Williamsburg CSA


First Day of my CSA (June)


Last Day of my CSA (November)

See more food photos: missginsu @ flickr

Some people know the season via the calendar. These folks enjoy what I consider the seasonal four-pack: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

Those in close contact with farmers' markets and CSA groups know a veritable color wheel of microseasons within those macroseasons embraced by the rest of the population. There's ramp-morel-lettuce season followed closely by spinach-pea-strawberry season. There's the highly anticipated tomato-corn-zucchini season. Right now, it's very clearly sweet potato-cranberry-Brussels sprouts season.

Thanks to Just Food, a nonprofit org dedicated to things like food-selling opportunities for small farmers and food-buying opportunities for urbanites like me, I was able to hook up with the Williamsburg Community Supported Agriculture group this year and enjoy six months' worth of microseasons in the form of organic produce from the farmers at Garden of Eve.

CSAs exist all over the country (I used to belong to the Loring Park CSA in Minneapolis), and while I wouldn't say membership is a good decision for everyone (some people, for example, just wouldn't be satisfied with the "Iron Chef Mystery Ingredient" aspect of a CSA group's weekly variety pack, and some would have no clue about what to do with three pounds of kohlrabi or a quarter-peck of habañero peppers), I've found that supporting local produce from actual people has been ethically, sensually and culinarily satisfying for me*.

Additionally, I've learned a lot about preservation. In years past, home cooks dealt with the seasons as they arrived. If it was tomato-corn-zucchini season and the kitchen overflowed with bags and bags of red, yellow and green produce, everyone ate succotash, zucchini bread, fresh vegetable chowders, and buttery cornbread muffins.

Thanks to a constant flow of produce available in any local shop, today's cooks are far less practiced in using up a surplus. Canning, drying, fermenting and pickling are the arts of the ancients. We buy what we need. The majority of us will never be pressed into anything resembling our progenitors' annual frantic frenzy of canning, baking, stewing and jamming an entire orchard or garden over the space of a week or two during the harvest.

That said, today's CSA member (and thrify produce buyers in general) often discover a need for those techniques of antiquity.

In a month or two, (around Meyer Lemon season), it will be time to start signing up for a new CSA year. For those who plan on joining one (localharvest.org compiles national listings), here's a few tips I've discovered that might make your produce microseasons more efficient and enjoyable:

Block out some time. Right after pickup, you'll want an hour or so to care for your vegetables. Rinse the apples and pears. Wash and dry the lettuces. (I love my salad spinner.) Cut the carrots into sticks for easy snacking. Separate the celery stalks from the celery roots. Rinse and chop up the beet greens for easy sauteing.

Triage. Softer fruits and vegetables will rot first. Can't use 'em right away? Think: chutneys, sauces, jams, soups. A lot of fruit and veggies freeze better once they're already cooked (Quickly blanch and shock tomatoes to get the skins off, then toss 'em in a freezer bag.) Save any root vegetables for last.

Same technique, different vegetable. Enjoy mashed potatoes? Try the same thing with mashed celery root, carrots or parsnips. Ratatouille, soup, slaw, salad and stir-fries are all your friends. The butternut squash soup is just as good with acorn squash. Sauteed greens are yummy whether they're beet greens, mustard greens, turnip greens, escarole, chard, kale, frisee or spinach. Nearly anything can be pickled. Almost everything is tastier when it's done up with a layer of olive oil, salt, pepper and some roasting time in the oven.

* That is, apart from the getting dressed and leaving the house early on Saturday morning thing.

Labels: advice, CSA, fruit, local, organic, veggies

Okay... raise your tiny fist if you've had something taken from you at the airport gate.

Yeah, me too. My water bottles, tweezers and little red Swiss Army Knives have all made it into the TSA refuse pile.

Fellow foodies returning from far-flung feasts (the recent AAA estimate put this year's holiday travel number at 37.2 million Americans traveling 50 or more miles from home) should appreciate this delicious moment relayed from the rim of the shiny silver TSA arch.

Forwarded-From: Ted
Subject: Sweet moment in airport security

Last week I went through security at Newark. I had just put my carry-on, pocket stuff, laptop and shoes on the belt and was standing in stocking feet waiting to go through the metal detection arch. A dozen people were in line for the arch ahead of me.

I looked down. There was a bin full of discarded bottles. Most, but not all, were plastic.

I espied a long, thin bottle of dark fluid. "Tawny Port," it said, "20 years old." Unopened.

I picked it up. Nobody cared.

I opened the plastic. Nobody cared.

I uncorked it. Nobody cared.

I took a fine, heady draught of very very nice port.

Other passengers were curious but declined to share it with me.

Regretfully I put it back in the bin and strode through the arch, feeling for once that I had not been violated, but elevated, by the Security Experience.

Cheers, T

Labels: beverages, travel, wine

Image from the exceedingly useful NYPL

"Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity."

-Frank Lloyd Wright, 1867-1959

Labels: artists, food quotes, Friday

Dave's skilled paws chop ginger at lightning-speed

The Recipe Rock Star is a cooking tutorial series. We've covered one focused minute, mise and the importance of quality. Feel free to read them in whatever order you wish. Moving on...

Recipe Rock Star Lesson #4:

Tools make the chef

In a professional kitchen setting, those who clock into work with dull knives have doomed themselves to an 8- to 13-hour shift of culinary hell. Delicate herbs will be crushed, not sliced, beneath a shoddy blade. Vegetables are hacked into misshapen chunks that cook at different rates, making some pulpy while others are crunchy. Because dull knives tear meat rather than carving it, the resulting slices are clumsy, thick and ugly. A cook using a dull knife has to use force to cut things, increasing the risk of chopping up fingers. (Unfortunately, I know this from experience.)

This is why chefs baby their tools. They sharpen their knives, massage oil on them and take them everywhere. Why? Any chef worth her salt knows she's more like Batman than Superman. That is to say, chefs might appear to have superhuman superpowers, but (like Batman) it's all about ace skill augmented with impressive hardware. Take away the utility belt and the Batmobile, and you've left Batman in a bad, bad place.

It's not just the knives. Inexperienced cooks usually don't want to invest much money in a new endeavor, so they tend to purchase inexpensive pans made with thin, flimsy metals. That's about the worst thing a newbie can do, since this type of pan is extremely difficult to use. Because heat is distributed unevenly, these pans tend to warp or develop hot spots.

What does this mean for your dinner? In a cheap pan, you're almost guaranteed to burn your meats, scorch your sauces and find your fish fillets, omelets and cutlets sticking anxiously to the surface of the pan, rather than sliding easily onto your spatula. I've found that a plate of shredded omelet alongside a pan of charred remains doesn't really boost a new cook's sense of accomplishment. Don't worry, though. It's probably not you. It's the equipment.

Though I could go on forever about various pieces of equipment I love, here, in brief, is what I consider to be the very basics for your utility belt (along with some nice accessory items listed thereafter).

Essential Kitchen Equipment

1. A set of sharp, good-quality knives (and a safe place to store 'em):

• chef's knife (about 8")
• long serrated knife
• short paring knife
• honing steel (to keep those knives in shape)

I have a set of Wüsthof-Trident knives I picked up on the cheap, but there's a lot of good brands. Just find something that feels good in your hands. Some people also like a mid-length utility knife, but I never use 'em.

2. Two non-slip cutting boards.

I prefer wood. You'll need one for meats and one for fruit/veg. Label the boards with a permanent marker. On the fruit/veg board, use one side of the board for veg and the other side for fruit. Nobody likes their apples to taste like onions. Or raw chicken. Bleah!

3. A very basic set of high-quality pans:

• small saucepot with a lid
• large, heavy-bottomed stockpot with a lid
• small sauté pan
• large sauté pan
• large roasting pan

If you have extra interest and money, it's really nice to have a large cast-iron pan, a wok and a dutch oven.

4. Bakers will need a few extra pans:

• muffin tin
• sheet trays (It's good to have two.)
• 13"x9" cake pan
• 9" round cake pan (It's nice to have two of these for doing stacked birthday cakes.)
• What they now call a "fluted tube pan." I call it a bundt pan.
• 9" pie pan
• 9" tart pan
• loaf pan
• a cooling rack (or two)

There's a host of other pans for specialty items. These few will assist you with the basic pies, cookies, tarts, muffins, cupcakes, brownies, cakes and quickbreads. Folks who really dig baking will need to get springform pans and pans that accomodate additional shapes.

5. Other necessary tools:

• timer (Unless there's already one on your stove)
• meat thermometer and oven thermometer (You'd be shocked to know how many ovens run too hot or too cool...)
• vegetable peeler (the OXO one rocks)
• mixing bowls (I'd advise a small, medium and large one. The metal Martha Stewart ones at K-Mart are good and cheap.)
• heat-proof rubber spatula
• metal spatula (I believe these are also called pancake turners.)
• whisk
• set of teaspoons
• set of dry measuring cups
• liquid measuring cup
• ladle
• long-handled meat fork
• ricer or potato masher
• slotted spoon
• wooden mixing spoon
• colander
• strainer
• citrus reamer
• carving fork
• heavy-duty kitchen shears
• butcher's string
• grater
• pepper mill*
• metal steamer basket of some kind
• can opener/bottle opener/wine opener
• blender/food processor (immersion blenders are nice, but heavy-duty stand up ones work well, too)
• rolling pin (or a clean wine bottle)
• fire extinguisher

If you're a baker, add in a candy thermometer, pastry brush, sifter, pastry bag and a pastry scraper (also called a "bench scraper").

These days, I might be tempted to list a stand mixer, a Silpat tray liner, a kitchen scale, a microplane and a spice grinder (aka coffee grinder) or mortar and pestle as essential equipment as well, but since I got along without 'em for many years, maybe they're not essential... just awfully nice.

With all this stuff, you'll have a properly equipped utility belt, or at least a nicely stocked kitchen. In the next edition, we'll work on the other part of the Batman equation... skills.

* Cooks grind a lot of pepper, so we have arguments about the best one... I dig my Vic Firth, while fellow cook Molly loves the Unicorn Magnum. As long as it puts out a satisfying grind and volume, you're fine.

Labels: advice, Recipe Rock Star, tools

J, a mouth on the move between Seattle and San Jose this week, reports in from the field (or dock, as it were) on a subject dear to my stomach: quality brekkie.

First good brekkie of the trip today. There's a place at Pike
Market called The Little Crumpet Shop that rocks unconditionally.

$1.50 for a mug of unlimited refills of freshly brewed loose leaf
tea, $3 for a bowl of groats(!) with honey, milk and currants. Mmm.

My insides are so happy. They had the usual little sign about not
bringing outside food into the place, but they wrote in special
permission to bring fresh fruit from the market. Aw.

Labels: brekkie, J, recommended, reviews, Seattle, tea, travel

One Spice, Two Spice, by Floyd Cardoz and Jane Daniels Lear

One of the fantastic things about attending cooking school is the gateway it provides to great kitchens. To those who care nothing about the construction of food, it might seem silly to want to roam among the pots and cutting boards, but to the food obsessed, the opportunity to seek out behind-the-swinging-door secrets is truly the stuff of salivation.

As a culinary student, one is encouraged to "trail" in as many kitchens as one can without succumbing to exhaustion. A trailing cook simply sets up appointments with chefs or sous-chefs and arrives at the kitchen with knives in tow, ready to work on basic vegetable prep.

Generous chefs generally let the trailing student watch (and sometimes assist with) the set-up for evening dinner service, and they may let the student observe the service period itself (from a safely removed vantage point).

As a student, I trailed at Tabla. I loved the kitchen, the food, the ingredients and the fact that Chef Cardoz had a whole room dedicated to organizing and storing (and to my mind, exalting) the spices. I took an internship there, which turned into a job.

Young cooks tend to switch kitchens fairly often, but I stayed... for years. Indian food was fascinating.

Beyond the pasty yellow curries and soupy palek paneers served in the tiny to-go joints that pepper cities across America, Floyd Cardoz advocated rich braises and light, crisp tandoori breads, bizarrely spiced pickles and chutneys, and soups with more types of lentils than I'd ever seen. He brought me lotus roots and fuzzy melons, litchis, aleppo pepper, long squash and mung beans.

One doesn't often encounter fresh chestnuts in the wilds of South Dakota (where I was reared), but Chef had 'em. And they were a revelation ("Wow... they're nutty. They don't taste like a can at all!"). Every week I discovered five new things I could do with vegetables I'd never before encountered.

After years of daily practice with Indian techniques from making tarkas to pickling, spice toasting, braising and simmering, I've come to a few conclusions about the challenges to preparing delicious Indian foods in the American home kitchen.

The most opressive among these difficulties:
1. Understanding the techniques to layer in the traditional flavors
2. Acquiring good (or even appropriate) ingredients
3. Developing enough experience with good examples of the cuisine

I've clung to my usage-stained copies of Chef's recipes for the years since I left Tabla. Since these are the restaurant versions of his dishes, they all have phenomenally large batch sizes (first, dice 50 tomatoes...), and I struggle in my own kitchen to accurately size them down. No one household needs 4 gallons of pickled ramps, however tasty those little buggers might be.

Chef has now published a book of the very recipes my ugly, wrinkled home volumes contain. Thankfully, his One Spice, Two Spice was also written with household sizing in mind.

I always wonder about the accuracy of chef-written cookbooks. Are the recipes oversimplified? Have the authors reserved a few kitchen secrets? So I was particularly interested to compare my kitchen notes to Chef's published variations.

Having made the great majority of the recipes in One Spice, Two Spice recipe in a large-scale environment, I can verify the content in these small-scale versions is really pretty accurate.

There's a fore-section that explains the importance of the way one treats one's spices. Readers will discover the "whys" behind toasting, tarkas and whole-spice usage.

For home renditions of Indian foods, much of the first difficulty I mentioned above (understanding technique) can be remedied with this book. Unfortunately, this — or any other — book can do very little for cooks like my mother, (for example) who lives in South Dakota, and will still have difficulty with the remaining two challenges: acquiring appropriate ingredients and making an educated flavor evaluation of the finished product.

As much as I love books (and cookbooks specifically), One Spice, Two Spice has forced me to the conclusion that the book is a naturally handicapped tutor.

The core secrets of any cuisine are physical: first, the education of the tongue, and second, the training of the hand. These skills come from spending time in the presence of a skilled teacher. Recipes, even well-written recipes, are at best, simply a collection of notes to jog the memory.

That said, I've retyped one of my favorite basic sauces herein. The more obscure ingredients (like tamarind paste and nigella seed) can be found at most specialty shops these days.

This version (as it appears in One Spice, Two Spice), when properly seasoned, will make a good product. At Tabla's Bread Bar, it's called Kalonji and it's served with cheddar-cheese stuffed naan. If you don't have a home tandoor (and frankly, few Americans do), you might try dipping your cheese sandwich, flatbread or breadsticks in it. Or serve it alongside beef or lamb braises.

Warm Tomato Chutney (Kalonji)

Two 28-ounce cans whole or chopped tomatoes
1/4 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon yellow mustard seeds
1 teaspoon brown mustard seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon nigella seeds
2 tablespoons finely chopped garlic
3 tablespoons finely chopped peeled ginger
1 cup finely chopped white onion
2 small dried red chiles, crumbled
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons tamarind paste
1 tablespoon sugar

Roughly puree the tomatoes to a medium-coarse consistency in batches in a blender or food processor.

Heat the oil in a 4- to 6-quart pot over moderately high heat until it shimmers. Add the mustard seeds, cumin seeds, and nigella seeds, shaking the skillet, and when they pop and are fragrant, after about 30 seconds, quickly add the garlic, ginger, onion, and chiles. Immediately reduce the heat to moderate, and cook, stirring, until the garlic and onion have softened. (Don't let them color.) Stir in a pinch of salt and the tomato puree. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 1 hour.

Stir in the tamarind paste, sugar, and salt and pepper to taste, then remove the chutney from the heat. Serve the chutney warm.

The chutney keeps in an airtight container in the refrigerator for 2 weeks or in the freezer for 1 month.

Note: I prefer Muir Glen organic tomatoes, either plain, or for a little more kick, the "Fire Roasted" variety.

Labels: chefs, cookbooks, recipes, reviews

"I wonder if I love the communal act of eating so much because throughout my childhood, with four older brothers and a mom who worked in the restaurant business, I spent a lot of time fending for myself, eating alone — and recognizing how eating together made all the difference."

-Thomas Keller (1955-)

Labels: chefs, food quotes, Friday