder, and will likely just chop, blanch and freeze some of the remaining sweets.

The knuckles on my right hand are all singed because my grill tongs, while quite long and unruly, and nearly impossible to use without getting a cramp in my hand, are about 6″ too short for this kind of grilling. I have to keep the peppers all along the back half of the grill where the heat’s intense enough to blacken the skin quickly and not turn the flesh to mush. After about 45 minutes, I had this:

Boy, howdy that makes me happy. I was feeling so bereft about the lack of food put back for winter, and dreading having to shop for every blasted ingredient in the frigid months to come. But now with this little project almost under my ample belt (I do still need to peel, seed and de-vein the little bastids, then get them into the freezer, separated by strips of wax paper and nestled together in ziploc bags.) That’s a job for tomorrow morning, because I want them to cool completely and it’s just about bedtime on the ranch.

Have I mentioned how much this full-time work thing is cramping my urban homesteading style?

Jeesh.

So anyway, we ran out of steam after the peppers. I probably could have kept on, but only if in the company of happy adults who were equally obsessed with the idea of stocking up, rather than a Very Hungry Teenager Who Wanted a Hamburger and a Preschooler who Really Had to Poop, and in her Own Potty, Please. So maybe next weekend we’ll run out for beans if they haven’t lost them to frost. And I do still have to buy the tomatoes from the other market—I want to can some roasted tomato soup and some tomato sauce.

On the way home I kept hearing forced air leakage coming from Tyler’s seat. After about ten minutes of that, I asked him if he had a problem. He sat up straight and got all blushy and assured me, “No! I’m just blowing my hair out of my eyes! I had a great time. I’m really glad I came. Seriously.”

Well, naturally I stopped for ice cream on the way home. Not that he could get any sweeter.

*Then! Then comes October, people. Look what I get to go pick in October!

Yes! That’s a whole field of gorgeous collard greens. Isn’t it a stunner? And look at this!

You got it! A whole field of curly kale.

People, I’m swooning.

And running out of room in the freezer.

Technorati Tags: Roasted Red Pepeprs, freezing, canning, preserving, preserving the harvest, u-pick, cooking greens

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I haven’t eaten a single local peach this summer.

I’m just saying.

Geeze-oh-man, the weather alarmists are way off base for our zip-pity-do-dah the past two days. It’s been hot, muggy, still (except for yesterday when a stiff breeze blew over my 7′ tall patch of Matt’s Wild Cherry and Yellow Pear tomatoes). Usually when we get a forecast of 70% chance of thunderstorms, we get some good rainfall. So far we’ve heard some nice, slow rumbly thunder, but nary a drop of rain for our poor, parched patch of the planet. Ah, well. I should have gone out there and watered this morning, for surely then it would have poured.

Instead, I picked the ripe tomatoes so they wouldn’t split wide open if it did rain, then trudged back inside in the thick, soupy air to do some much-needed, long-overdue deep cleaning. Gawd, my house has gotten gross this summer. After about an hour or so, the kitchen looked much more pleasant to work in, so I wondered what I could make that would quickly destroy the spit shine and settled on Gazpacho.

So how’s about this time I provide y’all with an actual recipe, instead of making you try to mine it from my rambling prose? This is my version, ganked from several other versions and varying wildly depending upon what all the veggies taste like coming out of the garden that season. This year, methinks they’re perfect.

Kelly’s Damn Gorgeous Gazpacho

3 Bell Peppers (1 green, 1 red, 1 orange–okay, the orange was from the grocery store)
2 Slicing Cucumbers–seeded, or 4 or 5 small Pickling Cucumbers, or a combination thereof–yielding about 3 cups cucumber bits
8-10 Plum tomatoes of some sort–seeded–this batch I used mostly San Marzano and two big, ox heart shaped Amish Paste
1 medium onion–red is preferred, but I used yellow and it’s tasting good
1 small hot pepper of your choice
1 small stalk of celery– whole stalk if thin, half if super-fat
4-5 cups tomato juice (depends on how thin you like it, I do 4)
4 large cloves of F R E S H hardneck garlic
1 Tbsp. kosher salt
1 1/2 tsp. cracked pepper
1/2 cup White Wine Vinegar
1/2 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/4 cup chopped fresh Italian flat leaf parsley
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

So you start off by chopping all of the veggies into 1-inch dice and then, one vegetable at a time, pulsing them in a food processor with a blade until they’re coarse. I don’t think it really matters what order you do this in, but it’s imperative that you start with very ripe tomatoes.

I chopped my peppers and onions first and dumped them out into the largest of my glass nesting bowls. Remind me sometime to do a post about my bowls, will ya? I have a lot of bowls and every one of them is special to me in some way.

So now you’re adding the veggies one at a time to the bowl and your kitchen is starting to fill with the fumes from the onions and peppers, and with a sharp, green and cool fragrance from the cucumbers.

I used a mix of one slicing cuke from the farmers’ market and three smallish Boston Pickling cukes from my garden. If they’re organically grown, I leave the skin on, but don’t forget to slice the seeds out, you really don’t want those floating around in the mix.

Next came the tomatoes and then the short stalk of celery. A lot of recipes don’t call for celery, and I’ve tried some that use way too much. I love just a hint of celery flavor, it shouldn’t overpower. The tomato should take center stage.

Now you’ve got a great big bowl of freshness and it’s time to add the remaining ingredients, the most important being the garlic. If you haven’t got any fresh hardneck garlic from a local farmer, well… I’m sorry. I really don’t know what else to say. Except maybe skip the garlic, because the rancid crap they try to sell as garlic at the grocery store just shouldn’t ever be added to any dish you might want to take pride in. It’s disgusting. Sorry to be so blunt and mean, but it’s true.

So while there’s still time, get thee to a farmers’ market and buy up a buttload of hardneck garlic. This bulb is Music, a sweet and delicious variety—super-juicy and garlic-tastic! Mince it up as fine as you can, then fold it into the veggies. Add the olive oil and vinegar, salt and pepper, then the parsley and cilantro.

Last comes the tomato juice. I’ve got to tell you that I’m feeling pretty damned lucky right now. Want to know why? Well, let me tell you. It’s because of the fact that I made a little trip down to the dungeon (a.k.a. basement), and what did I spy right there gathering dust on my dwindling pantry shelf? I found a jar of thin tomato sauce—improperly labeled, because really? It’s tomato juice. My very own tomato juice from my most amazing garden two summers ago.

I got to crack that jar open almost exactly two years to the day—the label read 9/4/05—and swirl it gently into the bowl of vegetables, thus taking it from the level of a loose salad to a cool summery soup.

My fridge is a bit packed right now and I didn’t have enough room for such a big bowl, so I dumped it into a pitcher and the quart jar the juice came out of so it can sit in the cold overnight. You can eat it after a few hours if you don’t have the patience to wait, but it’s much better if you let all of the ingredients mingle and get to know one another overnight. It’s a fuller, sexier soup the next day.

And a fuller sexier soup is just the thing on a hot September day, don’t you think?

Technorati Tags: recipes, gazpacho, tomatoes, eat local, locavore, organic gardening

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I took a sick day today, courtesy of my skull-tingling, spine-wrangling sinus headache. I thought I would just drop the Lila Bean off at school and head back home to sleep for a while because I only got about two hours last night. But when I came in, flashes of red winked at me in the bright morning sun from the garden beds next door. I grabbed the colander and walked over in the still cool air, passing by the chickens who are still happily scratching bugs up out of the soil, making those contented little gurgly chicken noises.

So instead I’ve been listening to Natalie Merchant’s, The House Carpenter’s Daughter, while coring, seeding and quartering the colander full of San Marzanos, and tiny dicing eggplant, a variety of peppers, and mincing shallots and Red Russian garlic. Slow-roasted Ratatouille for the freezer. The house and neighborhood are so quiet, just the music twanging from the speaker on top of the fridge, the kitties wandering around, scratching at the door for in, then out. The cicadas and crickets sing their swan song of summer and I know I made the right choice staying home today. I’m in desperate need of some alone time in my own house, a little head space for the head case, so-to-speak. Almost perfect, except for the pounding headache, the perpetual sneezing and the constant chills which we will attempt to ignore for the remainder of this gift of a day.

San Marzano paste tomatoes, as described at High Mowing Seeds where I purchased my seed two years ago:

A favorite among processors due to its high solids and outstanding flavors, this classic Italian variety makes an excellent, all-around tomato for paste, puree, or canning. Long, 3” X 1 ½“ intensely red cylindrical fruit resists cracking and holds well both on the vine and in storage. Indeterminate.

This year I bought my plants from a grower through ebay because I didn’t get my seed-starting act together in time. I swear I posted about that, but can’t find where to link back to it. I’m not very good at the meta-blogging. Aaanyway, even with the less-than-optimal access to the sun, these plants produced some fine tomatoes that are ripening at just the right rate to make a batch of roasted sauce at a time (today a double-batch). I’m all addicted to roasted sauce now—gas bill be damned—with small diced eggplant and lots of garlic and peppers and plenty of fresh herbs tossed in for the last hour of cooking. It comes out so sweet and caramelized, tasting of earth and sun and captured summer.

I can’t see any real reason to grow other types of paste tomatoes if you’re looking for a true paster and are low on space to grow them. (Although I am a big fan of the Amish Paste and Italian Giant Paste tomatoes as well.) The San Marzanos have very few seeds, almost no gel and thick, dry walls with a terrifically meaty texture. They’re super fast to prepare for cooking, with very little mess. Steven’s been very busy with his San Marzanos this summer, too.

I can only imagine how incredible they must taste when grown under the Italian sun, hugging a trellis built by wizened peasant farmer’s hands on soil that has been tended by the same family for centuries—as opposed to my second year Ohio soil, overshadowed by giant old oak trees.

Oops! Sorry. I seem to have fallen down the romantic stereotype rabbit hole.

See how neat and tidy that looks? The seed clump slides right out leaving a truly empty, dry cavity that’s just begging for a good slow roasting.

Don’t you think?

You should smell my house right now. That’s what someone needs to do—write a wordpress plugin for fragrance blogging. Come on all you code wizards out there, heed my call!

So here we have one of two pans about to go into the oven.

And here’s the finished batch from Saturday.

Hee. Do you like how I did that? Now, you can see that I didn’t take the skins off the tomatoes. I seldom do. I’m just one of those weirdos who doesn’t mind the papery skin sticking to her teeth and the roof of her mouth. Or maybe I’m just too lazy to deal with that extra step of dunking them in hot water, then plunging them into cold, then peeling them. I mean, let’s cut to the chase, what’s a little tomato skin between teeth?

So I think I’m going to do this Ratatouille thing with the rest of my tomatoes as they come in. The eggplant at the market has been great—medium sized, skin not too thick, not too seedy and affordable. I’m thinking ahead to February and how wonderful a container of this is going to taste over rice while I’m balancing my bowl on my belly and browsing through seed catalogs.

Technorati Tags: San Marzano paste tomatoes, Ratatouille, slow-roasting, garden, eat local, locavore, stocking the freezer

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I can’t believe OLS is over. I didn’t try half of the recipes I intended to try, but the summer isn’t finished and the produce at the farmers’ market is still abundant, so I’m going to keep this thing going on my own blog for a few more weeks.

I had no idea what I wanted to make last night because my brain is all fogged up with histamines. The goldenrod is in full bloom and my sinuses feel like a big rig has parked right up in there, and the driver is a heavy smoker. That and a new symptom that I’ve never had with seasonal allergies before—my entire body hurts as if I’ve been whacked all over with a rubber stick. Like flu aches. Lila and Tyler are both wonky from allergies too, so we all kind of pooped around all day. Be forewarned, this post is going to meander. My head’s a wreck. I promise eventually to get to the point, and it’s all related, just not particularly well organized.

The big college apartment complex out across the road that runs behind us had some kind of a battle of the bands event outside yesterday. Lots of extremely loud, angry music. I know I’m getting old because dudes…what the everloving hell? I just don’t understand the noise that passes for music with the kids these days. So much angst. Hate. Anger. No melody. No rhythm. How is this considered music? And why did it have to infect such a glorious day yesterday for eight solid hours? Hours that I had planned to spend wandering around outside, peacefully doing small jobs that wouldn’t entail too much lifting or bending over.

I tried working outside, but my heart was beating so fast from the allergies and the grinding metal guitar and screaming. I did manage to pick a large colander of San Marzano tomatoes, which I forgot to photograph and Chris has my camera down at the old house today, so you’ll have to take my word for it. I’ll snap a pic of the slow roasted sauce I intend to make with them today. I also finally dug up the last row of potatoes, German Butterball. Looks like about 20 lbs. Some of those will go into vegetable soup with the Red Russian kale I got at the market, and the carrots I picked.

While I did all of that harvesting, Lila and two of her friends discovered the wood lot for the first time in a year of living here. They marched around from one end to the other—barking out orders—and climbed the wood chip pile to survey the lay of the land. They also tromped through a huge patch of poison ivy. Oh joy. It was close to nap time though, and the two girls began to melt down, so it was time to break up the search party and head inside. Thank Maude.

Lila pissed and moaned for half an hour and I lay on the bed next to her reading Harry Potter and trying to ignore all of the terrible sounds coming at me all at once. Whining. “Music”. Lawn mowers. “Music”. Whining. Eventually she fell asleep and I stayed inside and read for three hours. To hell with everything else.

So by the time I started dinner it was already almost 6:00. I halved two acorn squash (organic from the market) and started them baking in a 350 degree oven. Meanwhile I warmed up the cast iron skillet and dropped in a dollop of Amish butter, some sliced Cippolini onions (market), 3 types of peppers (my Anaheim Chili, and 1 sweet red and 1 sweet green from the market) and sautéed until golden. Added some zucchini (market) and all blue potatoes (mine). I added these to ten eggs (mine), a cup of flour (local), 1 tsp. each of baking powder and baking soda (not local), and chopped fresh basil (mine). Poured the goop into a buttered 9″ square baking dish and baked for 35 minutes at 350.

While I waited for all of that to cook, I sliced up a bunch of tomatoes (Pink Caspian from the market, my Juanne Flammé and Black Krim) and a cuke (market), then tossed those with a little balsamic, salt and pepper (all not local), local goat feta and my basil. Doesn’t it look yummy? I didn’t get the photo until dusk, so it’s a wee dark.

I sat out on the deck browsing through the latest Gardening Jihad Catalog while everything cooked and Lila played on the swing set with two friends. The music, blissfully, had ceased. The air smelled of late summer, loamy and green with a tinge of decay, and a rich, eggy warmth wafting out of the kitchen. Soon the timer dinged…

So over the next month or so, I'd like to try cooking a few things I haven't tried before, but will need to do a bit more sourcing (driving) to accomplish locally:

Leg of lamb (I've never cooked lamb in my life, so this will be a new one. Any advice on cooking one on the grill much appreciated!) If we end up liking the taste of lamb, I have opportunity to buy a good amount to stock the freezer for winter.

Homemade pasta. I can't find my pasta attachment for the KitchenAid anywhere. It's only been used once in, oh, fifteen years. No idea what happened to it.

Stuffed Cabbage using local, grassfed bison.

I'm also going to do a little canning/freezing by doing some U-pick at Hilgerts a local farm that isn’t certified organic, but uses Integrated Pest Management. In the next month or three they have paste tomatoes (sauce & salsa, dammit!), green beans and cooking greens that I want for the freezer, onions, turnips, rutebega, yams, and parsnips for the chilly corner of the basement that I’ll pretend is a root cellar. I will have local foods this winter.

Jeepers. That’s like, right around the corner, isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: one local summer, eat local, locavore, garden, seasonal allergies, pantry, root cellar, harvest, zucchini tart

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