Pimento Cheese!

Roasted homegrown pimentos

After a long, long period of neglect of my beloved Milkweed Diaries, I'm breaking radio silence with a short little ode to pimento cheese.  Oh pimento cheese, I love you!

A classic staple of the American South, this delicious and creamy treat is traditionally made with Duke's mayonnaise and canned pimentos. My slightly pretentious, healthy, homegrown version is made with raw goat cheese and fresh roasted peppers.  As I spooned this experimental concoction straight into my mouth fresh from the food processor, I announced to Christopher: "I believe this is the best thing I have ever made."  Even in the clear light of day a week later, I'm pretty sure it's true.  

Here's how to make it:

• Roast the pimentos. I did this at 450 degrees using the broiler setting of my toaster oven.  I drizzled  them with a scant bit of olive oil and broiled them until they had begun to pucker and develop black spots on one side and then flipped them and broiled on the other side.

  

  Roasting the pimentos

• Let the pimentos rest in a paper bag.  This will make them easier to peel.
• Peel the pimentos. This is the tedious and slightly time-consuming part. Remember, it's worth it.  At this point you can store the pimentos in a jar for a day or so if you need to sit the project down til you have time to complete it.

Mixing in the food processor

• Mix the pimentos with fresh raw goat cheese. I used a basic soft goat cheese I had made the night before from our goats' milk using Ricki  Carroll's recipe - a raw, cultured goat cheese made with mesophillic culture.  Any good mild, cultured goat cheese will do - the slight cultured tang adds a really nice zest.  I did the mixing by dumping the pimentos in the bottom of my food processor and gradually adding cheese until the consistency, color, and mix looked right. 
• Enjoy immediately!  This cheese stores well in the fridge and also freezes well, but I find it tastes best at room temperature.

The final product: Pimento Cheese!

One important tip: use good pimentos - as fresh as possible.  I was inspired to make this by the abundance of pimentos rolling in from our garden this year.  I used about 25 homegrown peppers - the beautiful, plump, and prolific Ashe County Pimento from the High Country of Western NC via Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.

Ashe County Pimentos

I also threw in some Doe Hill Golden Bells which are supposedly a bell pepper, but to me look like a small, golden pimento. This seed was also from Southern Exposure, and has been a great addition to our pepper production bed this year. The plants have produced abundantly, and the flavor is wonderful.  According to Southern Exposure, this little gem is a pre-1900 family heirloom from the Doe Hill area in Highland County, Virginia.

Doe Hill Golden Bells

This cheese is so delightful spread on toast, noshed upon with crackers, as a garnish on tomato salads, and eaten straight up with a spoon. I froze a ton of it and am envisioning pimento deviled eggs, pimento grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches, and all manner of pimento goodness through the months to come. Yum!

Seed Sources: Let the Seed Hunting Season Begin!

As is typical for me on a drizzly day when I am looking for ways to procrastinate, I have been thinking about next year's garden. There is no better time than a cold, rainy day to sit inside by the fire thumbing through seed catalogs, either of the paper variety or in the vast seed catalog of the internet.

I came across this amazing list of heirloom seed sources while searching for heirloom pea varieties that we could grow for dry split peas. It's a detailed and dense listing of seed sources, including quite a few I had never heard of. One exciting example: The Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center -- a nonprofit organization that preserves Southern Appalachian heirloom varieties. Don't let their very low-tech-looking website deter you from exploring their bean catalog and checking out their articles on Southern Appalachian heirloom seeds. They apparently steward more than 300 bean varieties, including quite a few "Greasy Bean" varieties!

This is the sort of thing I get fired up about. If you can't relate to excitement over greasy beans, consider this: some experts say there is no commercial source for genuine heirloom greasy beans. Greasy beans are a distinct type of bean with a long Cherokee heritage. They have been a staple of the Southern Appalachian diet for countless generations and still maintain cult status in the mountains of western North Carolina. There are varieties specific to certain hollers, families, and communities that have never been grown outside those small circles. Bean seed experts and mountain old timers will tell you that true greasy bean seed is only available through seed swaps, passed from hand-to-hand by gardeners and farmers, and from people and organizations dedicated to preserving family and community heirloom seeds from this region.

I love growing Southern Appalachian heirlooms, particularly varieties that can be traced back to the indigenous agriculture of what is now western North Carolina. These are plants cultivated by pre-colonization Cherokee people and their ancestors in these mountains for thousands of years.

On a practical level, these varieties have an advantage in my North Carolina mountain garden because they are cultivars that evolved over generations to thrive in this particular spot on the planet, with its specific climate and conditions. On a more abstract level, it feels like a restoration or a homecoming of some sort to grow these seeds in this place. These are plants that came from here, and that were treasured, cherished, valued as part of the living wealth of communities in these mountains for thousands of years. Planting them in the soil of the Swannanoa Valley, where people have grown food for thousands of years, just feels right.

If you are growing in the Southeast, I recommend Southern Exposure Seed Exchange as another a great source of heirlooms from our region. If you're growing elsewhere, find the old timers and seed stewards that are saving seeds that came from the place you live. Wherever you find your seeds, if you've never saved seeds before, consider saving seed from at least one plant in next year's garden.

More on greasy beans here: What are Greasy Beans and Why Should You Care?

Seed-Saver's Heaven

Bean seeds changing hands at the Seed Swap.

Last week, CF and I were up in Charlottesville, VA for the annual Heritage Harvest Festival sponsored by Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and Monticello.

Friday we spent time at the Tufton Farm, where the Center for Historic Plants does its amazing work. Then we took a seed-saving tour through the vegetable, herb, and flower gardens at Monticello, where we had a chance to harvest and take home seeds from heirloom varieties growing there.

Saturday we went to workshops with some of my seed saving heroes (a talk on saving seeds from heirloom plants by William Woys Weaver being the highlight for me) and communed with gardeners, seed savers, plant-lovers, garden nerds, and others of our ilk.

The big seed swap on Saturday was amazing, and worth the trip in itself. Like most seed swaps I've participated in, it was more of a gift economy than a swapping or bartering economy. There were some extraordinarily generous big-time seed savers there, like Rodger Winn (at left in the photo above), who grows dozens of heirloom beans for seed and had a whole table filled with beans for sharing. I brought Hibiscus sabdariffa (the red zinger hibiscus) and Calendula seeds to offer, and we came home with a big pile of little envelopes full of future vegetables, herbs, and flowers.

It was a really wonderful event--I'm posting a few more photos here to give more of a sense of it, and I have a slideshow up on Picasa with lots more photos as well. The festival happens every year...maybe I'll see you there in 2010!

View of the vegetable garden at Monticello

Pat Brodowski, the vegegable gardener at Monticello scooping out tomato seeds . . .

. . .and discussing saving bean seeds.

Cleome and Kiss-Me-Over-the-Garden-Gate at Monticello

Hyacinth bean arbor at Monticello

Debbie Donley, the Monticello flower gardener, talking flowers and seeds.

Cherry tomatoes for sale at the festival

The gift economy in action.

Some of the seeds we brought home. . .

. . .and some more!

More of my photos from the festivities are on Picasa.

Winter Reading: From Scuppernongs to Switchel

When it gets cold outside, there's nothing I like more than curling up somewhere with a hot beverage, a cat, and a book. I come from a long line of bookworms, librarians, word-lovers, readers, writers, and other nerd-types. Book-loving is in my blood.

If the book contains recipes, food history, and stories about food, all the better as far as I am concerned. One of my all-time favorites is 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, by a hero of mine, seed saver and historian William Woys Weaver.

So I can't tell you how excited I was to be introduced last night to this book: Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine by Joseph E. Dabney. We were having dinner with our good friends Bud and MF. After a highly satisfying meal of stuffed butternut squash, cream of broccoli soup made from broccoli from their garden, and a creamy custard for dessert, we retired to the living room to talk about James Bond movies (!), Noam Chomsky, and traditional mountain "stack cakes." This last topic lead to MF whipping out the aforementioned book.

We found several very fine stack cake recipes within, but that was just the beginning. This book is a treasure trove of Southern Appalachian food lore, food histories, food traditions, and recipes. It's one part oral history, one part cookbook, and one part hymn to the people and traditions of the Southern Appalachians. It is meticulously researched and written with the reverence and relish of a person who has cultivated a long-lasting and deep love of food and food traditions.

I quickly became completely absorbed -- a whole chapter on sweet potatoes, another on persimmons, and a veritable profusion of information about old-time food-preserving techniques. Very old Cherokee recipes, wild foods traditions, and chapters on moonshine, wine, and beer. Recipes calling for everything from "several squirrels" to "Tennessee truffles," otherwise known as ramps. A section on "The Art of Growing" in the southern mountains. And lots of amazing old photographs of places all around where I grew up and where I live now. This is so far up my alley it's out the other side.

In the 12 or so hours since MF kindly lent me her copy (seeing the pain it would cause me if she didn't), I have spent most of my waking hours falling in love with this book. I stayed up late reading Christopher snippets about the history of wild grapes in North Carolina, and opened it up first thing this morning to read about possum hunting.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. As I try out recipes, I will post some of them, and I'll write more about Dabney's exhaustive survey of mountain food culture as I read and re-read it, I am sure.

On a related note (food traditions, books I love, recommended reading for cold days and nights), I was re-united last night with my copy of Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. I had apparently lent it out to MF long ago and forgotten. Christopher has had to hear me lament its absence many times in recent months, only to discover that it was safe and sound in West Asheville all along. I was very excited when MF whipped out my copy last night.

This is one of my all-time favorite books. It is only 187 pages from cover to cover, but it is highly concentrated. Like a thick mole or miso paste, it provides more flavor, substance, and hours of enjoyment than you might imagine. Wild Fermentation is chock full of recipes, food histories, stories from the modern food underground, philosophy, politics, and food lore from many traditions.

Wild Fermentation is the book that I used as a guide when I first began making krauts and brine pickles, ginger brews, kombucha, and other fermented foods. It is the single indispensable resource for people embarking on fermentation adventures, in my opinion, and an invaluable cache of fabulous food facts and folk traditions.

So there are two recommendations for winter reading. Though I am a big fan of libraries, these are books that I think it is worth owning. My copy of Wild Fermentation is well-worn already -- it has the creases and stains to prove that it's a book I pull off the shelf and use in the kitchen all the time. I am going to purchase Smokehouse post haste, and have a feeling it will assume a similarly revered and beloved status in my kitchen.

Happy winter, happy eating, and happy reading!

~~~~

A note on the title of this post: Scuppernongs and Muscadines are wild grapes that grew rampantly in North Carolina before and at the time of European settlement. According to Joseph Dabney, they were still to be found in abundance growing wild in these parts as recently as the 1940s, and were used for wine-making, desserts, and an amazing-sounding ferment made from wild grapes and molasses, apparently based on a Cherokee tradition. Switchel is a delicious home-made soft drink with molasses and ginger, a fine recipe for which can be found in Wild Fermentation.

Okra!

Photo by Debi Cates

Over the weekend, we planted the last of our hot-weather starts, including 3 varieties of okra.

One heirloom variety that we planted, Fife Creek Cowhorn is said to have been in the Fife family since around 1900 and believed to have came to them from a Muskogee (Creek) Indian woman who stayed with them in Mississippi.

There is plenty of discussion online about the history of okra, and how it might have come to the US, but it seems clear that it is an African native that was brought here by slaves. (Reccomended reading: 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From by William Woys Weaver.) In fact, since there is ample historical evidence (including oral family histories of people of color in the US) to suggest that escaped slaves were integrated into Native American/First Nation communities, it's easy to imagine that the Fife Creek okra we're growing came into the hands of the Muskogee/Creek woman (who may have also had African heritage) directly from people of African descent.

Okra was a staple of many African cultures before the slave trade.

Imagine African people, ambushed, kidnapped, forcibly taken from their homes into the slave trade, somehow managing to carry seeds with them. Were the seeds secreted away in a pocket or pouch? Were they passed from one pair of hands to another as people grew sick and died on the grueling "Middle Passage" journey across the Atlantic on slave ships? Did different people carry different varieties of okra seeds with them?

Of course imagining how okra came to us makes me think: what would people of our culture take with them if, in an instant, we could grab a few most-important things from our homes to carry on a long, forced journey with an unknown end? What do we value in the way that kidnapped slaves valued seeds?

What the Cherokee people took, what the Africans soon to be slaves took, what the indigenous peoples pressed into slavery and moved from one part of the Americas to another took with them were seeds. The food we eat is a gift from those who placed such a high value on seeds, on food, on the continuity of life that they carried seeds through circumstances most of us cannot even imagine.

In many villages where slaves were captured, the women and girls planted the seeds, brought water from the river for the young plants, worked the soil, and harvested the food. The adas, eldest sisters, were the keepers of the seeds and the settlers of disputes. Last night, watering the small okra plants in our garden, I said thank you to the adas.

Okra












West African women

Trail of Tears Beans

This year, for the 4th or 5th season, I am planting shiny black beans known as Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans. We will let the beans dry on the vine and harvest them in the late fall for delicious dry black beans. These beans are close to my heart, and I love to plant them and share seeds because their ancestors came from this place, and they are gifts from the people who lived in these mountains before me.


They carry the history of a people that survived brutality, dislocation, and degradation. And planting these beans represents to me a homecoming of a land-based, earth-honoring tradition in these mountains.

In 1839 the US government forced most of the people of the Cherokee nation to walk west from Georgia, North Carolina, northeastern Alabama, and Tennessee to what is now Oklahoma. The distance traveled by most of the people was about 1,000 miles, with the vast majority of the travelers making the entire journey by foot. The forced march, now called the Trail of Tears, began in October of 1839. Cherokee people walked the thousand miles over the course of a harsh winter. The walk began after many had already been held for months in internment camps, where conditions were degrading, violent, and cruel. By the time the removal was over, roughly one-third of the men, women, and children had died.

When the time of internment and removal began, many Cherokee people were forced to pack quickly. People took only what they could carry, often having to decide in a hurry what was most important to them that could be taken on the journey to an unknown new home. Some people carried seeds.

The seeds of dry black beans now called the Cherokee Trail of Tears Black Bean were grown in the mountains of Western North Carolina for thousands of years. Someone carried them on the Trail of Tears. A Cherokee man in Oklahoma donated seeds from this bean variety to the Seed Savers Exchange and so we are able to bring a
few back to the mountains to plant in our river valley, where Cherokee people and their ancestors lived for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans.

The Cherokee people, and the other peoples of the decimated cultures that remained after the European invasion of the Americas saved the seeds that had been planted by their ancestors: corn, squash, herbs and flowers, grains. And beans: hundreds, maybe thousands of ancient varieties of beans.

Skimming through the Seed Savers Exchange catalog it is easy to see the fingerprints of First Nation seed-keepers:

Hopi Gold: "another strain guarded as ancient legacy by Hopi elder James Koorshongsie." Hyote: "from Violet Ruben, Seneca, Tonawanda Reserve." Seneca Stripe: " via Geraldene Green, Seneca Faith Keeper, Cuttoragus Reserve." Speckled Algonquin: "via Tamarack Song of WI, originally from Algonquin Indians of upper Midwest." Taos Pueblo Red: "Native American name is Ta-pie-eh-na, red-streaked pod, red seed, on of traditional foods cooked for boys during training in the Kiva. . .from the late Old Joe Concha."

What is our responsibility to these elders? How can we honor and give gratitude to James Koorshongsie, Violet Ruben, Geraldine Green, Tamarack Song, Old Joe Concha, and all of the unnamed figures in the largely unwritten history of the food on our tables?

How do we retrace the steps of these ancestors and recover the intimacy with the natural world that was at the core of their systems of living? By planting a bean, covering it with dirt, giving it water and sun. By encouraging all of the life in the soil and air and water that nurtures the seed: worms, beneficial insects, microscopic life forms. By cultivating intimate relationships with the plants that feed us and the earth, air, water, and light that feed them. By preserving the seeds that sustain human life for another generation.

Nurturing the small bean plants in my garden, I honor the lost, forgotten, fragmented, and violated cultures and people that stand at the beginning of an unbroken chain of life between the tiny green plants in my garden and the plants grown by peoples of the Americas before European invasion.

Harvesting the beans in the fall, I invoke and offer gratitude to the people who stewarded, protected, and cultivated the bean-ancestors of my garden plants. I say a prayer to the earth for the restoration of human relationships with the natural world.

Planting beans in my garden, I give thanks.

The Swananoa Valley river bottom land where we are growing food, where people have grown food for thousands of years....

---