Tag: local food

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Kitchen Garden

Local Pasta Sauce

Pasta sauce made in the kitchen garden.

I went to the garden to see if there was any decent basil. There was. With it, plus garlic scapes, an onion from my plot, and the first harvest of San Marzano tomatoes, I made a traditional pasta sauce for dinner. There was just enough for the two of us because that is how many tomatoes there were. I look forward to this meal all year.

Without eight seasons of working on Susan’s farm, I wouldn’t be half the gardener I am. Garlic alone is a testament to the value of learning on the farm over successive years. Susan also taught me the value of a vibrant local food system. That said, my views of a local food system have evolved. What matters more is how we engage with the food system to provide nutritious meals year-around. It is important to know the face of the farmer, yet locale is not always the penultimate concern.

Bonner apples from local orchard; Red Haven peaches from Michigan; plum tomatoes for sauce; cherry tomatoes mostly for the food pantry; Cavendish bananas; local melon; tomatillos, Vidalia onion. Aug. 10, 2024.

When local farmer Paul Rasch gets Red Haven peaches from his relatives in Michigan, I’m likely to buy a bag. This summer treat is better than stone fruit I buy at the grocer, and part of a tradition going back to 2013 when I first worked at his orchard. These peaches have always been good, and they come only once a year. I’m okay with living with their season.

I have not been able to grow an adequate number of good-sized onions. I lean on the grocers because their produce is consistently available and good quality. We like Vidalia onions because of their sweetness. Buying them from a major grocer keeps us in supply. We also get yellow onions and probably should get white onions. When we do, it’s at the grocer.

It makes little sense to buy many apples at the store. We have a couple of great local apple orchards with a wide variety of fruit. During my eight seasons at Wilson’s Orchard I learned which varieties ripen when and our apple consumption follows the season. If we are lucky, I get a good crop at home for cooking, eating fresh and storage. When we don’t have a crop, I buy certain varieties to meet our needs, including a large amount of Gold Rush for storage into winter. We don’t eat many apples the rest of the year and when we do get them from a grocer, we buy organic.

There is no comparison to fresh, home grown tomatoes. When they are in season, we eat some daily. When they are out of season, we rarely buy them at the grocer. With tomatoes, it’s all about the flavor of home grown.

Life with a kitchen garden is a series of moments like the dinner with fresh, home made pasta sauce or from the bite of a Red Haven peach. These moments don’t go on forever, yet if we are lucky, they will repeat from time to time.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Summer of the Garden

Bur Oak acorns – 2024

More than any recent summer, this one has been exceptional for growing food in the garden. The rain came, then it came some more. Ambient temperatures were not too hot, and if they climbed above 90, it wasn’t for long. It has truly been the summer of the garden. I can feel it every time I go out there.

A garden represents humans asserting their will over nature. I have not been so disciplined. All the same, I’m getting onions and potatoes, yellow squash and zucchini, kale and collards, parsley and basil, peppers and peas, and oh my God, tomatoes! Today I harvested Zestar! apples and they are great tasting. I can’t keep up with the genetics and environment producing this abundance. That is okay. Let nature have its way.

If I live my life according the Social Security life expectancy calculator, I can expect to plant 13 more gardens. That’s exactly what I plan to do. We’ll see if I can take better control, not that I want to. It is all part of the great circle of life and I’m in it!

Categories
Home Life

Thistle Removal

First tomatoes of the season.

This year thistles grew near the east side of the house. While planting the garden, I let them grow. Now came the time to remove them and start a brush pile.

After morning reading, writing, and cooking, I took an old sweatshirt from the closet and put it on. Over that I wore coveralls. Socks, garden shoes, a ball cap, and heavy leather gloves completed the ensemble. The idea was to prevent the thistles from puncturing my skin. For the most part that was accomplished. Ensemble is a pretty fancy word for my attire. We don’t do much stylin’ around here.

These jobs seldom take as long as I plan. The idea is to do them well and do them once. While I had the lopper out, I cut back low-hanging branches I’ve been dodging all year while mowing. I cut back a total of five trees. By the time I pile up all the brush, it will be a decent stack. After I add the brush stored in a fallow garden plot, and conditions are good, I’ll burn it. I put the brush pile over the stump of a locust tree, having heard the fire will remove the stump. We shall see.

The first tomatoes ripened. Orange cherry tomatoes as is usually the case. The garden is a bit of a mess yet it is producing like crazy. The refrigerator is at capacity and there is no shortage of ingredients to prepare a meal. This abundance is complicated by the fact my spouse has been helping her sister for three weeks. I’m doing my best to prepare meals without leftovers, although that is hard to do dining alone.

When J.D. Vance was selected as the Republican vice presidential candidate I pulled down my copy of Hillbilly Elegy and read it. It hasn’t been a priority until now. The ivy league lawyer who grew up in poverty has a story to tell, yet, he makes generalizations that don’t ring true. I’ve known more than a few people, mostly family or kin, who are poor and live in Appalachia. To a person, the word hillbilly was never used to describe themselves. From there the book went downhill as having any broader application than his personal life. Vance’s story is engaging, yet it seems written to support his conservative point of view. When I went to Goodreads to declare I finished the book, the software wouldn’t let me rate the book. I got a message that said,

Do you suppose people are dunking on Vance now that he is running for high office?

Each summer I make iced tea a couple of times. I heat up the water and brew three black tea bags in a teapot purchased for our child’s long ago school project. I buy the cheapest black tea available and it serves. I drink it over ice, no sugar. It is one of the pleasures of summer. On a Saturday afternoon, there is little else more satisfying to a septuagenarian pensioner.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

When Dinner Is Obvious

Fresh lettuce from the garden.

I harvested the rest of the first round of lettuce before it bolted. The last few years, I’ve been growing lettuce under row cover and it has fewer bugs and better growth than when I exposed it directly to the elements. A gardener does what works and this does.

That afternoon I separated leaves and cleaned them in the sink. I lay them out on a large bath towel to dry before putting them away. As the afternoon progressed, it became obvious some of the lettuce should be part of dinner in the form of a big salad. So that is what we did.

Lettuce forms the base, and whatever vegetables and other items are available goes in. For protein we usually use beans, or in this case, we had leftover baked tofu. The mix of textures and flavors is hard to beat for a summer supper. We eat only lettuce that I’ve grown, when it is in season. The rest of the year we do without. There aren’t many dinners that are obvious yet this is one of them.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Pac Choi Ramen

Pac Choi Ramen with tofu and spring onions.

The building blocks of our kitchen came into play at dinner time Monday. Canned home made vegetable broth, tofu from Iowa City, brown rice flour ramen and white miso paste from China, organic carrots from California, and spring onions, garlic, and pac choi from the garden. This is the American vegetarian kitchen garden at work.

It’s not really local food, is it? The ramen was suitable for vegans, and the flavor of the pac choi really came through. No wheat in this dish, and it is the first time in a while I used tofu for something other than stir fry. It is unlikely 20-year-old me would have prepared something like this.

I reserved some of the pac choi leaves, yet in retrospect should have added them all. The dish didn’t suffer from lack of greens yet there is no sense being frugal about leafy green vegetables. The world is full of them and in general Americans don’t eat enough of them.

There is no recipe for this dish. It was a product of that moment, my experience as a cook, and available ingredients. Mainly, I had to do something with the abundance of pac choi from the garden. We should cook like this more often.

Cooking carrots first in my saucier.

The ramen was satisfying on multiple levels.

This was the first use of my new saucier, and I was happy cooking with it. At three quarts it is of a size to make dinner for four. I hope there will be many more uses of the pan.

It is easy to get behind using leafy green vegetables. The garden produces so many, and certain ones, like pac choi, are best used fresh. One more giant pac choi in the refrigerator then on to the smaller ones.

I’ve written about making vegetable broth before. Baked tofu has become our standard preparation. What set this dish apart was flavoring. Salt and white miso, highlighted the flavor of the pac choi. Likewise, there was enough garlic, but not so much to be overpowering. Making food that tastes good can be done. It is not as simple as it may seem.

Would I make this dish again. Probably something like it in the never ending meal that comes from a kitchen garden.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Goal Posts Moved in 2024

Pac choi under a covered row.

Instead of getting the garden in by Memorial Day, I moved the date to June 20 when summer begins. I have five plots laid out, plan to skip one this year, and may skip part or all of another. Large amounts of rain kept me out of the spring garden. The shelves in the greenhouse are slowly emptying, and soon initial planting will be finished.

We’ve been cleaning to make room for technicians to repair our washing machine. It generated a code which I couldn’t resolve, so I made an appointment. The service company telephoned and said I should contact Maytag about covering the repair under warranty. I did and they will. The code first appeared at almost exactly at the end of the initial warranty period.

It is surprising how much a modern household depends upon getting laundry done. I can’t imagine what it would be like to return to laundromats. The one in our small city closed years ago, so it would be a big to-do of traveling to the county seat or further to launder clothes. There is only so much time in a life. The less spent on laundry the better.

I opened the covered row and an abundance of pac choi, lettuce, and basil was ready. I brought the haul indoors, cleaned it, and put it away in the refrigerator. I made a sandwich with a generous amount of fresh lettuce for lunch. I don’t often buy lettuce at the grocer, so when I have it in the garden, I make the most of it.

There will be pac choi ramen. In January I bought a 24-pack of Maruchan ramen. When I make it, I throw out the flavor packet that comes with it and make my own broth. This time, I’ll make a vegetable broth using white miso, then saute onions, garlic and pac choi, mix them together, and cook the noodles in the resulting liquid. The abundance of fresh leafy greens is wonderful.

Also in the kitchen garden mix is pasta sauce using last year’s tomato sauce, onions, fresh basil and garlic. This first of the season sauce is also a chance to try out my new saucier. Basil doesn’t keep long, so by the time this posts, I may already have made it.

There is one head of romaine lettuce which I’ll roughly chop for a salad. Not sure what to do for dressing, but it will inevitably use extra virgin olive oil and home made apple cider vinegar. I can’t wait.

While I had to move the goal posts for finishing planting the garden, the harvest already begins. These are the good days for which we live during the long winter. It’s life, as good as it gets.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Getting a Saucier

Made In three-quart, stainless steel saucier. Photo credit – Made In website.

I came into some extra money from my writing and ordered a Made In, five-ply stainless steel clad, three quart saucier. I saw the device on Olivia Tiedemann’s Instagram channel where she recommended it for sauces, grain cooking, one-pot dishes, and more. It is her go-to pan, she said. Tiedemann is a private chef with more than 4 million Instagram followers. She makes short cooking videos, curses a lot, and flips the bird at the camera at least once during each episode. The saucier sold out on the Made In website shortly after I ordered mine.

I am very excited to be receiving this saucier, tracking the shipment a couple times a day. As I type, it is at a warehouse in Iowa City awaiting delivery, presumably today.

Buying a saucier is a poor man’s extravagance. Did I need a special pan to make sauces? I was getting along just fine. Do I want to be like Tiedemann? Maybe, except she is definitely oriented toward using all the meat and dairy products, unlike what goes on in our household. Once one eliminates meat, fish, dairy, butter, eggs and the like from meal preparation, cooking becomes something else. I’m hoping the saucier will help me down a path of developing sauces and dishes for our hybrid vegetarian-vegan cuisine. If I had real money, I’d dine at a favorite restaurant multiple times a week. I don’t, therefore, saucier.

Will the saucier change my life? I hope so. I hope to be a better cook in my kitchen garden. Imagination and a special pan may be the way to distinguish what I do here. The anticipatory excitement is well worth the money spent on the saucier.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Local Food Reconsidered

First big kale harvest, Spring 2020

I began following Buffalo Ridge Orchard in Central City this year. In part, that means I am divorcing myself from a local farm where I worked for seven seasons. In truth, Wilson’s Orchard and Farm hired one of the best chefs available to prepare dishes made from local foods and gave him his own venue. They appear to have successfully transitioned from a mostly apple crop to add flowers, strawberries, and other common, locally sustainable produce. They went big into hard apple cider, long the mainstay and chief reason pioneers grew apple orchards on their farms. They continue to experiment and expand. What’s not to be happy about?

I seek a different relationship with local food. I will continue to buy select varieties of apples from Wilson’s as well as in-season sweet apple cider. As a consumer, that has been most of what I bought there through the years. I am more interested in a collaborative approach, like the one on display at Saturday’s pop-up market at Buffalo Ridge Orchard.

Early Saturday morning I received an email notification of the pop-up market that day. Products of nine different farms were available. I know three of those farms very well. While I didn’t make it over for the sale, partly because our pantry is already full of spring goods, it is more attractive than pursuing a basket of strawberries on a large, crowded operation when strawberries are in season.

I grow a large garden and we eat fresh from it from March to November. When I seek outside produce, it’s because I’m not having a good year or choose not to grow certain items. For example, my aging and soon to be goner Red Delicious apple tree produces every other year and I need to source apples somewhere every year. The ones at the grocer are usually not the best quality. Too, I can’t imaging buying someone else’s garlic. I have had a steady, year-around crop since I began planting it ten or so years ago. A certain level of independence is assumed when a person operates a kitchen garden.

Another consideration is our mostly vegetarian household cuisine. We don’t eat meat or consume much dairy in the form of fluid milk, butter and eggs. For the most part, I buy dairy at the wholesale club because their buying power makes it much cheaper than local. Expense does matter, especially with commodities. Maybe I should give up dairy. That’s a conversation for another post.

One day I plan to return to the Iowa City or Cedar Rapids farmers market. I don’t need to shop there, yet I enjoyed the atmosphere when I did and brought home items we used. For years I bartered for a Community Supported Agriculture share at a local farm, although when I increased the size of my garden, the need for that produce diminished. A kitchen garden has been a natural evolution toward independence from the very local growers who inspired me. Some farmers told me such independence is a positive thing, rather than an infringement on their business.

Over the years this blog has posted a number of opinions about local food. What I learned was the idea of local food is constantly evolving. I continue to purchase groceries from a large, retail establishment on a weekly basis. That doesn’t make me any less interested in available local foods. Am I a purist? No, I am not. Nor need I be. It is challenging enough to keep track of what local food is available and where. I leverage it when it makes sense.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Plot Three Develops

Bee in the collards.

On May 8th I’m way behind in getting the garden in. The first plot is mostly garlic planted in October. I’ll finish that plot off with herbs, lettuce, bok choy, and spinach under row cover. The second is onions and potatoes which will soon need weeding. I don’t know what will go in plot three but I have to get cabbage and kale in the ground before they get root bound. So I guess that will be part of it. I also need to get peas in, so maybe I’ll plant those next to the fencing so they have a support system. This is more hodge-podge than I care to be.

Wednesday was taking down last year’s fencing and pulling up the ground fabric. I was on my knees most of the time while working. There are two large collard plants in full bloom with abundant pollinators. The buzzing didn’t bother me while I worked around them, and took photos. Just being in the garden is affirming.

I asked the neighbor about cutting back the overhanging branches from their wild wooded area adjacent to our property. I did that, and left the branches to dry before piling them up for burning on Thursday. It was getting so thick, I couldn’t get the mower through without knocking my cap off my head.

The last of the volunteer garlic was ready to pick as spring garlic. It looked like a head developed and I missed picking it last year.I trimmed it and brought it to wash in the kitchen. While the spring garlic dried on the counter, the aroma filled the space. It was wonderful.

On Tuesday afternoon I drove the 6 or 7 miles to the Ely creamery. They have a retail store with products they make, including cheese, fluid milk, ice cream, and more. I like the cheese curds particularly. When I was riding my bicycle during the pandemic, I would ride the trail to Ely and stop there as a turn-around point. Their prices are a bit high, yet it is good to support a local business.

I don’t work in the garden as long as I did. I have to stop after an hour or so and take a short break. If I keep at it, I can likely get everything in the ground by Memorial Day. At least that’s what I’m hoping.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Garden Enchiladas

Enchiladas, Spanish rice, and sauteed corn and bell pepper.

It seems early for a kitchen garden post yet here we are. The combination of a mild winter and plentiful plantings last year brought a Saturday vegetable harvest. There were collards, kale, cilantro, and spring onions growing in last year’s planting areas. Volunteer garlic came up where I plan tomatoes this year. After harvest, I cleaned the produce and made dinner with it. We had enchiladas, Spanish rice, and corn sauteed with bell pepper. I also used preserved guajillo chili sauce from last year. My recipe for enchiladas is here.

This meal has a lot of steps yet is worth the effort. The point I make today is while I enjoy plate photos like the one above, the sought end result is fleeting creativity in the kitchen, set in time, as I use ingredients picked an hour or two before. It is of such fleeting essences our lives are made.

During my time I viewed many television cooking shows, and lately, short-form videos about cooking. Rarely does any one of them stand out. Some are formulaic, some a brief distraction. There were so many of them, all the recipes and processes began to look alike. I mean, we know the combination of onion, carrot and celery with bay leaves makes a delicious soup base. We should know the Louisiana “holy trinity” is onions, bell peppers, and celery. How many times do we need to hear it? I imagine most of us have heard it enough.

It is possible to be a creative person. Creativity has some end goal in mind, with cooking, perhaps a plate photo or making a memory of a specific meal. Yet it is the process for which we live. I would never have put collard greens in the filling of an enchilada, except that’s what I found in the garden that day. I found fresh cilantro and that unplanned addition characterized the dish. While I often have recipes in mind, they are little more than a suggestion when cooking. The best of what we eat is often the result of a process that had no recipe in mind at the beginning. At least, it can be.

Grocers have a problem with my kind of food creativity. A grocer in a big box store must stock thousands of items while waiting for some customer to come along seeking one. They rely upon an item’s popularity to cover overhead and make a profit. Popular as they are, I can’t imagine many circumstances when I would buy fresh cilantro or spring onions at the grocer, even though they stock them all year. Therein lies the difference between my kitchen garden and cooking. There is something magical about a kitchen garden that can’t be replaced by commodities from the grocer.

Enchiladas are a well-liked meal in the United States and elsewhere. Our small community has two Mexican restaurants that sell them. If I wanted a Mexican-style dinner, I could just buy take out. That would be missing the point of time in the kitchen garden.