Mad for Peaches

Millions of peaches, peaches for me...

With July now ripe and full, I believe the whole world's tipping at the brink of peach madness.

Over at the White On Rice Couple blog, one finds adorable dogs licking peaches.

I myself just received 15 juicy little darlings in last night's CSA box. They're about to become peach compote or peach pie or maybe just peaches with yogurt if only I can keep myself from devouring them all in a dripping, fleshy mess over the sink.



Then, of course, I stumbled over this entertaining peach reverie (from The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki [H. H. Munro]) at Project Gutenberg while eating a particularly fine specimen myself:

"How nice of you to remember my aunt when you can no longer recall the names of the things you ate.

Now my memory works quite differently. I can remember a menu long after I've forgotten the hostess that accompanied it. When I was seven years old I recollect being given a peach at a garden-party by some Duchess or other; I can't remember a thing about her, except that I imagine our acquaintance must have been of the slightest, as she called me a 'nice little boy,' but I have unfading memories of that peach.

It was one of those exuberant peaches that meet you halfway, so to speak, and are all over you in a moment. It was a beautiful unspoiled product of a hothouse, and yet it managed quite successfully to give itself the airs of a compote. You had to bite it and imbibe it at the same time.

To me there has always been something charming and mystic in the thought of that delicate velvet globe of fruit, slowly ripening and warming to perfection through the long summer days and perfumed nights, and then coming suddenly athwart my life in the supreme moment of its existence. I can never forget it, even if I wished to.

And when I had devoured all that was edible of it, there still remained the stone, which a heedless, thoughtless child would doubtless have thrown away; I put it down the neck of a young friend who was wearing a very décolleté sailor suit.

I told him it was a scorpion, and from the way he wriggled and screamed he evidently believed it, though where the silly kid imagined I could procure a live scorpion at a garden-party I don't know. Altogether, that peach is for me an unfading and happy memory--"

Now, I wasn't going to offer up a recipe at all, because, after all, a summer peach is a glorious thing. Why mess with success, right?

But then I realized that I've been needlessly cruel. In checking through my online recipe file, it's clear that I've never posted my glorious Gingered Peach Pie. For shame! It's a delight that never fails to please a crowd.

And, after all, one who is blessed with peaches should at least consider sharing them. Especially with ice cream. Or crème fraîche.

Gingered Peach Pie (with or without crumble topping, below)

3 Tbsp dry tapioca pearls
6 cups (2.5 lb) sliced peaches
1 Tbsp minced ginger
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tsp fresh lime juice
1 tsp lime zest
1/2-3/4 tsp garam masala blend (or substitute 1/4 tsp ground allspice and 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg and 1/4 tsp ground ginger)
1/4 tsp salt
1 pie crust
Crumble topping (use a double crust if you're not doing the crumble topping)

1. Heat oven to 375°F and blind bake* the pie shell for 20 minutes.
2. Pulverize dry tapioca pearls with a coffee grinder, mortar/pestle or food processor.
3. In a mixing bowl, gently combine peaches, ginger, brown sugar, lime juice, zest, spice blend and salt. Mix in the tapioca powder.
4. Pour the peach mixture into the baked pie shell, top with crumble topping (if using) or second pie crust. If using a pie crust top, be sure to open up several holes to allow steam to escape.
5. Bake pie on a cookie sheet for 1 hour, checking after 30 minutes to make sure the edges aren't overbrowning. (If the edges do start looking too brown, cover them with strips of aluminum foil.)
6. Cool the pie on a rack for approximately 1 hour before serving.

*Blind baking is a process that involves pre-cooking the pie shell (usually with pie weights or dry beans in the shell to keep it from bubbling and rising). This keeps the crust more crisp.

Crumble Topping
3 Tbsp flour
2 Tbsp brown sugar
2 Tbsp white sugar
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1 dash salt
1/4 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup pecans or walnuts, coarsely chopped
3 Tbsp chilled butter, cut in 1/2" pieces

1. In a mixing bowl, blend together flour, sugars, cinnamon, salt, oats and nuts.
2. Cut in the butter with a fork until the mixture resembles a uniform gravel. Sprinkle atop the pie filling and bake as directed.

Cheers!

What's In The Box? Part II

It's week two of my half-share CSA distribution. The local weather's been alternating between gorgeous sunny days and violent thunderstorms recently. That has to be affecting the local veggies.

The first shipment was heavy on lettuces. So what's in the box this week?

Arugula

Zucchini... big 'uns!

Chinese cabbage (flowering, but still tasty)

Mesclun lettuce mix

Red leaf lettuce

Pea shoots

Baby braising greens (a mix of tatsoi, mustard greens, kale and mizuna)

Strawberries

Blueberries

Eggs

A bouquet of cosmos, snapdragons, sunflowers, dianthus, rye and oats

Alas, asparagus season is over. Goodbye, local asparagus!

Everything looked great except for the radishes, a few of which had burst open (I assume that's the result of our irregular rain this season) and the strawberries, which were clearly soft and on their way out.

The radishes were just a cosmetic issue, but I knew the berries wouldn't last the night. So as I piled my pint in a zip-top bag and pedaled home, I thought of one magic word: compote

Yes, a simple compote is the fruit buyer's best friend. Mushed, soft berries, excess rhubarb, bruised peaches... clean 'em off, chop 'em up and throw 'em in a saucepan with a little sugar.

Whack! Pow! Twenty minutes later, you've got yourself a compote that's ready to mix into plain yogurt for a snack that's tastier than any grocery-store fruit-on-the-bottom blend you'll ever meet.

A good compote is so simple, you hardly need a formal recipe, but I'm going to give you one anyway, because I had a kitchen inspiration I wanted to share.

A while back J & I took tea at the sweet little Podunk teashop in the West Village. One of the things we remembered with greatest fondness was Ms. Espeth's strawberry jam, which was spiced with a peppery kick that hit in the back of the throat. A delight!



As I lopped the tops off the strawberries last night (off with their heads!) I thought with fondness of that strawberry jam. So why not make a peppery strawberry compote?

Herein, dear readers, is your ticket to that very confection. And, hurrah! you probably have just about everything but the strawberries already hanging around in your kitchen.

Some strawberries are sweeter or more tart than others, so I usually start with less sugar and add in more, to taste, as I go. So feel free to mess with the sugar : acid : spice ratios. A compote is only perfect when you, the cook, say so.

Kapow! Strawberry Compote (Makes about 1 cup)
1 pint strawberries (trimmed of their tops & bruises)
1/8-1/4 cup sugar
2 Tbsp water
1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/4 tsp finely ground black pepper
1/8 tsp ground mace or ground cardamom (optional)
1 dash salt (optional)

1. In a small-to-medium saucepan, combine the trimmed strawberries, sugar and water, and heat over medium flame.
2. Simmer for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Don't let the mixture boil; It'll just froth up a storm and make a big, sticky mess on your stovetop.
3. Turn down the heat, taste the mixture and stir in the lemon juice, spices and salt, if using. The compote will thicken and develop in flavor as it cools, so don't over-spice it at this point.
4. Use warm, or chill it down and keep it for up to a week in the refrigerator.

I love this compote with yogurt, but it's also superb on ice cream or used on biscuits or as a way to give strawberry shortcakes a little kick.

Cheers!

What's In The Box?

Oh, anticipation! I haven't felt so giddy since I was a kid at Christmastime. Several months ago, I signed up for my local Community Supported Agriculture group (that's a CSA to the regulars) and, swoon! the first delivery arrived last night.

One of the things I love about CSAs is how closely it ties one to the local environs. Here's what was in the box this week:

Red Lettuce

Green Lettuce

Radishes

Arugula

Mesclun Lettuce

Baby Leeks

Asparagus

Strawberries

Rhubarb

Eggs

Flowers

Now, since we've had a long, cool, damp spring (punctuated with a sudden heat wave last weekend), I can see and taste the weather trends in my produce. The lettuces — lovers of chilly days — are fantastic. On the other hand, the strawberries are big, but not as sweet or concentrated in flavor as they have been in other years.

My little apartment doesn't have any space for a garden, so these agricultural details thrill me. Here's a few shots other shots from the pickup:





Running a bit short on time this week (and stuffing my mouth full of juicy berries), but in future CSA box reports, I'll provide some recipes for usage. I've found that few people know what to do with, say, kohlrabi.

Cheers!

FoodLink Roundup: 05.05.08

Last week, Cupcake was located at the Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis, MN, scoring a hat trick for Hazard on correct guesses. Where in the world is Cupcake this week? Wager a guess in the comments.

The Pie-tini Club
Old-school food vice: The Grateful Palate features a triple-threat of Pie, Cocktails and Cynicism.

30 Days to a Green Your Diet
I'm a bit suspicious of a few of these. (Replace all your spices? Good advice, but is it really greener?)

Do you need to stock up the bunker?
"New survivalists do not look like Rambo." The rise of the urban liberal survivalist.

MyFarmShare.com
Can't bear to walk a few blocks to your CSA drop site? Now there's a veggie box for the lazy.

Reformulated Oreo Scores in China
Make your product something the locals like. Seems like a big *duh* once you see the solution.

To Save a Species, Get People to Eat It
We need to save the Waldoboro green neck rutabaga for the name alone.

Bottomfeeder
The days of uninformed seafood dining draw to a close.

The Seeds of Hope Within Dank January

Ever circle a toy in a catalog with a marker and imagine your future self loving and enjoying it? I imagine a lot of kids have done something like that. Of course, these days they probably just make Amazon wishlists or send out URLs of their favorite things prior to the holidays.

Here I'll file for the "weird kid on the block" title once again. For most of my life, the end of January has always created great anticipation of the season of seed catalogs.

Marker in hand, I'd circle pages and pages of tomato seeds, lettuce seeds, peapod packs, squashes, sunflowers and mystery flower envelopes. I'd puzzle over whether bicolor, yellow or Indian corn would look better growing up along our garage wall. I'd ponder their packs of live ladybugs and mantises. I'd grid the garden and feed the compost pit with starry-eyed anticipation.

I wonder now if seeds helped those ancient generations of pioneers survive cold northern winters prior to the age of reliable heat, merino wool and internet access. I imagine them looking at their seeds, dreaming about their summer gardens and filling up with hope, even during long months passed with nothing more than grandma's root vegetables and one unending game of gin rummy.

I know some of my darkest, dankest, most hopeless days of winter were annually made colorful and vivacious with pages of plantable potential. After all, hope is really what seed catalogs are all about.

Tragically, my Brooklyn apartment does not come equipped with a garden, and my Januaries tick-tick-tick along without those life-restoring seed catalogs.


Beginning of the CSA summer season

But lo! There's still joyful options for sad, cold city dwellers lacking access to both personal and community gardens. For me, hope arrives now in the form of my CSA, which I'm happy to report, I signed up for this very evening.

For any who don't know, a CSA is a community supported agriculture group, which essentially works like buying stock in a farm at the beginning of the growing season. CSA members (the investors) pony up some cash and determine their terms. The farmers return dividends over the course of the season in veggies and also sometimes (if the farmer/s have relationships with other nearby farms) fruit, farm-fresh eggs or meat and flowers.

Like the stock market, the vegetable market is variable and returns are not guaranteed. Sometimes there's nothing but lettuce. Sometimes the lettuce gets washed away and it's all kale and kohlrabi. It helps to have a good attitude about adventurous eating before joining a CSA.

Different CSAs are run differently, of course, but as half-share member of the amazingly well-organized Greenpoint-Williamsburg CSA for this season, I'll pick up my goodies once every other week from mid-June through mid-November at the appointed location and I'll volunteer for a distribution shift at some point during the season.

There's also the option of going on a field trip to the farm that's supplying my veggies, and there's apparently some other social occasions (Kohlrabi fest?) during the year.


Close of the CSA summer season

No, I won't be paging through seed catalogs this year, and I won't be plotting out my garden patch. I won't be puzzling over how to keep my beneficial insects from flying over into the neighbor's garden instead of eating the fat little aphids in my garden.

Chris and Eve Kaplan-Walbrecht will be doing all that. But I'm still supporting a sustainable, certified organic business and enjoying very competitively priced local fruit and veggies picked fresh off the farm. I'll pick up 12 nifty shipments filled up with color and flavor and life. And actually, I get nearly the same happy tingle of late-January hope just thinking about that.

A Quick Bite of 1946, Anyone?

I think most of us have played the "would you rather" game. It's usually a contest of bad and worse. Would you rather be turned into a zombie or an oompah-loompah? Would you rather give up your firstborn child to Britney Spears or a tribe of cannibals? Would you rather eat a kitten or a puppy?

The wacky world of Foods 1946 presents us with this conundrum:

Would you rather spend more time in the kitchen and eat a sustainable, locally sourced, home-cooked meal of ham & pureed vegetable soup, roast goose with roasted vegetables and a side of applesauce, mashed potatoes and turnips, fresh-baked corn muffins and then plum pudding and fresh-ground coffee to finish, a'la 1846. (Click into the image for the larger view.)



OR

Would you rather spend less time in the kitchen and enjoy a meal composed of packaged foods: split pea soup (from a mix), canned ham, minute rice, canned asparagus tips, canned artichoke heart salad, corn muffins from a mix and a last course of strawberry shortcake (from frozen strawberries and a biscuit mix) served with instant coffee, a'la 1946.



Granted, I could go for some strawberry shortcake right about now, but I think you see what I'm getting at here.

The world of 1946 was so sure that your answer to this "would you rather" query would favor speed and cheap processed foods, they'd most certainly be floored to hear that 2007 voted "locavore" as the word of the year, that people around the globe ware increasingly more interested in Slow Food or that Community Supported Agriculture programs were thriving and growing.

Oh, 1946! Everything was so plain, so clear and so logical for you, wasn't it?

Tomorrow, just a little more fun from Foods 1946.

The Hedonista Hundred, Part V: 21-25

Pushing onward in the quest to uncover and document 100 wonderful and tasty things...

If you've missed prior twenty, you'll find 'em at the archive page.


Takeout from Ollie's Noodle Shop on a flat-top rock in Central Park.

21. Picnic food. Even if it's only a loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese. Even if you don't have a blanket. Even if you didn't make it yourself. There's just something twice as grand about eating outside under the sky.


Next exit: Ripe stonefruit, berry baskets and fresh zucchini (3 for $1).

22. Roadside produce stands. Likewise, fresh sweet corn out of the back of a pickup truckbed. Sweet. Juicy. Awesome. Extra bonus: farm stands offer unique discoveries... which is kind of the philosophical opposite of the cookie-cutter, gas-n-go, drive-thru, "back on the highway in ten minutes flat" experience one finds along the New Jersey Turnpike.


Canned goods at the Hong Kong Mall in Queens, NY

23. Local grocery stores. Think the museums and monuments tell the whole story? Not likely. Stop into local food shops around the world to gawk at the cool packaging and variety. See how the natives stock their pantries. You don't really know a place until you know how its people eat.


Williamsburg CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) pick-up day

24. Community-Supported Agriculture Groups and farmers' markets. Give the money to the farmer. Get vegetables, fruit, eggs and flowers. It's fresh. It's direct. It's local. It's environmentally friendly. What's not to like?


The afternoon cream tea with scones and berries at Podunk

25. Teatime. I don't have a lot of love for their bangers and mash, but the Brits were really on to something with the afternoon tea. Civility, serenity, caffeine and lush snackies. That's a tradition I can get behind.

In praise of the microseason

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.

Point & click for orchard, field and meadow

This was on the NPR Marketplace Morning Report:

Local Foods Plymouth... like FreshDirect for the farmers' market.

The website is supremely limited, but the report made it sound like it’s been really popular there. People said they liked picking up all their farmers' market produce in one place.

I like the way they handle expectations on the first page (you can only order on Tuesdays) and they inform you that if you don’t pick up by 6 p.m. on delivery day, your food gets donated to a local charity.

Like City Farms & Community Supported Agriculture, online farmers' markets could offer yet another option for busy urbanites to connect to the bounty of the fields... and it gives small farmers a way to manage inventory and prevent waste.

I’m sure we’ll see more of this to come as the various pockets of our culture become more web-savvy.