Every year I try a few vegetables that I haven’t tried before, and for 2009 one of the clear winners was Tronchuda, a giant non-heading cabbage from Portugal. I grew only one plant, and it ultimately reached over four feet across, with leaves almost 2 feet from side to side. The leaves were pleasant to eat cooked at any point, but especially good after a few frosts. I used it in the same ways as collards or kale, and also made a soup with sauteed onions and garlic, Spanish chorizo (not the Mexican soft chorizo,) good chicken broth, salt to taste, and chopped tronchuda, all simmered together until the tronchuda tasted good. By the way, this is an overlooked method for determining when green leafies are sufficiently cooked: keep tasting them, and when they start to taste good, they’re done.
I will definitely be growing it again this year, and that’s the real test of any vegetable: is it worth the garden space? Tronchuda delivers. I’ve read that the wide white leaf ribs can be cooked as a vegetable in their own right, but I didn’t care for them and composted them instead, keeping the green parts and the narrow ribs to cook. I recommend it highly for any garden. You can get seeds at Nichols Garden Nursery, a wonderful source for all sorts of odd delights.
Our own New Mexico seed company, Gourmet Seed International, offered seeds for two of my new experiments, rampion (the famous “rapunzel” of the fairy tale) and bladder campion. I’ll keep you posted.
This is the time of year to plan your homestead garden and order what you need. I’m dealing with a brand new property with no planting in place, so I’ll be starting a new mini-orchard, and I would highly recommend dwarf fruit trees for eager would-be urban homesteaders. They produce relatively quickly, look charming, and allow harvesting with feet planted firmly on the ground.
Every yard-farm should reflect what the owner and family like to eat and drink, and with this in mind I’ve decided to plant wine grapes. It will be a few years before I’m making my own wine, but the thought of my very own mini-winery has already given me a lot of pleasure and the vines aren’t even planted yet. In anticipatory value, it’s the best garden bargain I’ve had, and this may be the most overlooked benefit of urban homesteading; you spend so many happy expectant hours. The same applies to my backyard chickens, which are not yet purchased but are already clucking quietly in the back of my mind.
By the way, if you have any interest in adding livestock to your homestead, it’s worth reading Farm City . Author Novella Carpenter created a little squatter farm in Oakland, and it isn’t what most of us would want, but her descriptions of raising and killing animals for meat are accurate and unromantic (but reverent.) If you have never harvested meat animals, this is a test. If you can’t stand to read her descriptions, you probably don’t want to go into livestock. If you do go on to raise a little of your own meat, I can guarantee that you will no longer allow meat to be wasted. Once you really understand where it comes from, waste is not an option. On the other hand, you will understand the fascinated reverence with which good farmers and hunters view meat animals.
Archive for the ‘home food production’ Category
8 Feb
Tronchuda, and some thoughts on planning urban homesteads
12 Jan
Kitchen Staples: Broth
Few things will improve your cooking as much as getting rid of all commercial broth products and making your own. On my website I have extensive notes about broth-making, and you can read them here. In this post, I’ll just add a few notes about broth and its uses, and refer you to that site for the details.
Use very good materials to begin with. You can get lovely flavorful pastured chicken necks and backs from Pollo Real at the Santa Fe farmer’s market, and there is no better basis for chicken broth. Give the roasting step the time it needs, and the pay-off in flavor will be considerable. Don’t salt your broth, because you may want to reduce it later which will concentrate it manyfold. I pressure-can mine for later use, but if you have room in your freezer, that’s an easier alternative.
Once you have good broth on hand, you can use it to reduce waste and pick up some goodness from all kinds of things that you might otherwise discard. If I buy a pound of oyster mushrooms or shitake mushrooms to roast for a winter dinner, I put the stems and trimmings in a quart of broth to simmer for an hour, building the foundation for a great mushroom sauce or mushroom soup on another day. Chicken bones left over after dinner? Pop them in a quart or two of broth to simmer and enrich the flavor. Onion skins and ends on your cutting board? A slow simmer in broth will improve its flavor and give it a lovely gold color, and the rawness of the onions is lost en route.Many people save their bones and vegetable trimmings in plastic bags in the freezer, but I think the flavor is better if you simmer them while they’re fresh. The broth can be frozen more successfully than the ingredients.
Fish and seafood broths need to be cooked separately from other meats, naturally, and don’t include any salmon trimmings. I love salmon, but it does ruin fish fume’. But if you buy a few mild fish heads to start fish broth, then every time you have shrimp shells, crab shells, or any other flavorful but inedible seafood bits available, you can extract its flavor in broth and save the broth for a great paella or gumbo when you’re in the mood.
Once some good enriched broth is hanging out in your kitchen, what do you do with it? There is almost no pan-grilled or roasted meat that can’t be improved by a simple reduction sauce. Remove the meat from the pan, pour a cup of good broth into the pan over high heat, boil hard and scrape all the lovely browned bits into the broth, and when it’s reduced to a few tablespoons and has a syrupy consistency, swirl in a tablespoon of butter and serve immediately. A glug of good red or white wine, depending on the meat and seasoning, can be added to the pan for the initial deglazing, then add the stock and boil down. If you want to get fancier, most of the sauces of classic French Cuisine are at your command when you have really good broth to start with, and you can check out Glorious French Food or another cookbook to consider your options. Grains like rice and bulgur are delicious when ccoked in broth. If you’re a fan of Mexican cooking, you’ll want to try Zarela Martinez’s trick of toasting dried chiles of various kinds and then soaking them in broth rather than water before grinding them into a mole’ paste or other flavoring paste. Great stews like coq au vin are within your reach, although they will use up a lot of broth, which is why you make a lot in the first place. A paprikash like the one above requires little more than a meaty main ingredient, top-notch paprika, and really good broth (my own far-from-conventional recipe is below.)When I’m feeling dispirited and glum I revert to my Louisiana roots and make gumbo, and it invariably cheers me up, and usually cheers some other people too.
I advise avoiding strong-flavored vegetables of the cabbage family, such as broccoli and kale, for general-purpose broth. If you use leafy greens, they will color the broth, so don’t use them unless you’re willing to have green broth. Onions, carrots, celery, shallots, and leeks are aromatic staples that improve any broth. If you want to make all-vegetable broth, my favorite way is to roast the vegetables to bring out their flavor via the lovely Maillard reactions, and add a few mushrooms for the base note; dried shitakes are especially good for this, and as long as you don’t use too many, the flavor will not be identifiably Asian. .
If we can grasp some positive principle from the wretched ecomony, it should be to get the best value we can from everything we use. Nothing does that better or more gracefully than broth.
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11 Jan
Kitchen Staples: Blue Corn Tortillas
Like any New Mexican, I adore corn tortillas. Until now, though, my adoration for blue corn tortillas has been purely theoretical. Yes, they have more fiber and a lot more antioxidants than regular tortillas de masa, but most of the ones I’ve been able to buy were also tough and a bit on the cardboardy side. At my last trip to the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market, I found a bag of organic blue cornmeal from Talon de Gato farm, and decided to try making my own. After a little experimenting, I came up with a result that I really like.
I especially like them as the main ingredient in stacked enchiladas, but they’re good with just a little butter, hot off the griddle. Click here for the recipe. Continue reading
17 Oct
Day of the Dead: a time to celebrate life
As a child, I loved deliciously spooky Halloween and the end of the deadly summer heat. As an adult, I came to prefer Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday of skulls and death which is one of the most life-affirming holidays that I know of. Day of the Dead celebrates the wild abundance of life, and our dead friends return in our memories to enjoy it with us.
I always enjoy decorating my house for the season, but this year it has a special poignance: we have bought a new house with more land for my gardening and this will be our last autumn on the 1/8 acre homestead. So no winter garden this year, and I’ve let a lot of things go to seed so that I have enough seed for my new garden-to-be. My various fermentation projects are being shut down, with enough starters saved so that the new house will be enlivened with the same cultures that fed us here. My lovely dwarf fruit trees will have to be left behind, but I look forward to starting over with more room, and I have another few weeks to enjoy the old garden and write about the vegetables that have done best and provided the most return for my very limited space.
So, over the winter my posts will concentrate on food made from our farmers’ markets, which now run all winter, and new sourdough and fermentation projects as I get them going. In the meantime, I’m filled with gratitude for everything that this little city lot has grown for us, and I’m more convinced than ever that connection with any piece of ground no matter how small is good for body and spirit.
So get some decorative vegetables and grinning skeletons, remember your biological and spiritual ancestors, and celebrate the beauty of the season. It’s nearly Day of the Dead, so live and love deeply.
My urban homestead 