Dryad's Saddles

Dryad's Saddles -- also known as the Pheasant's Back, or Polyporus squamosus -- is as easily identifiable mushroom for anyone looking to dip a toe in the great, complex and sometimes scary stream of wild mushroom foraging. I love mushrooms, but am a very tentative mushroomer, only slowly adding to my short list of species I am comfortable enough identifying to bring home to the dinner table.

Giant puffballs or breadloaf mushrooms are probably the first wild mushroom to try, as long as you pick them when they are at least softball sized to ensure that you haven't mixed them up with an emerging head of some other type.  None of the puffballs are poisonous and once they get to a decent size, there is nothing else that looks like them (unless you've inadvertently picked up an old soccer ball that has been sitting in the woods for years).

While there are many other shelf- or bracket-type fungus, Dryad's Saddles are simple to recognize. They have a short, thick angled stem, a curve downward to the stem, a feathery or almost shingle-like top, and most distinctively, a spongy underside of hollow tubes -- NOT gills, and NOT a hard flat bottom surface. The only other mushroom close to meeting this description would be the beefsteak mushroom, another bracket polypore, but it is pink to red, and fortunately is also edible so if you manage to confuse the two, you'll still be okay.

When Dryad's Saddles get older they get brown and dry, but then they are too tough to eat. Way too tough. So be sure to go for the light tan ones with brown feathery tops.

In May and June, look for these about two days after a rainstorm, on hardwood trees and stumps. They'll pop up literally overnight. Pick those that are flexible and have a light tan top like the ones pictured. Often they'll be about 4" across, in groups of 3 or 4. These two, growing right next to one another, had popped out to a full 8" across after we had a big downpour following several very dry weeks.

Sliced up and sauteed with butter and wild ramps, served with foraged fiddleheads or young turnip greens thinned from the early garden bed, they make a wonderful hearty spring meal, free and fresh from the wilds.

Pumpkin Pie

You have to love a dessert that counts as a vegetable...

It's the nice thing about pumpkin pie. True, one could count those apple and blueberry pies as a serving of fruit -- but you get to count pumpkin pie as a vegetable. And a tasty, nutritious vegetable at that, full of fiber and vitamins. 

But pumpkin also holds a certain spirit that satisfies the soul as well as the stomach and good health. Those orange orbs embody the sunshine of the whole growing season, the open sky and fresh air of the fields, those perfect autumn days. 


Deep in January, biting into a slice of pumpkin pie brings the wheel of the year firmly to mind, and thoughts roll back to last year's garden, and forward to looking at the prize-winning pumpkins at next year's fair. Pumpkins bring us continuity across the seasons, across the years. 

That continuity is strengthened by the bonds of generations when you use an old family recipe. There is something magical about cooking the same thing my grandmother did, an invocation of those who are gone from us. 

I start with a Long Island Cheese pumpkin -- a flattened, tan heirloom. It could be any other kind -- but then it wouldn't be MY pumpkin pie. But choose your own -- that's part of what makes is special. I quarter the cheese pumpkin, scrape out the seeds, and roast it on a cookie sheet with a little water in it at 350 degrees for... well, for as long as until it's done. Perhaps an hour, I just keep testing till a knife pokes through it easily. Then I let it cool a bit, scoop out the flesh and measure it, and bag it up in 2 cup measures  in small zipper-seal freezer bags (suck the air out, seal them, and lay them flat to freeze -- then you can 'file' them upright in a milk crate in the big freezer). My recipe calls for 1 and a half cups of puree -- but when using home-cooked pumpkin, I find freezing 2 cups works best as you'll lose some liquid and volume when it thaws.    

This is the only think I cook in which I use canned Carnation evaporated milk. I rarely use canned anything in my cooking, but this is an exception. You can use cream or whole milk or raw milk; since I want mine to taste like my grandmother's pie, I use the old-school kitchen staple for this.

Pick your favorite pie crust -- I use the basic shortening crust from my ancient, tattered edition of Betty Crocker's cookbook. But this recipe also works wonderfully as a pumpkin custard with no crust at all.

Pumpkin Pie: 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. 

Line a pie plate with your chosen one-crust pie pastry. 

1 1/2 cups canned pumpkin, or a two-cup bag frozen home-cooked pumpkin puree
1 cup rich milk
1 cup sugar (not quite full)
1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cinnamon
pinch of cloves
 --you can add more of these spices to taste if you like

2 large eggs, slightly beaten
1 Tbsp melted butter
1/2 shot glass whiskey

Combine all ingredients and mix thoroughly. Pour into the pastry-lined pie pan -- I avoid sloshing by putting the pan on the oven rack first and pouring the filling in there.  Bake about 45 minutes or until an inserted knife comes out clean. Cool before cutting.

Top with maple whipped cream, and the coup de grace, a maple sugar candy leaf. 

Winter Crunch: Sauerkraut and More

Sauerkraut and Lacto-Fermented Carrots and Turnips

A forkful of crunch, tang, and summer garden flavor in the midst of winter, in old-school style: This is the joy of lacto-fermented vegetables. Much has been written about the new-found health benefits of lacto-fermentation, this food preservation technique is ancient -- and simple.

A great winter read to get you started is the little paperback by the Farmers and Gardeners of Terre Vivants, Preserving Food Without Canning or Freezing. It will give you some food for thought as you plan next summer's garden. But with cabbage available inexpensively through the winter at supermarkets and farmers' markets, it's a great time to try sauerkraut at home.

Slice, Salt, Pound

I had made sauerkraut a few times in the past, but Summer 2012 was a bumper year for cabbage in my garden, so it was time for a larger sauerkraut experience. I started with a crock -- but no need for one of these uber-expensive, water-sealed lacto-fermentation crocks that are en vogue in the seed and garden catalogs. I just found an old lidless one, about 3 gallons, that my mother had been using as a decorative objet d'art in the living room. Washed it well, then proceeded to production. Using about 5 pounds of cabbage, I quartered the heads and cut out the cores. Then I sliced thinly--about quarter inch to smaller-- with a big chopping knife while my husband layered the sliced cabbage in the crock, sprinkled with sea salt, and pounded it with a heavy piece of broken chair leg. A baseball bat end, wine bottle, or any non-pressure-treated and non-splintery heavy board would do, though again, they sell overpriced sauerkraut pounders if you feel compelled to drop lots of money on this operation.

Eventually all the cabbage is sliced, salted (I use about 3 Tablespoons total for 5 pounds of cabbage, but feel free to use a little less, though no less than 2 Tablespoons or the brine won't be the right chemical blend to spawn the right microscopic critter growth to produce the fermentation), and pounded down. At this point it should be swimming in its own brine; if not add a little spring water and perhaps a pinch more salt.

In lieu of those fancy expensive water-seal lids, I put one plastic food bag inside another so it's a big sturdier, fill it with water, and close with a wire twist-tie, then just to be sure, knot the bags over the twist tie to keep it from poking the bags. I put a small clean plate over the top of the cabbage to help weight them down evenly, then put the water-filled bag on top of this -- the bag spreads to fill the top of the crock to its edges, sealing out air but not so tightly as to prevent the bubbling fermentation gasses from escaping. Voila, a lacto-fermentation crock for cheap.

I set this in the garage in the late summer -- you are shooting for perhaps 60 degrees. Check it from time to time, and add some more spring water and sea salt if it seems to run dry, but unless you are in an extremely dry climate, it probably won't. Don't let it get too cold or freeze.

How long you leave it set is a matter of taste, preference and convenience. I really like my sauerkraut crunchy and tangy, so I like to leave it sit only two weeks. This year, with a large quantity at hand, I removed a quart mason jar's worth at two weeks and stuck that in the fridge to stop the fermentation, and left the remainder to ferment another several weeks, until it seemed to stop active bubbling and changing. Then I put that remainder in jars in the fridge, where it will keep for many long months.

Of course, I kept eating it right out of the crock daily through this entire time period, just because I could.

The two-week sauerkraut has a bite to it that I love, while the nearly two-month sauerkraut has a mellower, richer more complex flavor and a decidedly mushier texture. I have conducted numerous taste-tests amongst my friends, and find sentiments regarding preference between these two are nearly equally divided.

Beyond Cabbage

Meanwhile, inspired by the success of my sauerkraut efforts and the lovely advice of the Terre Vivant gardeners, I experimented with using the same technique -- minus the pounding -- for other  vegetables. I was producing small quantities of these, so I just used half-gallon mason jars instead of the crock to start. I made one batch of julienned carrots and turnips, and one batch of julienned turnips and snappy black radishes. I packed them in their respective jars, covered with a brine made of spring water and sea salt, and put on the two-piece screw-type canning jar lids, though screwed on just firmly enough to seal but still allow gasses to escape. Paranoid about the potential for exploding glass, I also just turned the lid open then closed again once every couple days to release pressure. I set these jars in a small metal tray on the counter and let them fester several weeks.

The result was delightful. The carrots and turnips are sweet yet tangy, with a nearly citrus-type flavor and delightful crunch. The turnips and radish have an almost horseradish-type condiment flavor. Both can work on their own as a little side dish, be served on salad greens, or brighten up a lowly hummus or turkey sandwich out of its winter doldrums.

Many cooks also add a variety of things to their cabbage sauerkraut. Fennel seed and/or onions are common variations, but I suspect there are dozens of possibilities.

Mason Jar Canning Safety and Lids

I've read several food bloggers getting quite dismayed over the use of the standard two-part canning-jar lid for lacto-fermentation in mason jars, on the theory that it lets outside air in. Some now strongly advocate the use of new special, expensive, one-way-valve lids for this purpose. I admit I don't have the scientific credentials to have the last word on this, but I have not been terribly concerned about it because if the jar is filled right to the top, and the lid lightly screwed on, the fermentation process creates pressure within the jar and is constantly pushing the air out. This is the same reason that the air escapes and then, on cooling, creates a vacuum when you boiling-water-bath can using these same lids. If air could get in under such circumstances, then air and water would get in when you were water-bath canning, wouldn't it? As long as you keep the jar filled to the rim by adding brine, the positive pressure (evidenced by the daily leakage into your metal tray) keeps the atmospheric air out of the jar, doesn't it? At least that is my opinion, and it has seemed to work just fine for me without costly special equipment, but I will leave it to each cook and consumer to use her own best judgement regarding her family's food safety. Just do be sure to use SOMETHING that can be vented if you lacto-ferment in mason jars, to prevent the glass from breaking.

Cold Day, Hot Soup

Slow cooker, old style -- cast iron on the woodstove

Black bean soup with what's-in-the-larder

It's snowing -- but it does that in Vermont in January, so all is right with the world. I had leftover sweet potatoes in the fridge from dinner two nights ago, so I set out to make black bean-sweet potato burritos.

Then I'd cooked more black beans than I needed (dry beans, cooked on the woodstove, are way cheaper than canned beans -- and no risk of whatever chemicals the can lining gives off, either, especially since they are local organic beans). So what to do with the rest?

Black bean soup.

Soup is the ultimate flexible dish. The recipe? Stock and whatever is in the larder. Here I even cheated on the stock. I kept the water the beans were cooked in, and added a couple jars of my canned tomato-vegetable juice. Then I grabbed a handful of carrots from the copious bin of them remaining from last summer's garden, a couple heads (yes heads) of garden garlic, and a couple locally grown onions. I was out of peppers and not driving out to the store in this snowstorm (mainly because I'm lazy and the woodstove feels too good) so I also drained and added a small jar of my canned jalepenos. Then the coup-de-grace, three peeled, chopped-up seedless oranges, as we weren't eating through the bag fast enough and they would no doubt have gone bad.

How to spice it? I tasted the onion-tomato-orange combo and decided exotic was the way to go. Some smoked sea salt, black pepper, some cinnamon, some ginger, a little Jamaican allspice, some dried parsley for added iron and vitamins, and just to finish it off, a dash -- more like a splash -- of my homemade hot sauce.

Now back on the woodstove it goes to simmer away and I'll taste-test it later. If it's too hot, I'll add some more tomato-veggie juice or some stock. Not zesty enough, more hot sauce.

Since we have the burritos for tonight, this can simmer along 'till tomorrow, adding some water or stock if it boils off too much. Then I'll make a nice crunchy cornbread to go with it (mine is always crunchy since we grind our own corn) and a green salad, and it will be the perfect hot meal for the predicted single-digit night.

Using up what you've got is the ultimate food security -- AND it can lead to the most creative and fresh dishes. Soup is a good chance to experiment; just chop whatever you have in the larder into roughly equal-sized pieces and throw them into stock or broth. Saute them first if you have a mind to, but it's not strictly necessary. Soup is also so incredibly healthful, usually low cal (unless perhaps it's something like a beer cheddar cream soup), high in fiber and nutrients, and filling.

What are YOUR favorite winter soups?

Winter Salad

Fresh Greens from the Garden--In Vermont in Mid-January!

 

 

In the coldest of seasons, in the darkest of days, life goes on, and hope--and salad greens--spring eternal.

It's January thaw -- that annual occurrence of a few days of balmy thirty or even forty degree weather that feels downright tropical after last week's minus 20 Fahrenheit (yes, that is not a type -- it was minus 20 a few evenings last week). Yesterday, dinner was roasted root vegetables, including the last kohlrabi and the last turnip of the year. In a separate pan, I also roasted the last of the beets, to put on salads through the week.

When temps rose above freezing this delightfully sunny morning, I took a stroll out to examine the yard. It had actually rained last night, and the two-foot snowcover was gone. My kale bed was bursting with new green and burgundy leaves. I pulled the soggy straw off the parsley and chard, and they too were sending forth new growth. I picked handsful of tiny new green leaves to start my salad bowl.

At the other end of the salad greens bed from the chard, a few blackened heads of raddichio had soldiered through the snow cover, without so much as a straw blanket to comfort their frozen heads. I pulled the largest, stripped back the outer leaves, and was rewarded with a nice 4 inch head of bright red raddichio to add to the dinner loot.

On to the cold frames. The small one held some bedraggled arugula; the little bed is really too small to provide much protection from the cold. The larger 4'X8' bed, however, looked like a jungle. Spinach, arugula, mache, and sweet little 2" long French breakfast radishes with their cheery ombre of fushia and white.

Washed, spun-dry and chopped, I had about two quarts of salad greens. Plenty for two big dinner salads and lunch packed for tomorrow. I added some of the roasted beets from last night, some chopped walnuts, and grated some pecorino romano cheese that I had in the fridge since, it being that time of the year, I was also too broke to go spring for some nice blue cheese which would have been the absolutely perfect thing. But the pecorino romano added a surprisingly nice touch, so it's just as well that necessity was the mother of invention for this salad!

It's true that there are salad greens for sale in the market this time of year, but even aside from the carbon footprint question of where those salads came from, the price is nigh on unreachable for those of us feeling the economic pinch. This salad of organic greens with zero carbon footprint cost me the twenty minutes or so of picking, washing and preparing -- and gave me the great joy, deep satisfaction, and yeah, okay, bragging rights, of having picked my dinner from my front yard in Vermont in the depths of winter.

Reinventing the Cheese Wheel: What is Cheese?

 

 On-farm cheese caves, 

like this one at Orb Weaver Farm in Monkton Vermont,

are where most of America's finest cheeses

 are finished to a delicious, marketable state.

The explosion of artisan-made, cave-aged cheese may be the latest thing in food marketing, 

but cheese itself is nothing new. Cheese is one of humankind’s most ancient methods of food preservation. This highly effective means of storing milk developed under the distinctly non-high-tech conditions of carrying liquid milk in sacks made from the rennet-rich stomachs of ruminants.  

“Cheese making is a process of preserving the solids of milk as curds. This is done by coagulating these solids with the help of rennet enzymes, cutting it into small pieces and then cooking and stirring to remove some of the water in the form of whey,” explains “cheese queen” Rikki Carroll, whose New England CheesemakingSupply of South Deerfield, Massachusetts has converted thousands of ordinary people into home cheesemakers.

The basic principles of cheesemaking are the same whether you are making a pound or two with a kit at home or a thousand pounds in a small-farm dairy. “With higher production you just need bigger equipment and more storage space,” Carroll says.

Cheesemaking can be tricky. As anyone who makes bread or beer knows, playing with molds, bacteria and yeast is quite a balancing act. Good bacteria like B. Linens need to be encouraged to produce a natural rind, while other bacteria like Pseudomonas fluorescens, that can turn soft cheeses bitter, need to be avoided.

Then there’s the milk. “All cheese used to be made with raw milk, then pasteurized milk became the industry standard,” Carroll says. “Now ultrapasteurized milk has a slightly longer shelf life but it breaks down the proteins and makes curd formation more difficult.”

Aging Cheese

Once cheese is made, it must cure or age in a cool, moist environment. Unlike fine wines, fine cheeses generally age over the course of months, not decades. But while wine bottles sit quietly undisturbed in their cellars, some kinds of cheese wheels demand constant attention, including turning and washing with batches of favorable bacteria or herbal flavorings on a daily or weekly basis.

Historically, most cheesemakers supervise this aging process themselves at their farm or cheesemaking premises. In European markets where a high volume of artisanal cheese flows from farms to plate each day, affinage, or cheese aging, has become recognized as a separate task from that of cheesemaking. Affineurs, or people trained to oversee cheese aging operations, have developed a mystique referenced with awe in the food industry—an awe that drives the price-point of branded cave-aged cheese sky high.

Next time we'll look at whether affinage really creates higher quality cheese or if it's primarily a marketing ploy.

Natural Disaster

While my own little shire of Middlebury remained just slightly affected by Tropical Storm Irene, much of the state of Vermont was devastated. This set of video clips is but the tip of the iceberg, and I encourage everyone to look at the updated aerial videos on www.wcax.com and the WCAX facebook page.

Flash flooding caused intensive, almost unimaginable damage to the state's infrastructure. We watched in horror as historic buildings and old and new bridges were ripped off their footings. Graveyards gutted with coffins floating downstream. Cars tumbling end to end in the waters as everyone tried frantically to see if there was anyone inside. Thirteen Vermont communities were wholly cut off from the rest of the world for several days. Most of those are now connected only by rough ATV paths. Crews are working around the clock to improve the access to at least temporary 4 wheel drive accessible roads.

Fortunately while the flash flooding was horrible, the wind and fury of the storm had dissipated by the time it got here, so areas not directly impacted by rising water remained intact. This is giving our state the resources to scurry through immediate clean up and disaster relief, and then longer term rebuilding. Had high winds impacted the rest of the state we would be looking at a much more sinister situation.

Vermont is very resilient when it comes to food security. Many people have gardens, and pantries full of home-canned goods. Those resources were put to the test here as many communities that had been cut off ran low on food. Through generosity and practicality people shared the contents of their melting freezers and the jars and cans from their water-soaked basements. But had it been slightly worse, or in a slightly different configuration, food and potable water could have become serious issues. As it is, they are strained commodities.

Rain barrels and home gardens will not resolve all ills of all natural disasters, but they help.  Obviously if it all gets washed down the river, it won't help. But a few rain barrels full of water in a landlocked community can sustain many people for many days. Dried beans and corn, as well as home-canned pickles, dilly beans, applesauce and relishes, last for years all with no additional electricity. A well-stocked freezer will last quite a while after the electric goes out, and feed you for a long time afterwards. My freezer is bigger than my needs, so I've lined the bottom with milk jugs full of water. It'll buy me an extra day or two without power, and give me over 20 gallons of water if the electric is out for longer than that.

Redundancy is one of the primary keys of disaster planning. Have a woodstove, and a camp stove, and a firepit. Have a main garden, and a few cherry tomato plants on the patio and a few cucumber plants in hanging baskets. Or put in some storage crops like onions or pumpkins at a different location -- in a community garden plot or in an unused corner of a neighbors field, or in a vacant city lot.

I keep thinking about the community gardens in Harlem that I talked about a few weeks back. Had Manhattan born the brunt of this storm, they would not have been enough to feed many people for very long -- especially if they were under water. They would have helped though. Emergency rations rarely include fresh produce so the greens and fresh tomatoes would have been welcomed by most folks. But I compare this to the cities I've seen in Italy and Spain, where every apartment has a balcony, and every balcony is a garden. If the Tiber flooded Rome 6 feet deep, like our Vermont cities are flooded, everyone in their apartments would have still had enough to eat for several days from the lettuce and tomatoes and miniature fruit trees on their balconies. I'm not saying it wouldn't be boring -- but they would be in a better position to survive and patiently await assistance.

I'm not an outright survivalist. I don't think we need to bury tanks of water and dehydrated rations in sealed pits in the back yard (that we then can't shovel out when the ground freezes). But having food and water resources at hand makes sense.