Since reading Carol Deppe’s book The Resilient Gardener, I’ve been thinking more about growing things that are staples rather than side dishes. This does not require that I change what I grow. I need to think in terms of putting my vegetables at the center of the plate rather than letting the “side dish” mentality sneak in. Winter squash is a filling, substantial staple and can easily be the centerpiece of a meal.
In my opinion, roasting is by far the best way to bring out the flavor of squash. It keeps wonderfully in the refrigerator for a few days once roasted, and can also be mashed, packed tightly into containers, and frozen for later use. Once properly roasted, it can be made into ravioli or lasagna fillings, form the basis of hearty soups, or just be reheated later to eat out of the shell, so I roast plenty at a time. If roasting smaller squash, I cook several, so that the oven heat is efficiently utilized, or I put them on the bottom shelf of the oven when roasting something else. I love to put maple syrup or agave nectar, a pat of butter, and a pinch of salt in the cavity if I will be eating the squash straight, but if I might use it for something else like lasagna or ravioli or one of the impromptu dishes below, I just rub the cut surfaces with olive oil and salt before roasting. In the picture above, a roasted Kukuza half dominates the plate, with a few grilled mushrooms brushed with oil and soy for a meaty touch and a slice of grilled bread with olive oil and garlic. THis is a great substantial meal to share with vegetarians and vegans, or with nearly anyone.
Here I cut a roasted squash half into thick slices, brushed lightly with soy sauce, chili oil, and roasted sesame oil, and broiled for a minute or two to accompany Asian flavors.
Here chunks of leftover roasted squash join a few chunks of leftover roasted salmon under a cheerfully colored Korean sauce. To make the sauce, chop up 2 cloves of garlic and a 1″ cube of peeled ginger. Heat a couple of tablespoons of oil in a small wok, and when the oil is hot throw in the chopped garlic and chile. As soon as the ginger fragrance comes up, about a minute, put in a tablespoon of gochujang and stir around madly for half a minute, then add half a cup of stock and 2-3 tablespoons of soy sauce. As soon as it comes to a boil, turn off the heat and add a teaspoon of dark sesame oil. Have ready a teaspoon of arrowroot dissolved in a tablespoon of water, and stir in. Let the sauce thicken briefly and serve over a bowl of rice topped with hot chunks of salmon and squash.
If you are going to think of squash as one of your winter staples, you need to find a squash that you can grow well and that you really enjoy eating. A few posts ago, I wrote about the immense harvest of squash that I grew this year because I planted only Cucurbita moschata varieties, which love hot weather and are resistant to squash borers. C. moschata types need a hot summer to do well, and we can certainly provide that here (they are less esteemed in cooler parts of the country). All squash need curing before you eat them in order to taste their best. Needs vary among varieties. In general, I let all squash ripen on the vine and don’t pick it until a frost is expected. Then I set it on shelves to cure. It will cure faster in warmer ambient temperatures but will hold longer in cool places, so I keep some in the house, and some in my cool but nonfreezing garage to eat later. I give the smaller squashes three weeks to cure, and the bigger ones 8 weeks before I sample the first specimen.
Even with the best treatment, squashes vary immensely in quality in flavor. My favorite C. moschata so far is a big turban-shaped beauty called Chiriman. It has moist but not watery flesh, no strings, and a lovely sweet-earthy flavor. The much smaller Kikuza is also delicious, and its small size may be preferable for some. Both are rather shy yielders, and Kikuza has rather thin flesh. Sucrine du berry yielded prolifically, and the flesh is very thick and is a dark and splendid orange-red, but the flavor is poor and the flesh is both stringy and watery, so most of the bounty is going to the chickens. I wrote to the seed company about my experience with it, and they sent back an excerpt from a gardening book explaining that winter squash needs to be vine-ripened and then cured for best flavor. Well, duh. Some squash just isn’t much good no matter how you raise it. If I ever get into hybridizing, though, I’m going to try some crosses of the prolific and bullet-proof Sucrine du berry with better-tasting C. moschatas. I still have splendid 20-lb specimens of Musque de Provence sitting around curing, but I won’t broach those until Christmas, so I’ll report on the flavor and texture after the holidays.
If you save your own seed, remember that squash of the same species interbreed wildly, so consult Ms. Deppe’s book or a good book on seed-saving to learn how to ensure squash that is true to type. It isn’t as easy as just “saving the best one for seed.”
Archive for November, 2010
29 Nov
Kitchen Staples: Squash, and further notes on squash varieties
28 Nov
Books Worth Reading: John Kallas on Edible Wild Plants
The holiday weekend was a great time to read in a warm spot, which reminded me that I should be sharing more of the books that I think are really helpful. I should add that I don’t accept free review copies; whenever I review a book, I paid the same price for it that you will. I think that this is essential to an accurate judgment of the value-for-money aspect of the books that I recommend.
With that in mind, John Kallas’s Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods from Dirt to Plate is a very good value if you want to get started in foraging. I get a lot of inquiries about wild foods, and this is a book that I can recommend without reservation to any beginner; if you read and pay attention, you will learn to collect a number of common plants safely and prepare them well. Kallas concentrates on leafy greens which are found in most parts of the country, and he organizes them by flavor category in addition to giving accurate botanical and ID information. This is a lot more useful and practical than you might realize if you aren’t accustomed to foraging for greens. A well-balanced dish of greens needs a range of flavor notes, as well as a base of mild greens to build upon, and as you learn the plants from Kallas you will learn the notable aspects of their flavors. In my opinion, nearly any experienced forager could pick up a tip or two here, about preparation if not about identification.
Only greens and shoots are found in this book. If this seems too limited, keep in mind that most of us aren’t going to spend the time needed to forage and prepare wild staples, at least not most of the time. It’s romantic to read about gathering wild rice or arrowroot, or to imagine spending a clear autumn day gathering and storing fruit or nuts, but the wild foods that are widely available throughout much of the country for much of the year and that you can forage in a few minutes on your way home from work are mostly greens and shoots. Besides, if most of us were to make one change in our diets and maintain it, the addition of more green veggies would be a good one to pick. If foraging gets you to eat more leafy greens, this is a good thing.
If, like me, you’re a Kindle addict, this book is available on Kindle. I use the Kindle app on my Ipad so that I can see the photos in color. I daydream about eventually having a large collection of good foraging books on one e-device that I can carry around in my backpack, but unfortunately most of the wild-foods books available for Kindle are not of high quality. This one is.
DR. Kallas’s website can be found here if you’d like to order the book directly from him. You can also read his reviews of foraging books, and his thoughtful comments are invaluable when deciding what books you want to add to your collection.
23 Nov
Books Worth Reading: The Resilient Gardener
There are a lot of gardening books out there, and a lot of books on urban/suburban homesteading and on self-sufficiency. Many of them draw heavily from one another or from older books rather than from actual experience, but every now and then I come across a gardening book that I’m eager to share with others. Carol Deppe’s new book, The Resilient Gardener, is clearly based on years (decades?) of personal hands-on experience and is a must-read for anyone interested in the issue of personal food security. It is not a general gardening how-to book. Ms. Deppe discusses the best ways to improve your own food security by producing your own staple crops, and what makes a staple suitable for home food production with no unusual harvesting, threshing, or milling equipment. This isn’t one of the obnoxious-survivalist manifestos about how to be a country and a law unto yourself. It’s a sensible discussion of how ordinary people can direct their efforts to make themselves better equipped to endure the hiccups that life throws at us, whether environmental or health-related. As I read it, I found myself thinking about the spreading problems in my native Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Nearby cities like Baton Rouge weren’t hard hit by the storm. But Baton Rouge would nearly double in size in a week as evacuees poured in, grocery stores there would be nearly emptied of staple foods and anything fresh, streets would be filled with excess traffic and often impassable, and water and sewer systems would be strained. People with prudent habits were better equipped to help themselves and others through a difficult time.
No book about someone else’s needs and choices will ever be completely applicable to your own situation. Ms. Deppe includes a section on her own nutritional needs and decisions that can best be considered idiosyncratic. But then, as a doctor I believe that everyone’s needs are to a degree idiosyncratic, i.e. unique to themselves. Some basics apply to nearly everyone, but there’s a lot of individual variation. Her choices may have no applicability to you or me. They are, however, an encouragement to think carefully about our own needs and start doing more of what works for us.
I have no desire to be completely food-independent, even if such a thing were possible. But I do get great pleasure from contemplating the winter squash, potatoes, and sweet potatoes that came out of my own soil and will help feed me through the winter, and on winter evenings by the stove I’ll be studying Ms. Deppe’s ideas and planning how to be a more prudent member of my community next year.
21 Nov
Kitchen Staples: fresh pasta
Now that my chickens are laying and I have all these lovely fresh eggs around, I’m trotting out all my recipes that use up eggs. One of my very favorites is fresh pasta, and I can’t think of any kitchen skill more worth acquiring than pasta-making.
I used to make and roll pasta entirely by hand, and so I made it about twice a year. If you want to do it all by hand, you can get directions from any of several excellent cookbooks, and I particularly recommend The Splendid Table or Essentials of classic Italian cooking. My own current method is (surprise!) a lot more rough and ready, and relies on my Kitchenaid mixer. If you have one, get the pasta roller attachment (expensive but it works really well) and you’re all set. I use the Pro 600 mixer. I don’t know if the lighter ones will do the job. This is still a time-consuming undertaking, best suited to those relaxed weekend days that I think of as Domestic Goddess days, but it’s worth investing some time for a really delicious result.
The quality of the eggs is important. If you don’t have your own hens, make an effort to get real free-range eggs (not the supermarket kind.) Start with the bowl in place on the mixer and the regular mixing blade. I usually start with three cups of flour, which makes 4 main-course servings or at least 6 first-course servings. Have about six eggs handy. Put the flour in the bowl, crack one egg into the mixing bowl, and start running the mixer at the lowest speed. After the first egg is incorporated, about half a minute, crack in the next one. Keep adding eggs until you have yellow shreds of moist-looking dough and some dry “crumbs” in the bowl, as shown here. Usually I use five eggs, but a lot depends on the flour, the size of the eggs, and the weather. If the dough won’t come together smoothly when you switch to the dough hook, add another egg and try again.
Now switch to the dough hook. Run the mixer at the lowest possible speed until the dough comes together into a ball on the hook, and keep kneading for at least five minutes. This is where I don’t know if the light models will work. Even my pro model strains pretty hard. It’s a stiff dough, much harder to handle than bread dough.
When the dough is smooth and thoroughly kneaded, dust the ball lightly with flour, wrap it in plastic wrap, and put it in the refrigerator for at least an hour and up to eight hours. When ready to roll it out, attach the pasta roller attachment. Cut the ball of dough into pieces about the size of a lemon, and dust each lightly with flour. SEt the rollers as wide as they will go, start the mixer at lowest speed, and start feeding the balls of dough through. I like to do all the balls through the widest setting, then all through the next setting down, etc. Now this is where a trick comes in handy. You are going to need a lot of hanging room for the sheets of dough. Wooden racks are sold for this purpose, but I got a metal laundry-drying rack instead and took the nylon mesh “shelf” off the top. It’s easy to clean due to the smooth surface, HOlds a lot more than most wooden racks, and folds away neatly when not in use. The sheets of pasta look absurdly charming hanging from their rack.
When they are all as thin as you want them, let them hang until somewhat leathery. This may be 15 minutes or may be an hour, depending on humidity, breeze, etc. When they are leathery but can still be folded without cracking, you are ready to cut the sheets into noodles. The pasta roller has an attachment that will do it for you, but I greatly prefer to do this step by hand. I like the unevenness that results, and I can cut anything from thin linguine to very wide papardelle, depending on the meal that I have planned. Work on a lightly floured surface, roll the sheets around your hand to form cylinders, and cut across to make noodles, as wide or thin as you like. Unfold them and lay out on clean dishtowels spread on the counter for the purpose.
Cook soon for best quality, use plenty of salted water, and start testing for doneness as soon as the water returns to a boil. Sauce them simply to let their quality shine. In the near future I’ll post on my favorite mushroom sauce for fresh pasta, but for your first effort you might want to dress them with butter, cracked pepper, some chopped parsley, and the best Parmesan you can find. There is no simpler, or better, flavor.
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