Bring the Scapes!!!

Every Spring around this time, the modest, unadorned, hearty hardneck garlic plants that have been stoutly soldiering along since October become for a brief moment the most glamourous and exotic plants in the garden. Rising above their plain, strappy, green leaves are suddenly: SCAPES!

Serpentine, delicate, gorgeous and elegant, garlic scapes are the flowering stalks of hardneck garlic plants. They curl and spiral up and out from the plant, with a smooth, green, snake-like grace.

The flavor of scapes is a pure, intense, garlicky burst of spring green. We've eaten them all kind of ways: sauteed in butter, mixed in a stir fry, finely chopped raw in a green salad or with grated beets and carrots.

I would love garlic scapes even if they were common and abundant over a long season. But the fact that they can only be had for a short window of time, and a time before much else in the garden is producing heavily, makes them all the more precious and delightful.

It is good to pick the scapes as soon after they appear as possible so that the garlic plants won't spend energy flowering and will instead put all of their spring plant juju into growing large bulbs. Seeing as how we planted 1,500 garlic plants last fall, we have a lot of scapes to harvest and quick. Thus, we are cutting scapes fast and furious these days, and coming up with new scape recipes pretty much every day.

Christopher with some of the scapes we harvested last evening.

MF dropped by last eve just in time to help cut scapes (and squish a few potato beetle egg clusters), and Sandi came over later for dinner and scape escapades. We made pesto (see recipe below) and feasted on scapes until it felt like we were exuding garlic juice out of every pore.

Here are some of my favorite new ways to eat scapes:

Garlic Scape Pesto

I cannot describe how good this is. We ate it on pasta, but I also downed a few spoonfuls straight. It is a bright green, full-on, intense garlic experience.

• A whole bunch of raw garlic scapes
• A handful of mild greens (we used chard) if desired
• Walnuts, pine nuts, or sunflower seeds (we used walnuts)
• Olive oil
• Lemon juice
• Salt
• Parmesan or Asiago cheese (optional - we made a vegan batch and a cheesy batch)

Throw everything in the food processor and pulverize to desired pesto texture. Enjoy!

Sandi gets her pesto groove on

Garlic Scape Risotto

So creamy and garlicky and delicious!

• A handful of garlic scapes
• 1 cup arborio rice
• 4-5 cups stock or water
• Parmesan, Asiago, or another hard cheese, grated
• Salt, pepper, olive oil, and butter

Chop garlic scapes into 1/4 to 1/2 inch pieces. Saute in butter and olive oil (about 2 Tbs of each) until soft. Add arborio rice and continue to saute for a few minutes until the rice is

slightly toasted.

Add 1 cup of water or stock and stir. Stir. Stir. Stir. This is the key to a creamy risotto. Keep stirring and cooking over low to medium heat until all of the first cup of water or stock is absorbed. Add another cup of liquid and repeat. Stir constantly. Cook until water is absorbed.

Continue adding liquid a cup at a time and stirring, stirring, stirring until you have a super-creamy risotto. At this point, I added a tablespoon or so of pureed sweet pepper to the mix, but that is optional. About 5 minutes before serving, add 3/4 cup grated cheese.

Enjoy!

Lastly, I am trying a brine pickle with some of the scapes.

I chopped them up and layered them with salt in a ceramic crock (the first ferment of the season!), covered them with salty water and am now watching and waiting to see if they will ferment into a pickled, garlicky condiment of some sort. It seems like it will have to be good.

Anyone have other ideas of ways to eat scapes? We still have hundreds to consume!

How to Eat Local in the Wintertime

Eating local food is easy in August...but how about in the middle of winter?  

For the seed swap and dinner party that we hosted here last weekend, I challenged myself to cook a meal with as many local ingredients as possible to serve to our dozen or so guests.  Coming up with this much local food in January with nary a farmers market in sight and the garden long-since frozen initially seemed a difficult task.  

It turned out to be easier than I thought, thanks to drying, canning, freezing, fermentation, and some long-storing root vegetables.  

We had a delicious, spicy-sweet wintery feast.  Here's the menu for the almost-100%-local meal that we shared:

• Crostini with dueling pestos
  
• Black bean mole topped with spicy salsa and sweet pepper hash
  
• Creamy mashed sweet potatoes and potatoes with roasted garlic, fresh raw buttermilk, and homemade butter
  
• Slow-cooked collards
  
• Brine-pickled okra
• Warm apple & pear compote served over homemade raw milk ice cream
  
• Blackberry and quince meads & crabapple scrumpy
  

I served two pestos, both made from greens from our garden back in the summer, frozen, and thawed for this meal. One batch included magenta spreen lambsquarters, sorrel, and beet greens; the other was a classic basil pesto with sundried tomatoes from our garden. The bread was from Farm and Sparrow, a local off-grid wood-fired brick oven bakery.

The black bean mole was made with dried shell beans from our summer garden, slow-cooked with mole paste made in the fall from our Pasilla Bajio peppers.  I froze most of the mole paste and now I can unfreeze a few tablespoons of this potent blend and, viola! Spicy summer peppers on the wintertime table!  Along with the beans and mole paste, the other ingredients in this dish were all local: onions from the last farmers market of the year, garlic from our Summer 2008 harvest, and dried oregano from our garden.  

The salsa was made and frozen in the summer with our own tomatoes, onions, garlic and sweet and hot peppers.  I canned the sweet pepper hash with the last of the peppers from our garden back in October (see "Fall Kitchen and Garden Projects" for the recipe), and we cracked open the first jar for this occassion.

The collards were fresh from our garden, where a few intrepid greens are still growing under season-extending floating row cover.

The okra was also from our garden, preserved in the summer using the ancient process of brining.

The sweet potatoes came from Flying Cloud Farm, just over the ridge in Fairview, and the potatoes were a mix of varieties from various local farmers.  I bought the potatoes and sweet potatoes at the last farmers market of the year, and they are still holding up in storage.  These were mashed and creamed with raw buttermilk from Katy, the cow next door, and my first-ever homemade butter, also thanks to Katy.

I made the fruit compote from dried local pears and apples that we dried in the fall.  The fruit was slow-cooked with local honey and spices.  A little (very non-local) Nicaraguan rum that Melissa brought back from her travels made this steamy dessert concoction even more warming on a winter night. The hot compote was perfect on homemade ice cream (from still MORE of Katy the cow's milk), churned on site by Dana-Dee.

To drink, we had home-fermented Quince Mead, Blackberry Mead, and Crabapple Scrumpy.

Hurrah for local food!

Local food cheerleaders in Australia (more info on the radical cheerleaders of Adelaide, Australia here) ... note the fabulous artichoke, fork, and knife team logo on their team t-shirts...ah, thanks be to google image...

Pesto Extravaganza

Saturday afternoon we harvested all of the remaining basil in the garden and piled it in a huge aromatic heap in the yard. From this
luxurious pile of spicy green we made pesto over the next 36 hours or so...lots and lots of pesto.

Above: Love in the basil pile

At left: MT and Jonathan with the goods

We grew Genovese basil, the classic pesto variety. This is the third year we've had a big basil-harvesting and pesto-making event at Fall Equinox, which is also birthday season for both me and Christopher.

This year, MT and Jonathan and Christopher and I harvested and picked through all of the leaves, gradually filling and refilling a big plastic tub with basil.



At left: Picking leaves off of the stems, the most time-consuming and tedious part of the process, best performed with friends.

After we had enough leaves picked to begin washing and turning them into pesto, there was some enthusiastic garlic smashing (see below) followed by hours of chopping and blending in the food processor (thanks to Evaa and CP for stepping in to take the food processor controls when I was flagging).

At some point during the marathon of pesto production line activities, friends began to trickle in for birthday celebrations. Eventually, there was a sizable crowd, and good food (featuring pesto, of course) was enjoyed all round.

Shane brought an amazing pie made from wild berries and some fabulous mead from various fruits and honey from her bees, Paul and Jude contributed surprisingly delicious stewed tomatoes and green beans from their garden, Jordana made a downright delicious beet salad, and Dana brought paw paws and made mint chocolate chip ice cream on site with "milk squeezed from the cow's teat just yesterday morning" and chocolate chips she claimed to have grown herself.

April & Mike contributed the entertainment in the form of 2-month old Nathaniel, who was much admired by all.

And we ate pasta with potatoes, peppers, and chard and copious amounts of ultra-fresh pesto.


Above: Smashing and peeling homegrown garlic

Here's the basic recipe (no measurements, sorry!) for classic pesto for freezing or eating fresh. We used sunflower seeds and no cheese -- the budget version.

PESTO

• Basil (Italian large-leaf or Genovese are the best varieties for pesto-making)
• High quality olive oil
• Lemon juice
• Lots of fresh garlic, smashed and peeled
  
• Sunflower seeds, walnuts, or pine nuts
• Salt
• Pepper
• A little bit of fresh parsley & thyme (optional)
• Asiago or parmesan cheese, coarsely grated (optional)
  

Pulverize in a food processor, or if you are really old-school, with a mortar and pestle. Adjust proportions according to your taste (it is almost impossible to combine these ingredients in a way that is not pleasurable). Eat fresh or freeze!

We ended up with quarts and quarts of pesto -- we'll never know exactly how much because we ate so much right away and sent a whole lot home with friends.

There is nothing in the world like classic basil pesto. Besides its fabulous taste and smell, there's something about the green, green, savory, spicy, burst of flavor and color that just seems to capture the life-force of summer in a jar.

Basil is packed with chlorophyll, the magical substance that changes sunlight into plant energy, and also contains calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, and Vitamins A, D, and B2. Google turns up some interesting studies of the nutritional and medicinal properties of basil, for example: "Recently, basil was shown to rank highest among spices and herbal crops for xanthophyll carotenoids, which are associated with decreased risks of cancer and age-related eye diseases." (Read more here.)

And it tastes so good and is so beautiful.

So all of our basil is now all converted into pesto, packed into jars and various other containers, and stored for later eating. It's quite satisfying to open up the freezer and see all of that bright green, sunny summer juju, packed in for winter.

Happy Equinox!

Meadow Mushrooms**

Earlier this week Christopher noticed that jillions of mushrooms had sprouted up in the horse pasture next door. Fortunately, our favorite wild mushroom expert was coming over for dinner on Friday night, and quickly identified them as Meadow Mushrooms.

Alan, who knows more about wild mushrooms than almost anyone around (click here to visit his wild mushroom website), explained that Meadow Mushrooms are the closest wild equivalents to storebought white button 'shrooms. Since they are white, and there's a deadly mushroom that grows around here that's also white, we learned that this edible variety is distinguished by pink or brown "gills" on the underside.

C & A harvested some of the mushrooms last eve and we had them for dinner, marinated in balsamic vinegar and olive oil with fresh minced garlic and then broiled briefly in the toaster oven. I thought they were WAY better than button mushrooms. In fact, they were delectable.

Harvested meadow mushrooms up close


We ate the broiled mushrooms with fresh sliced tomatoes and sauteed veggies (squash, chard, potatoes, onions, garlic) with homemade tomato sauce over pasta, topped with some of that ridiculous beet/basil pesto. Needless to say, it was quite satisfying.

All of the vegetables were from the garden except for the potatoes, which I bought on Wednesday at the Farmers Market - I used one of each of these gorgeous pink- and purple-fleshed varieties (see the photo below...)

The potatoes were so lovely to behold, especially with the multicolored chard stems (see photo of saute in progress, below) and that magenta pesto on top.

Thanks to Alan for the mushroom lesson, and thanks to the meadow for the free gourmet ingredients!


**NOTE: Don't attempt to identify mushrooms for eating without help from someone with expertise and experience. Book learning is not enough!

Tomato wars* and pesto update

Yesterday morning, I went out to the garden to see how it was doing after all of the RAIN (!!!) and was met with an onslaught of tomatoes.

Because of all the wetness, a lot of them are cracking and demanding to be dealt with post haste. I harvested a huge basket full (above), brought them in and sorted them into piles according to the level of urgency with which they needed to be eaten, processed, or somehow handled.

I had a lot of other things to do yesterday, so I made a tomato sandwich and tried to ignore the tomato troops massing on my borders.

The sandwich was really quite tasty, and reminded me that tomatoes are not the enemy, but I still felt under seige.

Then, this morning on my garden walk-through I discovered at least TWICE as many ripe or over-ripe tomatoes as yesterday. Plus the rain knocked a bunch of their unripe brethren and sisteren off the vine, and I couldn't let them rot, so I took them in too and gave them windowsill space.

Tomatoes massing on the border

All of which led to a grim report to CF over our morning beverages: "The tomatoes are winning."

So today I put aside everything else and got busy making sauce.

At left are some chopped tomatoes en route to the sauce pot. I'm simmering these and their cohorts on super-low heat with sweet peppers, oregano, basil, parsley, and garlic--all from the garden--plus some sweet onions I bought at the farmer's market yesterday, along with olive oil, salt, and black pepper.

It's smelling really delightful already.


Meanwhile, I think I have perfected the pesto that I've been using as a heat-free way to preserve beet tops. It's a LOT more tasty when the beet and other greens are cut with some traditional basil.

Here's a recipe (with no quantities/measurements - sorry!)




PESTO

1 part basil (maybe about 2 cups?)

1 part mixed greens - I used dark red Bulls Blood beet tops, lambsquarter (magenta spreen and wild green), and flat-leaf parsley

sunflower seeds, garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice

Throw it all in a food processor, process, and enjoy!



This is some SERIOUSLY good pesto. And really beautiful with all of the pink and red leafy greens. I've been eating it with a spoon, straight up. I think if I put some on a tomato sandwich I might pass over to the other side. So it turns out that I can live in peace with tomatoes and their ilk (basil).


A small jar of really good pesto



* NOTE to Quakers, pacifists, and all of my fellow anti-violence people: apologies for all of the war imagery! If anyone can help me come up with some diplomatic solution, I'm open to it!


PS: Thanks be to Mother Earth & Hurricane Faye for the rain!

Pesto, pesto, rah rah rah

On the lookout for ways to preserve food as the tidal wave of vegetables continues, I was inspired this morning by Jeff Ashton's musings on pesto in his book The 12- Month Gardener.

Jeff lives somewhere around here and I've taken his classes at the Organic Growers School. I credit him with a lot of what I know about raised beds and season extension. Christopher recently invested in a used copy of the The 12- Month Gardener to help with planning our fall garden, and as I was skimming around in it I noticed an interesting sidebar about making pesto out of unconventional vegetables. At the mention of beet greens, my eyes lit up.

We grew "Bulls Blood" beets this year, a heirloom variety with a deep, dark red leafy top. I love to eat the luscious red leaves, which seem just packed with pure vegetable nutrition and taste strong and hearty. But lately I can't eat them fast enough to keep up with the garden. I'm fermenting the beet roots, but I'd been wondering how to put away the greens without cooking the good nutritional juju out of them. Aha! Beet green pesto preserves the greens raw, with all of the nutritional value intact, and the fact that the leaves are all holey and not aesthetically pleasing after a season of insect snacking doesn't matter after they are food-processed into pestodom.

My previous pesto-making endeavors have been limited to variations on the traditional basil standard. But after the Jeff Ashton tip and on the heels of savoring the purslane pesto that Alan made last week I leapt with gusto into the world of unconventional pestos.

I made 4 different batches one morning last week -- 3 with various combinations of sorrel, beet greens, and Magenta Spreen lambsquarters (above is one gorgeous volunteer plant in the garden, re-seeded from last year) and 1 with a bunch of "sundried" tomatoes from our dehydrating adventures and basil from the garden.

My tasters tell me that the sundried tomato/basil one is the best, but I am partial to a pink pesto that's heavy on the dark red beet greens and bright pink lambsquarters.

Here's an approximate recipe:

• Beet leaves/tops
• Lambsquarters (wild green or cultivated Magenta Spreen)
• French sorrel
• Flat leaf parsley
• Sunflower seeds
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Peeled garlic cloves
• Lemon juice
• A little water if necessary to make the food processor swirl

These can be combined in an almost infinite variety of proportions. I used somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 cup of sunflower seeds, 1/2 cup olive oil and 1/4 cup lemon juice for every batch, along with 5 or 6 cloves of garlic and greens to fill up the rest of the food processor. You can skip the lemon juice if you add a lot of sorrel, since it's super lemony.

Which reminds me to sing the praises of sorrel. It's perennial. It's easy. It's très gourmet. It's beautiful in the garden from the time it first appears in the spring to its tall, flowering peak. And it tastes so good! I can't say enough good things about it, really. Sorrel, how do I love you? Let me count the ways. I like it in salads, as a cooked green, in soups, and today I learned it's fabulous in pesto too.

Here's some in our garden (above).

In any case, viva el pesto!

Eating bright green basil all winter long

We planted a few Italian Large Leaf and Genovese basil seedlings in the spring. Though I restrained myself from biting off more than we could chew in terms of gardening this year, we had to have basil. It's so good, and so easy, that there was no excuse not to grow some.

Despite the drought and our neglect, by August we had huge shrub-like basil plants crowding bursting out of one of the new raised beds. (Above: some of our harvested basil).

For C's birthday in September, we invited a few friends to a pesto-making party, and preserved our basil bounty (at left) with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper and sunflower seeds, with the help of a lot of hands washing, picking through, and de-stemming, and a borrowed 12-cup food processor.

We gave all of the guests ample pesto supplies for eating fresh or freezing, and froze a bunch ourselves...Now we're eating those bright green leaves gratefully as the temperature drops.

Gratitude to the pesto-making birthday guests, and to the abundant basil plants, and to the soil, sun, and (not much) water that turned those tiny seedlings into spicy green food for the winter!