Chanterelles

Golden chanterelles, as precious as summer sunshine. Dinner tonight: Salad of fresh greens, a bowl of green peas in the pod, sumac and raspberry leaf tea, and chanterelle puffs, a light simple little fritter that lets the delicate earthy flavor of these mushrooms shine through.

I have a confession to make: I did not pick these chanterelles myself. There are a small number of mushrooms that I am confident picking and eating--dryad's saddles, morels, angel wings--and every couple years I add one or two more to that list. Chanterelles have not quite made it onto my complete confidence list. I have found carpets of them a few times... I think...but at the last minute I was not totally certain so I let them lie. Maybe in a year or two...

Meanwhile I bought this batch from a gentleman who sells wildcrafted foods at the Middlebury Vermont Farmer's Market. With my own gardening and foraging, it's not too often that I actually buy produce from someone else, so I was really excited about this.

Then I had to decide how to cook them. A simple saute in butter is always splendid with wild mushrooms, as is an omelet. Mushrooms and eggs just seem to go together. I opted for this suggestions from the Mycological Society of San Francisco Cookbook, and I'm glad I did. The buttery simplicity, the melt in your mouth texture of the dough against the chewy woodsy flavor of the mushrooms -- pure heaven.

Recipe: Golden Chanterelle Puffs

1 cup chicken broth (I used my fresh-made vegetable stock instead)
1/2 pound or so minced chanterelles
1 stick butter
1 tsp. sea salt
1 cup unbleached flour
3 eggs

Preheat oven to 450 and lightly butter a cookie sheet. Heat the broth in a saucepan; add mushrooms, butter and salt and bring to a boil. Slowly stir in flour a little at a time. Remove from heat and beat in eggs one at a time. Drop dough by tablespoons onto the cookie sheet, and bake for about 15 minutes until lightly golden brown on top. Cool them on a rack, then try not to devour them all at once. They are splendid slightly warm, and even better cold for lunch the next day.

Eggs

An ivory box without hinges or lid, but inside a golden treasure is hid.

As every Tolkien afficionado knows, the answer to this Hobbit riddle is ‘eggses,’ the calcium-coated chicken ovum eaten all the world over.   

Chickens were reputedly domesticated more than 8000 years ago, and chicken eggs are a nearly ubiquitous element of human culture. Hundreds of different varieties of chickens have been bred, some with exotic feathers just for show, others for meat production, and still others – like Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds – for superior egg production.   

Most small-flock local egg producers choose varieties with mixed characteristics, including Plymouth Barred Rocks and Wyandottes that are consistent layers but also look pretty. Araucana chickens are also popular with home egg producers as they lay those crowd-pleasing blue to olive-green eggs, which is so much fun that it’s well worth the fact that they don’t lay as consistently as something like a Rhode Island Red.  Contrary to legend, it is not necessary to have a rooster in order for chickens to lay eggs – but many home egg producers keep a rooster nearby anyway, believing that it gives the hens “encouragement.” 

Happy Chickens Make the Best Eggs

Chickens are inexpensive to raise, and, weather permitting, can roam and forage on their own through the day in many different environments, then come home at night to roost in nearly any snug dry place, laying their eggs in the morning right where you can find them before heading out to forage again.  Happy chickens are sociable creatures, seem to enjoy human company and make a full range of ‘chitchat’ sounds that are downright conversational.  

I have seen chickens kept under tiny residential stairwells in a small white stucco town high in Spain’s Andalusian mountains, and stashed into basement window ledges of modern urban buildings in Karachi, New Delhi, and Islamabad. In the Middle East and India, hard boiled eggs are sold by street vendors the way pretzels or nuts are sold in New York City.  The egg comes wrapped in a newspaper cone, with your choice of spice mixture at the bottom to dip it in, from herbed salt to firey hot pepper melange. 

Here in Addison County we suffer from an embarrassment of riches when it comes to eggs.  While folks in urban areas have to make do with bland, less-than-fresh eggs from their supermarket shelves, we have a local commercial egg producer, Maple Meadow, just down the road, as well as numerous small farm and home producers that grow eggs for personal use or farmer’s market and natural food co-op sale. 

Fresh eggs from healthy chickens who eat a varied diet and are free to walk around are distinctly different from factory-farm eggs. The fresh ones usually have thicker shells, brighter yolks, and a thicker, ‘meatier’ feel. There is one small disadvantage to fresher eggs though – the shells often stick to the whites after they are hardboiled, so if egg salad won’t do and lovely deviled eggs are absolutely necessary, you can always swap a dozen fresh local organic eggs with a dozen someone has bought from a  supermarket, and rest assured they’ll be better off for it.  Or just stick a dozen local eggs in the back of the fridge for a few weeks, and then make your deviled eggs.

Nutritional Treasure

Like meat, eggs contain complete protein.  At only 70 calories per single large egg, they also pack a nutritional wallop, including 15% of the RDA of Riboflavin and Folate, and 30% of the RDA of vitamin B-12 as well as significant amounts of vitamins A, D, and E.  Nutritional controversy rages, however, over eggs cholesterol content.  For several decades, nutritional guidelines have recommended stringently restricting the intake of dietary cholesterol on the theory that dietary cholesterol intake corresponded with blood cholesterol levels, and high blood cholesterol was associated with heart attack risk.  More recent studies call this correlation into question, and in 1999 the Harvard School of Medicine published an extremely extensive study in the Journal of American Medical Association indicating that of 177,000 people studied for 8 years, no difference whatsoever in heart attack incidences was found between those who ate less than one egg a week and those who ate more than one egg a day.  (JAMA 1999;281:1387-1394) If you are unconvinced, or your predisposition to heart disease makes you reasonably cautious, skip or minimize egg yolks: the white contains many of the positive nutritional components of eggs, but has no cholesterol.  With the rich, meaty texture of fresh eggs, you can easily make an omelet or scrambled eggs with three or four egg whites and perhaps one yolk, and not miss a thing.

Other recent nutrition news suggests that eating eggs has other previously unknown advantages. Dietary studies show that eggs for breakfast provide such a nice filled-up feeling that dieters tend to eat significantly fewer calories through the rest of the day.  And egg yolks have recently been discovered to be great sources of lutein and zeaxanthin, two substances that reduce the risk of cataracts and macular degeneration.  These nutrients are also present in green leafy vegetables, but may be more easily absorbed into the bloodstream when consumed in eggs.  Best yet, combine leafy greens and eggs in a wilted greens salad or spinach and broccoli quiche, and double your nutritional punch.

WILTED SPINACH SALAD

2 large bunches of fresh spinach

2 hard boiled eggs

2 tablespoons chopped chives or green onions

1 tomato

2 tablespoons crumbled strong blue cheese

juice of one lemon

2 tablespoons olive oil

optional – 1 tsp capers, or crumbled crisp bacon or tofu bacon substitute

fresh black pepper and sea salt to taste

Rinse spinach; place in large pot with just the water that clings to the leaves.  Heat on medium low just until wilted but still bright green.  Remove from pot, squeeze out excess water, and place in salad bowl.  Peel and chop hard boiled eggs.  Cut tomato in half, squeeze out and discard seeds, and chop the pulp.  Add eggs, tomatoes, and all remaining ingredients to wilted spinach and turn with two wooden spoons until well mixed.  Serve while still slightly warm.

Local Foods: Rhubarb

Rhubarb, or Rheum rhaponticum, is a perennial plant native to the mountainous regions of China and Tibet. Althought rhubarb will grow in many temperate areas of the world, a fondness for rhubarb seems to be focused in a few small localized regions including England, Sweden, New England and the Great Lakes area. I'd never heard of strawberry-rhubarb pie until I moved to Vermont. Now I can't comprehend missing out on this fabulous vegetable.

Localized food choices are an integral part of our web of food culture, and are an important counterpoint to the increasingly uniform and lowest-common-denominator fast-food-chain and agribiz-supermarket-produce phenomenon. Enjoying locally-favored food species and varieties entertains your taste buds, expands your life experiences, and helps you to bond on a deep yet subtle cultural level with the surrounding community. Sharing rhubarb plant divisions, bringing rhubarb to elder friends who no longer garden, and savoring that rhubarb pie every year on father's day weekend, is part of what defines our local culture here as Vermonters. Where ever you live, your own local food culture, including locally grown or developed plant species and varieties, is just as important.

It may be that one of the attractions of rhubarb is its early-season appearance. It's huge, burdock-like leaves emerge about the same time as asparagus, and in fertile soil it quickly grows to elephantine proportions. Rhubarb is a heavy feeder, so dig a deep hole and fill it with manure and compost before starting a new plant. If your rhubarb likes its surroundings, it will need to be divided every 3 or 4 years, which gives you an opportunity to renew soil fertility with a fresh batch of compost.

Gardeners in some less stalwart communities may have an aversion to growing rhubarb because it's actually poisonous. Well, the leaves are considered poisonous, in that they have a high oxalic acid content. It's the crisp, red celery-like stalks that are eaten raw, stewed, baked into pies and muffins, canned in jam and jelly, and just about anywhere else you can throw it if you happen to be a rhubarb fan. Cut each stalk near its base, being careful not to cut into other adjacent stalks. Cut away the leaf at the end of the stalk, and either let it lie to help mulch in your rhubarb plant, or throw it in the compost pile. When the white fluffy flowers appear in early June, on stalks that will soon reach 6 feet high, I cut off the first few flowers to try to delay the end of the season. The common wisdom is that once those flowers escape you, usually by mid- to late- July, the stalks go bitter and should not be cut.

I'm rather crazy about rhubarb. I love its appearance, and grow it in the front flower bed as an edible ornamental. My favorite way to eat it is raw, with a light sprinkle of sea salt. On larger stalks, I peel off the stringy skin, but on smaller stalks I just eat that too. The sharp tang of the rhubarb stalk with the bite of salt is like a real-life version of those horrific sour gummy candy things that kids adore, except without the artificial neon color and chemical ingredients. Granted, this is not for the faint of heart or those with an aversion to aggressively-flavored foods.

For the gentler spirits, Victoria sauce is rhubarb, chopped and stewed with brown sugar, with optional raisins and honey, cooked until it is just the right texture to pour over ice cream, pudding or angel food cake. Rhubarb also subs in well for tart apples in pie and crisp recipes.

A local favorite in my neck of the woods is Rhubarb Punch. Rhubarb Punch has been something to look forward to every year at our January pot luck supper at my local spinning guild, courtesy of fellow guild member Christine Rising Turner. I've finally asked her for her recipe, which she's generously shared:

Rhubarb Punch

When rhubarb is in season, cut 1.5 pounds of stalks--about 6 to 8 1" wide stalks, 18" long. Cut these into 4-6" pieces and stick them straight in the freezer.

To make rhubarb juice, remove a bag of the stalks from the freezer, empty the contents of the bag into a saucepan and add 1 quart of water. 2/3 cup sugar, and a pinch of salt. Heat on medium until the rhubarb has stewed down to mush. Strain the juice through a fine sieve or cheesecloth to remove the stringy bits.

To turn one batch of juice into punch, add a 1/2 cup orange juice, 2T lemon juice, another pinch of salt, and 1 1-liter bottle of seltzer or ginger ale.

Fresh lemon slices make it even more festive, or during strawberry season, mash some strawberries with a sprinkle of sugar and pack it into ice cube trays and freeze it, then remove the cubes and store them in the freezer in a Zip-lock bag. Throw a handful of these into your rhubarb punch around New Year's as a reminder that you're half way back to rhubarb season once again.

Fiddleheads!

Photos by Jack Rowell

Fiddlehead Fever: Succulent Scrolls of Spring

                              

The first of May is celebrated around Vermont in many guises, from flower baskets to the first lighting of the barbecue grill to organized labor demonstrations.  But no May Day festivity quite combines the sense of magic of the season with independent Green Mountain spirit of living off the land as an annual pilgrimage to pick fiddleheads.  These deliciously coiled new sprouts of the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris), named for their resemblance to the scroll at the tuning-peg end of a violin fingerboard, can be picked and eaten in Vermont with patriotic pride: they are our official state vegetable. 

Fiddleheads grow in alluvial and swamp muck soils from the far northern reaches of tundra to the bottomlands of Virginia, but folks in Vermont and Maine (where some call them ‘fiddlegreens’) have a special affinity for these elegant spring sprouts, which share the early season with such other wild-crafted delicacies as early dandelion greens and the first shoots of wild garlic. Restaurants across Vermont pay good money to local pickers to put fiddleheads on their plates beside the earliest spring-caught trout, possibly more to see the looks on tourists’ faces as they pick curiously at the strange green stems than for purposes of actually serving a nutritious, delicious vegetable.

Fiddleheads have their own unique taste, but it’s comfortingly similar to a good green bean or nice fresh asparagus.  While they can be eaten raw as a crunchy antipasto, do be warned that the Center for Disease Control has connected a few outbreaks of food-borne illnesses with raw fiddlehead consumption.  This is most likely due to residues of pollutants from the rivers whose bottomlands the fiddlehead inhabits.  No reports of health problems have been associated with washed and well-cooked fiddleheads. 

True fiddlehead afficionados hold their favorite fiddle-picking spots as safe-guarded secrets, protecting them with the same possessiveness as a Hobbit exhibits over his mushroom patch (and  fiddleheaders have been known to keep a weather eye out for the occasional early morel as well).   Fortunately, there are plenty such spots to go around along the banks of any of Vermont’s major waterways, from the White to the Black, the Otter to the Poultney.   Look for last year’s ostrich fern bases inside bends in a river, where March flooding has overwashed a sandy island and ancient willows drape their flowering wands in verdant curtains over budding pillows of dutchman’s breeches.  Or cheat and keep an eye out for where people are suddenly parking their cars and dashing off with buckets – the landlubber’s equivalent of fishing for runs of blues by watching where the other boats are clustering. 

Pick fiddleheads by simply snapping off the curls which have cleared the top of last year’s fern base cluster, but have not yet unfurled and are still wrapped in their papery brown scale covering.  Never pick all of the fiddleheads from any one fern crown; leave some to unfurl and gather energy back into the roots to support next year’s crop.  Walk gently around the fern bases, and try not to pick in a spot that other people have already heavily picked over. 

When you get your fiddleheads home, you’ll need to remove those papery brown scales that cover the overwintering fern crown.  There doesn’t seem to be any substitute to sitting on the front porch and picking these off by hand, one by one, but I have had some luck submersing the fiddleheads in a bowl of cold water.  I let them soak for about fifteen minutes, then place the bowl in the sink and let more cold water flow gently into it, allowing the brown scales to simply float away.  Sort of.  At least some  do. Then you still have to pick the rest off, so suit yourself. 

If you want more elegant looking fiddleheads, while picking off the covering, you can rub off the small leaves that may have begun to sprout out the sides, revealing a clearer spiral shape; you can also take a sharp knife and put a clean edge on the bottom stems, which may darken slightly where they were broken. 

As with all food wildcrafting, do exercise caution.  There is a slight danger of mistaking the edible fiddlehead ferns for other fern shoots like those of the Bracken Fern, which are known to be carcinogenic.  However, no fern but the edible fiddleheads has the distinct papery brown wrapping; most ferns are either smooth or have fuzz and fur. And should you make a mistaken identification, one taste should clue you in: most other ferns are intensely bitter and acerbic on the tongue.  If you are not completely confident of your plant identification skills, hook up with a skilled fiddleheader, bring along a fern field guide, or buy your fiddleheads at an early farmers market or your natural foods store – which saves you the trouble of getting that brown papery stuff off.

Your fiddleheads will taste their best if you cook them as soon as possible after picking.  As soon as you give up and admit defeat on getting all those papery scales off, get a pot of salted water boiling.  Drop the fiddleheads into the salted water (if you put them in first then bring the water up to boil, they’ll overcook and be mushy).  If you are going to use the fiddleheads in a dish requiring additional cooking – a quiche, soup, or in canning – five minutes ought to be about right.  If you are going to eat them out of the pot or marinade them, you’ll probably need closer to ten minutes of cooking time. 

Marinated Fiddleheads, Fresh or Canned

The simplest way to enjoy fiddleheads is to saute up some garlic in butter while they are cooking in the boiling salted water.  Drain the fiddleheads well, then toss them with the butter, garlic, and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.  Or mix up a good fresh Italian-style salad dressing with olive oil, cider vinegar, and fresh herbs to taste.  Amply drench the cooked fiddleheads in the dressing and let them marinade for a few hours before serving, or pack them into pint canning jars with approximately one-half inch headspace and process in a boiling water bath canner for ten minutes. Serve marinated fiddleheads at room temperature, on their own or over pasta or rice.

Blue Cheese Fiddlehead Crepes

My favorite, more elaborate way to eat fiddleheads is in blue cheese fiddlehead crepes, which I devised twenty years ago while living on the fiddlehead-rich banks of the White River. All proportions are simply to taste: 

Fiddleheads, lightly boiled and drained.

Garlic

Sweet white onion (or wild onion and garlic shoots)

butter

salt

white pepper (fresh ground black pepper may substitute, but not as aesthetically pleasing)

blue stilton, or other strong blue cheese

prepared crepes

prepared white sauce (flour, butter, and sweet cream)

chives

parmesan cheese

Preheat over to 300 degrees.  Saute garlic and sweet white onion in butter with salt and white pepper. Toss in the fiddleheads, then crumble in some strong blue cheese such as Blue Stilton.  Roll tightly in prepared crepes. Put the rolled crepes, seam side down, in a buttered lasagne pan. Add more crumbled blue cheese to your prepared simple white sauce, and pour over the crepes. and top with fresh chopped chive (or more wild onion and garlic shoots) and parmesan cheese.  Cover with foil or a glass lid and bake for 20 to 30 minutes, until they crepes are heated through.  Serve with a light rice pilaf, some slices of fresh lemon, and fresh ground pepper. 

Fiddlehead Quiche

Fiddleheads can substitute for the asparagus, green beans, or other vegetables in most quiche or cheese pie recipes, and makes a fine gratin with a well-aged Gruyere.  This variant of the classic Quiche Lorraine is simple, and works equally well for a hearty breakfast with homefries and toast, or a light dinner with a side soup or salad.

Pastry for 9-inch one-crust pie

6 slices bacon (optional – or substitute vegetarian bacon or tempeh) crisply fried and crumbled

1 cup lightly boiled fiddleheads

3/4 cup shredded Swiss cheese

3/4 cup shredded sharp Cheddar cheese

½ cup finely chopped onion (or slice onion in rounds and saute on low in butter until carmelized)

4 eggs

2 cups cream

3/4 tsp. Salt

½ tsp. Pepper

½ tsp. Cayenne pepper (or, for milder flavor, paprika)

Preheat over to 425 degrees. Prepare pastry.  Sprinkle bacon over bottom of pastry-lined plate.  Top with half of the cheese, then layer in the fiddleheads and onion, then the second half of the cheese.  In a medium mixing bowl with a whisk or hand beater, beat eggs well, then beat in cream and spices.  Cook in 425 degree oven for fifteen minutes, then reduce temperature to 300 degrees.  (To help avoid browned crust, you can cover the crust edge with a ring of aluminum foil for the first 15 minutes of baking.)  Cook approximately 30 minutes more, until a knife inserted half way between edge and center of pie comes out clean.  Let stand 10 to 15 minutes before serving. 

Cold Winds, Warm Food, Winter Wealth

The winter solstice has passed, but winter has just begun. It's time to start digging deep into the pantry, larder and cold frames for hot winter comfort food--starting with beets. If you were traumatized by slimy canned beets as a kid, it's time for some memory-re-adjustment. Beets are the source of much of the sugar you eat every day, which should tell you something about how sweet they are.

This year I grew six different beet varieties, some I'd grown before and some new to me. I'm forced to admit I was very impressed with the production and flavor of Kestral, and F1 hybrid -- I'm usually pretty adamant about growing open-pollination varieties but I make exceptions for F1 hybrids especially when I 'know' the seed breeder, like Vermont's own High Mowing Seeds.

But the biggest Wow in the beet patch this year was the Lutz Long Keeper, a OP Heirloom that grows quite bit. I picked a few of these through the fall for use as the other beets ran out, but I left about a dozen in the ground until the bitter end -- early December, just as the long, late warm autumn was about to crash into the single digits. I dug up the beets and the last of the turnips and rutebagas and put them in buckets in the garage with a bunch of dirt over them -- lacking a root cellar, a huge deficiency in my life.

I pulled the bucket into the kitchen today and washed and sorted the beets and turnips, putting all the golf-ball-sized ones in a bag in the bottom of the fridge for roasted mixed vegetables. The four largest beets I washed, trimmed, and put whole into a lidded casserole dish with some vegetable oil in the bottom. Set oven on 250 and left it for about four hours. Took the dish out and let it cool for a little while with the lid still on to keep the juices in there.

Then I toasted some chopped walnuts in a cast iron pan on the stove, peeled the beets and diced them, tossed them in a bowl with the walnuts and added crumbled blue cheese, the oil and beet juice from the roasting dish, and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Scooped a pile of it out over some fresh-picked microgreens mixed with mache and radicchio and a couple little chard, beet, and sorrel leaves from the cold frames.... heavenly!

It dawned on me that this simple garden-dug and window-sill-raised lunch of mine would cost a princely sum in a restaurant -- which got me pondering the concept of wealth. If you have tons of money, you get the privilege of being able to purchase food that humble cottagers grow in their front yards... that's ironic. Yet our society doesn't value the food or the farmer/gardener as much as the dollars that buy it. I guess I opted to just skip the whole intervening money-making part and grow the food myself. Yet even many of my friends who remained in urban areas don't get that -- they say, why do I want to spend all that time growing a carrot and having to touch dirt when I can pay someone else to do it for me?

I suppose that if the hours you spend making the money to buy your food are intellectually, spiritually and socially rewarding, then by all means, it's a better use of your time than growing your own food. But if your work is tedious and dull, or infuriating and soul-draining...

Think about digging in the dirt. There's great wealth to be found there. Where else can you plant a seed, watch your seedling grow, harvest the fruit, then close your eyes and savor the rich, sweet rewards on a snowy winters day?