Morsels

The market is ending next week so I went up and bought 25 pounds of potatoes. And we don’t even eat many potatoes. But everyone is out blowing leaves around on this beautiful fall morning, my amish Covered Bridge Farm friends are giving out free samples of their incredible eggnog and I got worried about having enough potatoes to last through the winter. Plus they were seconds so they were less than fifty cents a pound. Still…. well, it should be interesting to see how many I have left at the end of the winter.

I also bought a lovely whole duck and some short ribs. The hardest part about getting through the winter is worrying about getting good, local meat but it turns out the beef guy will deliver to Crocker Park once a month. If I plan accordingly, that ought to work out just fine.

Meantime, it is a lovely, warm fall day and the entire neighborhood is out attacking the leaves with their loud blowers; the town leaf-sucker is out and it is general mayhem. You’d think leaves were a scourge or something! It’s a little disturbing. I took a quiet walk through the woods this morning and crunched through the leaves — in their place, ready to crackle with frost and turn sodden after thaws. Making warm, fresh earth. And then there are all these poor suburban leaves, blown to the curb. It’s so loud out there, one really would prefer to stay inside — even on such a pretty day.

Just a quick note — made more bread (finished it last night) and it is getting better and better. Also, inspired by my SBF (serious bread friend), I have some sourdough pizza dough fermenting in the fridge. We’ll probably have that this weekend.

Anyway, I’m just writing to say how very much I love september. Tomatoes, peaches, one or two leaves skittering across the road, crickets, cool nights. And so forth. Last night I tackled my peck of peaches and now they are all very politely resting in their freezer bags in the freezer. They are a promise kept for winter when I want to cook them with vanilla, nutmeg, some cinnamon and maybe cardamom — you don’t even need pastry or ice cream to go along with really good peaches — but you might want some just to add to the fun. As for the tomatoes, I bought a case this past weekend of very nice romas and slow-roasted a bunch on Saturday. There are still plenty left. And THEY are not being polite at all. They are lurking in their basket as only impatient ingredients will do. I suppose I should blanch them and cook them down tonight. I’m sort of wishing that they would turn themselves into a sauce (do you think nanotechnologists are considering these sorts of issues?).

Finger Lakes this weekend.

It is our anniversary today (happy us!) and we are up in soggy finger lakes house. I know it has been forever since I have posted but I did want to tell a funny story about yesterday and our marriage (as it relates to food of course) and also post the recipe for a wonderful souffle I made (if I do say so myself).

Here’s the story: we went shopping at Wegman’s yesterday. Some weekends we cart all our necessary food up and sometimes we (read I) are too disorganized to do anything more than make sure there is milk for coffee in the morning. So this weekend was a disorganized one and we needed food for our anniversary dinner. The idea in my brain and vetted with Dennis was duck breast with cherry sauce, rice pilaf and snap peas. Grand Marnier souffle for desert. Well, we get to Wegman’s which was more packed than I have ever seen it — I guess it’s the only thing to do around here when it is pouring rain? And they have no duck. Well one frozen one but it didn’t look like it was going to cooperate with being cooked for dinner in a few hours. So I grabbed a couple of little fresh cornish game hens and figured we’d be down with that.

Get to the check out line and as I lift them up to the conveyor belt thingy I show them to Dennis and say “here’s what I got instead of duck.” Poor guy’s face fell. “Oh,” he says. You see how sweet he is in the face of a disappointment? So I said, “you really wanted steak didn’t you?” and he nodded. So I sent him back to the meat department on his own to return the two little game hens and bring back a steak.

Now we all know what it is like to get to the check out line with all your variously gathered goods and realize that you forgot the sage, or garlic or whatever. The pressure IS ON. Luckily, we had the two slowest check out guys I have ever encountered. So Dennis was able to return with his steak. It was a three pound (at least) sirloin. Huge. All I could see when I looked at it was the slaughterhouse (sorry). I am eating meat again, yes but I am trying so hard to keep it to local and at least grass fed. Food is rumbling along the conveyor belt. He has just dodged about six women in carts and a couple of really old ones who seem to do a lot of standing in the middle of things all with this huge bloody steak in his hands. I looked at him and said. “Umm that’s a lot of steak. Mind if I go grab some smaller grass-fed ones I saw?” He shakes his head no. And now I’m the one running through the aisles past the very same women who are still standing around with the same piece of meat ( I mean I have the piece of meat and THEY are still standing around). I actually started laughing at the spectacle, which only made it more spectacular I guess. Anyway, got my little more appropriate steaks and phew! made it back.

So there you have it. Our daily negotations. Particular to us at that moment I suppose but really not at all. We are all (us marrieds and committeds) juggling daily details and back and forths. Sometimes more gracefully than others. It certainly helps to have a sense of humor and (thank you Dennis) patience.

And it also helps to make a souffle now and then. I took this from Bittman’s How to Cook Everything book and switched it up because we had no Grand Marnier. But we did have Amaretto and it was really, really good and really easy. Believe it or not, this was my first souffle. I am going to make more.

I have a book of quotes and photographs called Offerings. The quotes are from various Buddhist-type philosophers, the photos from the Dalai Lama’s “official” photographers. They are arranged so that every day you have another quote to read. I keep the book in the place where most people keep their little books they want to peruse daily and I don’t mean by the bed so you can figure that out.

Anyhoo as they ridiculously say around here, the one for yesterday or maybe the day before? Was this:

The trouble is you think you have time.

Well. I don’t know about you but the just hit me hard and hasn’t really let me go. In fact, I framed almost every activity yesterday with that thought — buying seedlings at the greenhouse which is always a cause for celebration was just a complete joy. In part because of all the hope instilled in the act of planting a vegetable garden.

The trouble is you think you have time.

Truth is, that the writer (Jack Kornfield, btw, who is a wonderful writer about All Things Buddhist including doing the laundry) means to smack you upside the head — means to startle you. It makes me think of stories about old Zen Masters smacking the meditating monks with a stick if they begin to slump. And, it is not a depressing statement. What he is saying is that if you live your life as if there is all the time in the world, then you waste the minute to minute existence that IS life. That means not hurrying through (for example) buying your funny heirloom tomatoes but holding the plastic containers to your chest, talking to the other women about varieties, reading the descriptions on the wall with a concerned older German-accented woman who thinks (irony) that the tomatoes will all take too much time. I wanted to tell her that 90 days would be gone before she knew it. And I was feeling oddly happy about that — there’s really no other way to deal with that truth — but I think it might have shaken her to the bone. So I let the moment (in time) pass.

But to live in that particular way, relishing moment to moment, that is the joy that Kornfield is hitting us over the head with. And it is not a natural, human practice. We crave a narrative, a linear life and we are forever anchoring ourselves in either the past or the future. This is one of the reasons I love making art so much — I literally lose all sense of time.

Which brings me to today’s recipe: Herb-Marinated Lamb Shanks. I bought a bunch of lamb yesterday at the Farmer’s Market (still no vegetables, of course) including two little shanks. Now, I know I said that the time for stews was fast departing. But I’ve since made a lovely veal ragout and today will make this stew to eat later in the week. Tonight, we will have fresh Italian Sausage from this wonderful butcher/sausage maker from Berea. Not sure how we will have the sausage as of yet. I’m remembering a recipe Sabina used to make with cherry tomatoes, broccoli, sausage and a little pasta. See if I can recreate that recipe from my past maybe. And then savor it in the here and now, the tastes wrapped up in memories of Sabina’s kitchen; her tremendous, emotional friendship. The recipe all the better for it.

It takes practice to be happy sometimes. Arthur literally breezed through this weekend having to go down to OU to see if he might like to transfer there and going to see the Diplo show last night. All in all I probably got in 4 hours of Arthur time. And now he is barrelling down 90 in his car, headed for Bennington and the rest of his semester. I just got back from Heinen’s and the weekly food shop, which is usually a relaxing, happy event — picking this and choosing that. But not today. I wandered the aisles with a very small list since I had just been there yesterday getting Arthur snacks for school. So I felt anxious, bereft and I could feel that little stone begin to lodge itself in my chest. I don’t mean to sound dramatic — it’s just that sometimes a mom gets sad when her kid takes off again.

Still, I wasn’t about to let that stone gain too much ground. And here’s the practice bit. It’s good to know a song or two that you have on your trusty i-pod so when you are finished with said errand and are heading back to the somewhat more empty house you can blast it just for yourself. I picked Jai Ho from Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack and kicked that damn rock to the curb.

Yesterday, Arthur and I went to the first farmer’s market of the season and bought some lovely ground veal. I made these veal meatballs from Emeril (I subbed Tony Cachere’s for the spice mixture) and served them with fresh garlic and chive pasta from Ohio City Pasta. Nice to feed my boy. That’s another thing that makes me happy.

So does painting and I made sure to do some of that almost as soon as he pulled away.

So, bit of unsolicited advice. Know what makes you happy and DO it when you get a little sad. As long as it’s not self-destructive — scotch makes me happy, for example. You ought to do a lot of it.

Got a biggish chicken from Delbert this week at the market and it’s Sunday so naturally one’s thoughts turn to a nice roast chicken. Unfortunately, one’s thoughts also turn to making cookies, banana muffins with the week’s neglected specimens and soup for tuesday. Well… it has not been the most relaxing afternoon at all. My poor feet are throbbing and yes, the chicken is roasting away happily but the kitchen is messy  and I am feeling as if monday is way too close. Dennis always thinks that sundays are for easy cooking while I think that the afternoon hours stretch out for me and there will be time enough. And as if that planned activity weren’t enough, I decided that I would make a chicken from my Cafe Beaujolais cookbook. It is called Chicken Stuffed Under the Skin. It is based on a recipe from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food. Both recipes call for pulling out the breastbone and then stuffing the chicken but I took the easy road and just slid my hand under the skin all the way down the breast and the legs and then put the stuffing in. Olney’s stuffing recipe is made with ricotta and fresh herbs, Margaret Fox’s (the chef from Cafe Beaujolais) is richer, featuring cream cheese and grated vegetables. Her recipe calls for quickly sauteeing a melange of vegetables, draining them to reduce the liquids, mixing that with the cream cheese and then refrigerating the whole for an hour. Unfortunately, I did not read that until 15 minutes before I had to put the chicken into the oven. So, the stuffing was goopier than it is supposed to be but I have to say it certainly seemed as if it would be very very good. I put both recipes on one page for time’s sake — NOW I am being efficient? When it is almost eight and we are all hungry and no one is complaining (thank you!)? I am serving the chicken alongside roasted potatoes and squash.

As for the cookies? I decided last week that it would be more economical and nicer to make dough and freeze it into little pre-made cookie dough balls so that when Christopher-Who-Is-Not-Afraid-of-the-Oven comes home from school, he can make himself a few. Now there are three dozen incipient cookies in the freezer. I never got to the banana muffins and they (the bananas) are lazing about the counter looking very close to no-good. Sigh.

I made a crock-pot version of pot-au-feu this past week (sounds so home-maker-y!). I took three pounds of what the farmer up at the market had labelled “boiling beef” and added to a mix of leeks, carrots and some onion that I had sauteed in olive oil. To that I added some parsley and thyme and 15 cups of water. I let the whole thing go on the high setting for hours and then turned it down but let it cook overnight. The broth was splending and there was way more than Christopher or I could eat. So this morning, I took the remaining meat off the bones and sauteed a shallot and a few garlic cloves in olive oil, added some diced roma tomatoes and a can of diced tomatoes and some herbes-de-provence and made a sauce for pasta later this week. With the left-over broth, I made a mushroom barley soup. So, I am pretty set for a few meals this week, which is a very nice Sunday evening feeling.

The beef does have a bit of a story. I think I mentioned earlier that I had talked at length with a farmer who breeds belted Galloways and that I was considering getting myself a quarter of a beef for the winter. Well.. he didn’t have any so I put it aside then I got a call on the answering machine and it turns out that he did have a quarter available. So I sought him out at the market to put my money down. Well…. he didn’t exactly have a belted Galloway available. What he had was an orphaned, bottle-raised dairy cow who they had tried to integrate into their herd when a mom Galloway lost her calf and was full of milk. She rejected the heifer, who I learned in the course of the conversation is named Bucky and they resorted to bottle feeding. He is not technically organic having come from another herd but he grazed along with their animals. They are charging fifty cents per pound less… hmm. It was a hard call. And there was this very “friendly” and odd gentleman standing next to me listening in on our conversation (which lasted about 15 minutes?) the whole time. It is pretty disconcerting having a stranger stand near enough to you so that at some point the person with whom you are really having the conversation says, “excuse, me are you together?”

Well, we weren’t. The fellow told me afterward that he was listening in because he was having a hamburger contest with some other guys and wanted to know if this guy’s beef was worth it. I saw him later in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. He had locked his keys in his car. I pulled the protective cell phone ploy…. grab your cell phone pretend to call someone when at a safe distance from the person you are trying desperately to avoid and then have a pretend conversation into your phone. It works and the only person who knows you are a complete weirdo is you (and now, all of you!).

Back to the beef. I might be getting Bucky. And he might be around 150 lbs of beef (wow). Dennis has a friend who has indicated interest so he might split Bucky with us. I hope so. I don’t think I am going to be able to eat all that food. I’m feeling full already. And the other thing is that Bucky was the name of a very bad-tempered pony who lived across the road from us when we lived on the farm. And then that family moved and we ended up with Bucky. So, all my connections with that name have to do with this cantankerous, brown, stubby pony. I don’t think he would have tasted nice at all.

The basil is gone, the tomato lady won’t be coming anymore. I really wish I had learned her name. She has the most beautiful stand of all at the market — bunches of sunflowers and other cut flowers, an array of mixed baskets of heirloom tomatoes, heirloom cucumbers, tiny baby eggplants. She told me that they harvested 20,000 pounds of tomatoes this summer. Pretty impressive. I am sorry that I only ingested about three of those pounds all told, what with being away so many Saturdays. I am going to have to trek into Canandaigua on Saturday mornings next summer I think, for those weekends when we are up in the Finger Lakes.

There was plenty of hilarity at Delbert Yoder’s stand. I’ve never seen him with more than his sidekick, Dave up there but this time around there were probably about 4-5 young amish men, all looking gleeful as they listened to a customer discuss something with them. I edged closer and Delbert saw me.

Eliza! how are you? Then, nodding to the gentleman who was causing such a stir — “have you met the Professor”

“Can’t say that I have.”

And now, the professor turned his straw-hatted head to me. He was wearing one of those straw hats the amish men all wear — only he was clearly not amish. He bent his head to me and thrust out his hand.

“Pleased to meet you. Would you like to know next year’s weather?”

This sent the amish fellows into gales of laughter.

“I’m not sure if I would,” I answered.

“Oh, no harm.” Here… and he rustled through a stack of papers neatly clipped to a plain brown clipboard. And handed me a paper that tells me among other things that we will have a White Christmas. Here is December’s weather:

12/08 1-3 cold and dry; 4-7 fair, then wet Illinois through Ohio; 8-11, heavy snow for Wisconsin, Michigan; 12-15, fair and turning colder; 16-19, becoming wet, especially Great Lakes; 20=23, fair and pleasant; 24-27 heavy snow spreads through the Great Lakes; 28-31, fair skies, followed by increasing clouds.

I didn’t get to ask him what his source of knowledge was because he was busy asking me if I knew anyone named Margaret and I said yes so he gave me an information sheet on his grandmother whose name was Margaret and how she came to be named Podgie or something. “Knowledge is power,” he said.

More happy laughter from behind Delbert’s stand. I just read through Delbert’s weekly newsletter and learned that they are young friends of his who are raising produce of their own and excited to see a market of the North Union Market’s size. I gather they may apply for a permit for next year. Nice to have an explanation for the crowd of happy fellas.

Meanwhile, in a true sign that summer is over, I signed up for Delbert’s winter delivery. Seasons are so fleeting.

And so that I don’t get caught in a muddle this week trying to get dinner on the table, I am making a variation of Judy Rogers Chicken Bouillabaise from the Zuni Cafe cookbook as well as layered Vegetarian Enchilada casserole from a cookbook called Horn of the Moon == recipes from a vegetarian restaurant in Montpelier, Vt.

I was going to end this post here but just have to add a bit of a footnote. The Horn of the Moon was run by Ginny Callan and then sold in the 90’s. I was casting about for an update and found this sad story which says that the cafe closed in 2000 after its then owner committed suicide.  All the more reason to buy this nice little cookbook — it has some recipes in it that have been standbys for me.

Because my life has been a little ridiculous this week (from Maine to an overnight in Boston and then home and literally every morning having to be out of the house for one reason or another and downtown by 7, 7:30 and then out until it’s too late to cook a reasonable dinner for us), I decided to cruise my favorite blogs, web places to see what might be up and what might resonate.

As usual, there’s plenty out there — but one post that just seemed too like-minded to pass up was Farmgirl’s post on Chanterelles. Seems they had a heavy Gustav related rain over her way (which is Missouri) and some nascent wild mushrooms sprouted. So she picked them and ate them sauteed simply in organic butter over home-grown lamb and alongside home-grown potatoes. But the very exciting news?

Apparently, Marx Foods, which is located in Seattle is offering up 2 lbs of Chanterelles (a $70 value????) for the winner of their recipe contest. Check the recipes out. They are really varied and exciting, which makes sense when you consider the fact that Marx Foods was historically a provider of wholesale foods for chefs that has now branched out to home cooks.

If I have as plentiful a harvest next year as I did last, I will make sure to test some of these recipes out. Though given the stated value of these suckers, I’m thinking I ought to sell them from my version of a lemonade stand. Maybe I could hire Christopher the Younger to wear a mushroom costume and wave down cars? It works for carwashes and Chick Fil A.

I promise more recipes and food thoughts this weekend. I finally get to go to the farmer’s market, which will certainly inspire.

A week from dropping Arthur off at school and my throat seems always tight. I stayed home with him Friday because he had to get his wisdom teeth pulled (part of the get him off to college to-do list). He was groggy most of the day but relatively cheerful and yesterday (Saturday) woke up plain old happy and energetic. We went to the farmer’s market together at 9:30 a.m. and he helped me scope the best peaches and some excellent looking salsa from a local guy (Cowboy George) who has a store called Pzazz in Rocky River. I got a peck of second peaches so I could make my peach butter right away. This is a great way to buy fruit for preserving if you are like me and head to the market expecting things like peaches to be ripe, ripe, ripe. Truth is, the vendors can’t pick and bring super-ripe peaches and the like to market because they would bruise and turn so quickly. But one guy had a few boxes of seconds and I got them for half-price. I also bought several pounds of heirloom striped Roma tomatoes from Sirna’s stand. The guy working there told me that $3 a pound was a good deal. They are $6 a pound in the store. Those I plan on slow-roasting and freezing the results into ice-cube size amounts for later addition into soups, stews or pasta sauces.

I spent some time yesterday investigating fruit butter recipes on the web and found several that referenced making it in the crock-pot as opposed to standing over the stove and fretting. Currently, I am midway through the process, having decided last night that I was going to try to put as little sugar in as possible and to add it this morning once the fruit had cooked down. Well… the fruit has cooked way down and, guess what? there’s no sugar at all in the house. This would make my Chinese doctor, Dr. Mao happy. I will say that his diet of no salty, no sweety, no coffee and no wine is making me lose weight. Naturally, I am taking his advice with a, shall we say, grain of salt. So, one cup of coffee ‘fore I go (out) in the morning and one glass of wine with dinner seems to be the ticket. As for salt and sugar? I don’t eat much of it. But really. What normal household has no sugar?  Irritating. Well, when I do return with the sugar, I will add a cup to my fruit mixture and see if that is sweet enough. I also plan on adding some nutmeg, a few teaspoons of vanilla paste and, I think, some diced candied ginger.