In search of Laurie Colwin's Corn Relish Recipe

Ok, faithful readers, I need your help! I know someone out there has Laurie Colwin's books, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. Could someone, anyone, post or email me the recipe for the Blue Ribbon Corn Relish? Here on the farm with corn and peppers, longing to preserve, but I don't have my books with me. Many thanks, and I'll even send you a jar if you want one....

Chard Lovin' Mama

A new blog, from a real farm wife. Chard Girl is the nom de blog of Julia of Mariquita Farms, a fantastic organic farm in Watsonville. They have a website (see the links list at right) and a CSA under the moniker Two Small Farms.

Right now, she's talking elderberry pie, made by chef James Ormsby, late of Bruno's, PlumpJack, and numerous other very good places. I've picked wild mushrooms with him, and eaten his incredible backyard spit-roasted pork, and I can attest that anything he cooks is something you'll be very happy to put in your mouth. So I'm considering that elderberry pie, since we've got piles of shiny eggplant-purple elderberries ripe for the asking here. And I am on 'snack duty' for the garden crew these week...

Elsewhere in the farm-to-table adventures, my little kitchen-garden plot yielded half a dozen very groovy Suyo Long cucumbers, now languishing as four jars of bread-and-butter pickles (two of the cukes were too huge to pickle; the cooks made them into something vaguely Chinese for breakfast instead.) Very, very simple, and people who like this kind of pickle really love these, especially with a burger or a grilled cheese sandwich. If you're not getting all locavore-ish by using your own garden cukes, nice little Kirby (also called pickling) cukes are your best option, since they don't have the wet seedy middles of your average cuke. This recipe came from a back issue of Simple Cooking, John Thorne's excellent food newsletter.

Bread & Butter Pickles

[makes 4 pint jars]

6 cups pickling (Kirby) cucumbers, sliced
1 red onion, peeled
1 green pepper
1/4 cup fine sea salt

2 cups dark brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon tumeric
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1 tablespoon whole mustard seed
1/2 teaspoon celery seed (optional)
1 teaspoon ground hot red chile pepper
2 or 3 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups cider vinegar

4 pint-sized glass canning jars, with two-part tops (rings and lids)

Wash the cucumbers but do not peel. Cut off the ends, and then slice cukes into thick slices. Peel the onion and chop into bite-sized chunks. Seed, core, and shred the green pepper. Toss all these with the salt in a nonreactive bowl (glass, enamel, ceramic, stainless steel, NOT aluminum), cover, and let stand 3 hours.

Meanwhile, put 4 pint canning jars (without rings or lids) into a large, deep pot. Fill with water to cover by at least an inch or so. Bring pot to a boil and let simmer for 10-15 minutes to sterilize the jars. Turn off the heat, drop in metal rings and leave jars in the hot water while you prepare the pickles.

Drain cukes thoroughly in a colander, rinsing well with cold water, and set aside. Put all the syrup ingredients to a large pot, bring to a boil, and cook, boiling, for 5 minutes. Then mix in the pickle ingredients. Bring the syrup back up to just below a boil, stirring occasionally.

Pack into the pint preserving jars, leaving 1/4-inch of space at the top of the jar. Wipe jar rim with a paper towel dipped in hot water. Using tongs, dip each flat lid into the hot water from the jars’ boiling. Then place lid over jar and screw on metal ring until it is finger-tight.

Replace sealed jars in pot of hot water (you may need to bail out some excess water from the pot.) Bring pot back to a boil and process jars for an additional 10 minutes. This is not a crucial step but helps ensure a good seal.

After processing, remove jars from hot water with tongs and set on a towel or cooling rack. Do not move until completely cooled. When jar is cool, test seal by pressing down on the middle of the lid. If it pops up and down, it didn’t seal properly; it’s safe to eat but must be stored in the fridge like an opened jar. Jars that have sealed can be kept in a cool dry place for up to a year. Pickles are best if you let the jars sit for a few days before eating.

Cause that's how we roll

It's just me and Oscar the dog, housesitting this weekend--aka sleeping and showering INSIDE, doing laundry without the long walk with a duffle on my back, watering the tomatoes, drinking pink wine left over from the wedding, teaching Lanette to knit, and wallowing in farm vegetables, which are in high summer abundance right now--peppers, zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes and tomatillos, potatoes, basil, beans and more. Much canning to be done--dill beans, corn relish, bread and butter pickles from the cukes growing my little kitchen garden patch, plum jam, pear butter...

But this morning I'm on the biscuit production line for brunch with Catherine and her visiting Dallas family. Making a really fluffy biscuit is life-long quest of mine, so wish me visitation from the Southern biscuit angels. Thinking of making half plain, half pepped up with grated cheese and minced rosemary, a particularly felictous combination.


Music to Roll By:

"Hollywood", Collective Soul
"Rehab", Amy Winehouse
"Don't You Fall", Be Good Tanyas

Wedding Bread

Christina and Sally got married! At long (12+ years) last, these two hotties have finally tied the knot in public, with white roses, Bellinis, and Billy Idol's "White Wedding" as the recessional..

It was a lovely, lovely Northern California day under the oak trees in San Rafael, clear and sunny with a long, long view over the undulating lion-colored hills. Everyone dressed up and drank champagne dolloped with honey and peach puree, the peaches picked by PQ herself the day before on the farm. Lots of organic farm produce made it up to the wedding, for platters of roasted summer squash, baby potatoes, cippoline onions, carrots, and red peppers, and crudites of cucumbers, green beans, broccoli, and even more peppers and carrots. There were beautiful dips galore made by Susie and Heather, and ravishing plates of leg of lamb. Being on the veggie bean-mush farm diet has turned me into a raging carnivore--how much of that lamb I packed away all on my very own, I wouldn't like to say. Shar made the special love-juju hummingbird cupcakes and peaches-and-cream cake, Sally's old pals Tess, Reggie, and Carol dressed up in sequins and lip-synched and danced for Christina, and both the Lucys (ages 4 and 10) had a bang-up time.

Love was in the air, and if only K. had been there, all would have been perfect. But she's on her way to California soon--just a week! And she'll be here, ready to be wined and dined and relaxed among the redwoods, far from the chiggers and poison ivy. And I'll be off the farm, which, lovely as it is, one really needs to get a break from every so often, back into the land of non-shared everything and soft clean inside beds.

Part of their ceremony was a ritual sharing of bread and honey. The honey came from a black-lava beach where they did their own private wedding ceremony last year; the bread I was honored to make that morning. So we call it a

Sweet Wedding Moon Bread for a Feast of Love

1 cube fresh yeast, or 1 packet dried (fresh is nicer, if you can find it in the refrigerated section of your market--it's often on a little shelf near the butter and yogurt)
1 1/2 cups tepid water
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup olive oil or soft butter
2 cups unbleached white bread flour (with more as needed to make a soft dough)
1 tbsp salt
2 1/2 cups whole wheat bread flour
Add-ins:
chopped pecans, diced dried figs, golden raisins, pumpkin seeds

1. Dissolve yeast in tepid water, and let stand 5 minutes.
2. Stir in honey, olive oil, and 2 cups white flour. Sprinkle on salt and whole wheat flour.
3. Stir in additional white flour to make a soft dough. Knead well for 10-12 minutes, until smooth and springy.
4. Let rise to double in bulk. Punch down, knead briefly, and pat into a flat rectangle. Sprinkle on nuts and dried fruit, folding the dough over and kneading gently to incorporate. Shape as desired. I made this into a flat oval, then made diagonal cuts in the middle of each side to make a fougasse shape. But you could also make a regular loaf, or a foccacia-type flatbread.
5. Let rise 30-40 minutes.
6 Bake at 400F until nice and golden brown. Let cool to warmish, then eat with butter and honey.

Farm Fashion, Part 1

Friday was Farm in a Skirt Day, no exceptions, and everyone did it, even the farmboys from Texas and Arkansas. On Wednesday, a couple of the guys hit the thrift stores, and by Thursday breakfast a row of skirts was hanging from the ceiling with a note, "Skirts $4, boys take priority." I didn't have a regular skirt that I wanted to get farm-dirty, so instead I dug out this sparkly hippie caftan, property of the late PQ grand-mere. Note the belt, holding both my pruning shears and harvest knife, and yes, capri pants underneath, so I could tuck the ground-sweeping skirt up into my belt without wowing my fellow farmies with the sight of my undies.

Putting everyone in a skirt made the day just terribly festive, somehow. And nearly all the dudes commented on how free they felt. Okay, actually they talked about their balls, but we're about the pies here.

And yes, as mentioned earlier, apricot galettes were made in the up-garden chalet kitchen. Quite simple, really--2 1/2 cups flour, a tablespoon of sugar, a tsp of salt, 2 sticks (8 oz) butter, ice water with a splash of cider vinegar, mixed and cut in and tossed together the usual way. Then up the ladder to pick a bowl of sun-freckled little apriums, pitted and tossed with sugar, a little cornstarch, a pinch of nutmeg and allspice. I remembered too late that you have to roll out the dough and put it onto the baking pan before you start piling in the fruit. Thus getting the fruit-heavy, tippy thing off the counter without tearing wasn't easy, requiring an offset spatula and some muttered pirate-worthy language.

So roll your dough into a rough circle, slap it onto a baking sheet, then pile up your nicely sugared fruit. Lap the edges of the dough up over the filling, leaving an open space in the middle to show off the color. Bake at 375 or 400 degrees until the fruit is softened and giving up juice and the pastry is deep golden. Let cool as long you can stand; it's best warm rather than boiling hot.

Friday is Galette Day

It's a perfect beach day in Santa Cruz. Maybe you can imagine me there, laying on the warm sand with the sparkly blue water and sea gulls edging up the sand to eye my lunch. Or put me next to a swimming hole surrounded by shady redwoods, or under a tree anywhere, watching the fine clouds etch lace over the high blue.

Whatever you do, don't put me where I have to be, sitting next to a concrete pillar in an atrium adjacent to the library, typing away. For well-paying work, so I shan't complain, although that sunshine does look mighty pretty, and there's a moonlight hike I'm going to be skipping too, for the sake of a job to do. But at some point tomorrow, the Green Zebra tomatoes and sweet Thai basil will get planted in my freshly-dug bed in the kitchen garden--a rough little plot behind the kitchen where we can have our own private plots. I didn't even mind heaving a wheelbarrow full of compost all the way from 'compost row' this morning--not usually my favorite job, but it's amazing what a little private ownership can do to one's incentive. Living here has made me appreciate many things, and having my own space is one of them.

The 'up', or Chadwick, garden, where I'm working for the next six weeks, is a maze of fruit trees and organic roses, with beds of lettuce, onions, and many many peppers squeezed in higgledy-piggledy wherever there's room. Passing the heavy-bearing aprium trees every morning on my way to the greenhouses, I resolved to use the little farm kitchen for a spot of galette-making come Friday. And it worked: during our two-hour break from noon to 2pm, I whipped up a batch of dough, picked a bowl of not-quite-ripe but tasty fruit, assembled two galettes and got them in and out of the oven. They were gone too quickly for photos, but recipe to follow...

pies for a birthday

When the fruit is ripe

I will bake you pies all year long,

apple



strawberry


peach


and



lemon meringue


Happy birthday, K.

On the Farm

All last year, I used to log onto the "daily farm photo" over on Farm Girl Fare and feel wistful. Now every morning I'm walking through a new day on the farm--fog over the ocean, sun on the strawberries, spider webs strung through the kiwis. This is the sign leading to the back farm entrance as well as to a university housing complex known as The Village. But I love this sign; it always makes me think that the road will lead to a Bruegel scene with haystacks, thatched roofs,and women with little caps and long aprons.



This is part of the main field, where I'll be learning irrigation for the next 3 weeks. Lots of greens growing here, plus flowers, beets, carrots, cauliflower, and garlic.


The plum orchard, with a huge fruit set that we've been diligently thinning.

And did I mention that the farm's open to the public daily from 8am to 6pm? Or that we'll holding a fund-raising strawberry shortcake festival, made with organic berries harvested right here, on Wednesday, May 23rd, from 3 to 6pm? I'll be the one in the pink hat and pink-striped apron, handing out bowls of cream and strawberries.

Happy Mother Earth Day

The ingredients for Saturday's dinner, foraged from the garden and farm. The last of the spring rhubarb and a few broccoli leaves from last winter's bolted plants, three small artichokes and a handful of purple-stalked asparagus from the perennial beds, plus new spinach and a head of red-leaf lettuce. And for dessert, sun-warmed berries from the strawberry patch.

You Are Horribly, Horribly Old

What I wouldn't do to swap my 39-year-old smarts for the knees (and backs) of my 23-year-old fellow farmers... Weeding baby onions and planting long, long rows of peppers in the sweltering sun yesterday, I felt beyond creaky.

But the best moment was lying down in one of the just hip-wide furrows of earth between the rows. Cradled in the clods, I did feel nutured by the earth. Or maybe it was just the joy of being stretched out instead of folded up.

Later, there was an impromptu dance party in the farm center, with everyone rocking out to "Come on Eileen" and "Just Like Heaven" and I realized I was the only person there who had personally danced to that stuff when it was actually on the radio, in my assymetrical haircut and silver shoes. And then I pulled a muscle in my hip and have been limping around the farm all this morning, feeling even more old and gimpy, if that were even possible. Or worse, like the fake-young man at the beginning of Death in Venice, the one foreshadowing von Aschenbach's eventual transformation and downfall.

Making fresh cornmeal waffles helped, but still...I need to find a way to reconcile my brain and body with the 20-something crew around me.

Carrot Salad for a Heat Wave

Sitting in the excruciating hip Ritual Roasters on Valencia and 22nd Sts right now, drinking an iced decaf americano (first proof of hipness: no decaf drip. Clearly, in this setting, decaf is as uncool as your mom's 5 lb can of Folger's) to chill out during this unexpected but blissful Bay Area heat wave. At the counter, displayed under a sign reading "Because you're not the selfish bitch everyone thinks you are," are little red gift cards emblazoned with chipper slogans like "You're an asshole without coffee." On the sound system is a violin-drenched Canto-pop remix of the James Bond theme. It hurts a little, really.

But then again, really good coffee, couches, wireless and all the soul patches you'd ever want to see! After a late night and early morning making lemon-poppyseed muffins (white flour! no quinoa! naughty, naughty!) and farm-produce frittata (spinach, arugula, tarragon, spring onions, and mint, all picked fresh by moi, sauteed with local eggs from Everett Farms), followed by homemade whole-wheat pita (really fun to make, and they actually puffed into useable pockets) with hummus, falafel, carrot-mint salad, more spinach, and peanut butter cookies both straight up and vegan, I got the heck outta Dodge and came up to to a happy, sun-drenched Cinco de Mayo San Francisco. Every tattooed girl and boy and all their dogs were celebrating by drinking Tecate and eating chips in Dolores Park; Lanette and I hit the worth-the-hype Bi-Rite Ice Creamery for mint-chip and butter-pecan scoops first, then joined the throngs basking on the grass for mimosas with her pals.

I had good intentions for boosting my farm fashion quota with cute and useful t-shirts and overalls from Buffalo Exchange and Thriftown. Which means, of course, that I am going back to tentland with a fabulous rhinestone-studded 50s party dress, bought at a Valencia Street fence sale for $5.

Of course, I had to make big bowls of mango salsa and guacamole, my favorite California foods, to go with the mojitos at Shar and Jackie's. These are so easy that they hardly garner actual recipes. Mango or avocado, lime juice, salt, red onion, cilantro, minced jalapeno, mixed up together to taste. Don't skimp on either the lime or the salt.

What you do need to make, however, is that carrot-mint salad, a made-up dish that was the hit of the plant-sale picnic, at least in my mind. Sort of vaguely Moroccan, and much better than that boring carrot-raisin salad that everyone makes. Because the flavors are concentrated, this works best as an addition to a sandwich or as one of several dishes, rather than as a stand-alone itme. The mint is really wonderful, and adds a nice zing that balances the carrot sweetness. No measurements, since it's dependent on the number of carrots you have and how much salad you want. The mint shouldn't overwhelm; you just want lots of nice green flecks among the orange.

Carrot Mint Salad

carrots, peeled and grated
mint, stemmed and finely chopped
a couple glugs of olive oil
a good squeeze of fresh lemon juice
a splash of mild vinegar, like apple cider or rice
salt and coarsely ground black pepper

Mix all ingredients up; the dressing should lightly coat the carrots without sopping. Taste and adjust. Chill if not eating right away.

How can you keep them down on the farm?

Much bustle here on the farm today, as we get ready for the big fund-raising plant sale this weekend, at the Barn just past the main entrance to UC Santa Cruz. After making many, many wheelbarrow trips back and forth from greenhouse to truck, I drifted off down the slope with a bucket to thin the extra fruit off the apple trees. A wet and meditative job, deciding which of the five or six baby apples in a given cluster will live to become fodder for this fall's pies, and which ones will hit the bucket, destined for compost.

My plant sale job, you may be SHOCKED to learn, is cooking breakfast and lunch for my fellow farmies (yes, we're called that for real--they've even made a great army-green t-shirt with F*A*R*M*Y across the front) as they work the sale. So I'll be on duty from 5:30am (to get breakfast toted down by 7am) to about 2pm, and then....up to the city!!!

I actually didn't get into San Francisco during the couple of days between arriving on the west coast and heading down to tentland, so I'm very, very excited. And even more excited to sleep inside where it's warm, and have a bath! And eat MEAT, instead of kale n' beans n' beets. And maybe even a hot tub at Osento, and ice cream from the new Bi-Rite Ice Creamery. Two days of city glam, without farm boots or flannel! Except, of course, my fabulous psychedelic-pink flannel pajamas, courtesy of Queen Christina.

a poem for a huge pink moon

The stars will come out over and over
the hyacinths rise like flames
from the windswept turf down the middle of upper Broadway
where the desolate take the sun
the days will run together and stream into years
as the rivers freeze and burn
and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we know
what will we say to each other.

- Adrienne Rich, Dream of a Common Language

Last week, I asked for poetry, and Jen happily complied (see the comments below for 3 swell poems). But this one turned up in an email from my old college pal Christine, currently living in London with her husband and son.

The First Rule of Pie Club...

is, bring your own butter. Living with 45+ people, butter goes fast, and by Sunday night, there's not a whit of dairy in fridge, nary even a drop of Almond Breeze for morning coffee.

Besides the butter (which we brought in from Trader Joe's), Sunday's teaching pies were almost all home-grown. If we'd had the time, we could have ground the flour from wheat grown here last summer. The rhubarb was pulled from an overgrown patch down near the quince trees, while the strawberries came from the sweet and juicy rows next to the garlic and leeks. With a paper bag full of rhubarb, I kept foraging, slicing a few late-season purple asparagus, nipping off a couple of baby violette artichokes, and pulling up some thumb-sized purple potatoes that had volunteered in a spare uncleared bed. Everything was purple!

Anne had never made pie before, but before the end of the night, she'd been anointed a true Pie Princess, for fearlessness in the face of lattice. The diehards who stuck around til 11pm were rewarded with hot-from-the-oven strawberry-rhubarb pie. Another pie was surreptitously brought out at breakfast, mmmm. A proposal for an every-other-Sunday night pie club has been bandied about, with plans for Meyer lemon tart next up.

but this one is just right....

Many things are in abundant supply here on the farm: quail; pocket gophers; gopher snakes to eat the gophers; and of course, the aforementioned kale, now making an appearance at every meal, even breakfast! But glamour, alas, is not one of these things. Not until this morning, however, when former apprentices Daryl, Matthew, and Doron showed up to make our breakfast much more fabulous than usual.

You'd be surprised how much more alluring oatmeal can be when it's spooned into a waiting bowl just for you by a guy in a red feather boa, mardi gras beads, and a kimono jacket. The oatmeal was divided into 3 vats, descriptively labeled "Lumpy", "Smooth but Runny", and "Mortar". Chopped kiwis (from the farm-yes, they grow here, on long vines), walnuts, raisins, and brown sugar were on offer, and even if you'd never had an opinion about oatmeal before, the outfits and ceremony cheered everyone up. And at dinner, there was tempeh mole, tortillas and hot sauce, yellow rice, sauteed kale, even warm vegan chocolate cake.

But what I want even more than lumpy oatmeal and chocolate cake is poetry. Send me your favorite poems! Especially if there's some kind of nature component. Ok, to be honest, a real bed is what I want most, but showering in the outdoor solar shower this afternoon, with the blue sky and green leaves visible above the hot shower spray almost made up for 2 weeks of damp and chilly sleeping on the ground.

I can't give you anything but kale, baby

It's chilly out here on the top of the hill! Not 6 inches of snow on the car chilly, as it was in Lake Snowbegone last week, but living outside all the time is taking some getting used to. Going inside one's tent doesn't raise the temp any, a fact I'm still not quite adjusted to. And going from work clothes to pajamas--and then back again in the morning-- well, it takes some teeth-gritting for this steam-heated city girl.

But the farm and the view over the fields of Monterey Bay is just crazy beautiful, and it's very peaceful to wake up to birds (and my fellow farmie's alarm clocks) instead of trucks and cars revving by. I'm achy from chopping down the cover crops (bell beans and oats) with my brand-new spade and fork, but the reward is all the steamed kale and chard you can eat. Next week, I'll be on "bread duty" with Ben from Pt. Reyes's fab Brickmaiden Breads, so expect plenty of good tips on working with sourdough and making 20 loaves in a couple of bakings.

Westward Ho!

Today is my last day in the tiny apartment in Lake Snowbegone, soon to be replaced by an even tinier tent on the top of a hill in Santa Cruz. So, in honor of using up the stuff in the kitchen that K. wouldn't (like lard, yeast, chickpeas, and poppy seeds), I went on a bit of a cooking binge yesterday, making stuffed eggplant with onions, tomatoes, chickpeas, and feta, followed by a puffy loaf of whole-wheat-oatmeal bread and a big apple galette. Mmmm.

The bread was completely made up and thrown together. One packet of dry yeast, dissolved in about 1/2 cup water and thrown into the quart-size empty yogurt container doubling as my whole-wheat flour cannister. There was maybe a cup of flour in there; I mixed in the yeast and water and added enough water to make a goopy batter. Let it rise as a sponge for an hour or so, then stirred it together with more water, a teaspoon or two of salt (honestly, I just poured out some into my hand and dumped it in), an egg because our supermarket carries good marigold-yolked local eggs, about half a cup of rolled oatmeal flakes, a good glug of the Cobble Hill honey Amy gave us as a leaving-Brooklyn present, and enough white flour to make up a smooth dough. Kneaded it, let it rise, rolled it into a ball, let it rise again, then glazed it with egg yolk and sprinkled with poppy seeds, to bake until brown at 350F.

Once you've made bread a bunch of times, you realize that there's no real need for measuring. As long as you have a rough idea of the proportions of water, flour, and salt, you'll get a nice loaf. You can do with a lot less yeast than you think; I usually use one packet for 2 loaves, about half of what most recipes call for. Yes, the rise is slower, but you don't get than beery-yeasty taste that can plague some homemade loaves, and the bread stays fresher longer. I still use recipes when I want to be sure of a particular result, or when I want to try out a new method or combination, but it's relaxing to know that there's no need to get out the cookbooks and teaspoons just to make an ordinary toast-for-breakfast loaf.

Why bring this up? Not to toot my own bread-making horn, for sure. But to encourage all you bakers out there to loosen up in the kitchen. Bread is remarkably forgiving. Short of killing the yeast with too much heat (dissolving it in hot water or using a really hot rising place--for example, don't leave the bowl full of dough on top of the stove when you're preheating the oven), your bread dough is more friendly and flexible than you think.

And the galette was a happy, not really measured treat too. Not having a pie pan or a rolling pin up here, I made do with a Grandma's molasses jar and a cookie sheet. The dough was 2 cups of flour, 1/4 tsp salt, 1 TB of sugar, with 4 oz of Flying Pigs Farm lard and 4 TB (2 oz) of salted butter cut in. Enough cold water to make a just-holding-together dough, flattened and wrapped in plastic wrap and chilled in the fridge for a few hours. Rolled out into a rough circle on the counter, then slid onto the cookie sheet. Peeled and sliced a half-dozen Empire apples, then tossed them with a little raw sugar, some crumbled maple sugar, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg and a few shakes of salt. Heaped the apple slices in the middle of the pastry, then flapped the dough over the apples, leaving a hole in the middle. Glazed with an egg yolk beaten with 1 TB of water, sprinkled on some more raw sugar, and baked until the crust was deep golden and the apples tender at 400 degrees.

Thanks to the lard, the dough was lovely and flaky, and not as hard to work with as a shorter butter crust.

Now, back out the best coast, and life on the farm!

Je me souviens les neiges d'antan

Snow on Easter. That's not the only reason I'm fleeing Lake Snowbegone for California come Friday, but it's certainly one reason I'm happy to be kissing upstate NY bye-bye. Actually, though, the fact that we were dodging snowflakes on Sunday may have had something to do with being in Canada. Yes, who knows why, but we went north last weekend, to a place even grayer and colder than this one: Montreal!

It was freezing when we arrived, and as we shivered down the street we did look at each other to wonder why we weren't in Florida, K.'s warm and lovely home state. When K. called her mom on Sunday, she said they were having a bit of a cold snap, so it was only 70 degrees. If she weren't such a nice lady, I'd have cussed her out.

But, weather aside, Montreal was as close to Europe as we could get driving. We didn't have too much time, but we did see lots of old stone buildings, the inside and out of the Basilica Notre Dame, carriages drawn by horses wearing bunny ears, and the gay Timmie's in Le Village.



What did we drink? Vin chaud, hot chocolate with cinnamon and cardamom at the hip, cute Au Festin de Babette tea salon and chocolate shop, locally brewed beer with polar bears on the label. And we ate maple everything, from the divine "danoise" (that's danish to you, mate) pastry smeared with pale maple cream at the Patisserie Premiere Moisson to chewy maple taffy poured out on snow and rolled around a stick (known there as tire d'erable, or what we'd call sugar on snow). There were maple products everywhere: tiny ice-cream cones filled with maple syrup, maple sugar hard and soft, even maple liqueurs. Maple syrup in a can was in every shop. The Quebecois maple obsession makes the maple-makers of upstate New York look like pikers, I can tell you.

What else? We went to the wonderful Jean Talon Market, indoors for the winter, and lined with shop after shop selling veal, pork, lamb and sheep's milk cheese, fromage cottage in numerous flavors, sticky Moroccan pastries and hot mint tea, rabbit sausage, live spiky-legged crabs from the Gaspe peninsula, and fabulous French-language cookbooks . After sampling everything in the market, we didn't have the appetite to brave the trotters and blood puddings at Au Pied de Cochon; instead, we ended up with cheese and beer and apples in our room, watching Charlton Heston perform all his own miracles.

NYC

Just back from a speed-dash down to NYC for Passover. Sharing the horseradish and charoset with my old college pal Mike and his family was the ostensible reason for hopping on the Jetblue express to JFK, but I was really there to walk, eat, walk and soak up as much culture as I could, after a month without any up in Lake Snowbegone.

I was a little too hopeful as to how spring-like NYC would be in comparison to the North Country, and so I ended up underdressed and chilled for three nasty cold, rainy days. But the flowers were out--daffodils, frilly tulips, crocuses, hyacinths, magnolia buds on the trees overhead. Arriving mid-afternoon on Sunday, my pal (and former neighbor) Amy and I headed out to always-open Bocca Lupa (ok, not really, but they do offer lunch from 11:30am to 5, then dinner til late-ish, so by a freelancers' sleep-in standard, they're always available). Amy got the zampone-piave-pickled peppers panini (say that 10 times fast) that she'd been craving, and I went for my comfy fave, the roast chicken with arugula and provolone. Lovely, as always--such a great little place to have in the neighborhood. Then, oh bliss, it was just a few blocks' walk over to Cobble Hill Cinema for the stunning Lives of Others, the German flick that won the Best Foreign Films Oscar. A great film.

The next day, perfect-as-always pear danish at Almondine, and a spin through the Easter candy offerings at Jacques Torres. Dark chocolated matzoh for the Jews, rows of chocolate-dipped marshmallow Peeps (in the bunny shape) for the gentiles. Oh, and carrot-shaped tubes of chocolate-dipped Cheerios for those of you who, sadly, have had your taste buds surgically removed. They were offering free samples of the cocoa-rolled chocolate almonds. Resisted the urge to tip the whole bowl into my purse.

Then, into the city for a slice at Joe's Pizza in the Village, followed by a French movie (Avenue Montaigne, a dull movie for old people, despite its Amelie aspirations) and a spin through the genteel rooms of the Neue Gallerie, whose dark wood-panelled walls always look carved out of chocolate. A robust crowd in town for the Van Gogh and German Expressionists show, which was small but potent. Followed, of course, by the last slice of topfentorte in the house at a marble-topped table in Cafe Sabarsky, where I would happily live if only one could get a glass of Riesling for less than $14 (and a cup of coffee for less than $5). But ah, that topfentorte-- fluffy quark filling, light layers of genoise, melting slices of pear on top, lovely.

On to Central Park West for eggs in salt water, horseradish and brisket, four kinds of kugels and a platter of asparagus, chocolate-chip macaroons and next year in Jerusalem, amen.

Matzoh brei and leftover cheesecake for breakfast, then onto the bus out to Nyack to see my aunt for lunch at the elegant Restaurant X, with nosegays of roses on the tables and a pastoral view of just-barely-greening willows around the pond.

That night, back in Brooklyn, Amy and I had just enough energy to walk around the corner to the new Japanese place, Hideno, which looks better than it is. Warm housemade tofu comes in a little glass pot with a pitcher of soy sauce and a tiny spoon; it has a gentle, silky texture but tastes, as I guess we should have expected, like nothing. Or more exactly, nothing with an aftertaste of masking tape and chalk. A bowl of rice will run you $3, a pot of tea $2. Tuna tataki, with a small mound of avocado-topped salad, was too salty to eat.

The next morning, high hopes of checking out the new feminist-art wing and Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum. But alas, cold rain and boring errands ate up the morning, and then there was only time for a quick bowl of lamb soup (a brown, intensely lamb-y broth with bits of onion and green herbs, $2) at the Yemen Cafe on Atlantic Ave, and a plan to come back for the grand platters of roasted lamb and rice ($8) being shared by tables of men around the room.

Woke up this morning to several inches of snow on the ground, and more falling. Welcome back to Lake Snowbegone...but we're off to Montreal for Easter tomorrow. Any Montreal tips, please let me know!

Maple Weekend, Now with Pictures!

We celebrated the arrival of spring in Lake Snowbegone by heading to the woods for the running of the sap. Yep, it was Maple Weekend up here last week, and the tiny towns were jumpin', what with all the pancake breakfasts and the steaming evaporators and the smiley lady from the Cornell Cooperative Extension handing out little paper cups of maple-walnut candy and stapled-together handouts full of recipes for maple-glazed sweet potatoes and maple-nut pancakes.

There was still soft snow under the sugar maples, but the temperature had poked up just enough over the past few days to start the sap running. Not by much, though; at Yancey's, they'd only started tapping the day before, and there wasn't enough sap yet to keep up with the syrup demands. But I digress.

We started out at the Golden Maple Shanty, where steam billowing out of the chimney did give the whole scene a nice IHOP smell. Inside, a big stainless-steel, oil-fired evaporator was bubbling busily, the hot sap flowing in channels labelled with digital temperature readouts. Talking to the proprietor, I found out that this machine was still a bit of a newcomer to the shanty. "I boiled sap over wood fires for 40 years," he said, then admitted the new oil-fired machines were trickier; they needed a continual flow of sap to keep from overheating, and you had to keep a close eye on the readouts, rather than watching the size of the bubbles on the roiling sap or gauging the heat of the fire. The room was cheerfully crowded, with not much difference between the look of the maple-makers and those come to buy their wares.

On a tip from the Cornell lady, we followed the directions on the Maple Weekend brochure through the woods out to Yancy's. On the way, we saw "Maple Syrup for Sale" signs tacked up in front of numerous farmhouses; once we got into the woods, plastic buckets once used for spackle and plaster were getting another go-round as sap collectors. Any house with a few trees around it was engaging in a little sugar-making.



Yancey's sugarbush, owned by the same family for over 150 years, is spread out over several hundred acres of old maples. The sugarhouse is still a large wooden shack, stacked with logs from floor to ceiling for firing up the long wood-fired evaporators.



Sap comes to the sugarhouse in a wagon hauled by a team of draft horses, to be poured down a chute into a boxy wooden storage tank that can take some 1500 gallons.



Warm near the fire, cold near the open doors, awash in billows of steam and lit only by the pale, snow-reflected afternoon light outside, this was syrup making mostly unchanged as it had been in New England for generations on end.



As one of the Yancey boys heaved more logs into the firebox, another scooped up boiling sap with a long-handled flat shovel. As with testing jelly, the syrup is done when it "sheets" from the edge of the scoop, hanging in a clear, glassy ridge from the metal edge. A hydrometer helps too, bobbing in a tube of boiling syrup to measure its density and decide when the sap's cooked down enough to be judged quality syrup.

The only thing not cooperating with the old-time vision were the trees themselves. The still-chilly days meant the sap was barely rising. Outside the door, metal buckets hung from the surrounding trees, each suspended beneath a thumb-sized spigot. I held the tip of my finger under the tap as a clear drop slowly swelled and fell. The taste was something more than clear water, a hint of wild tang, a bosky woodsiness.



But tang or not, the trees were still mostly sleeping, and with it taking around 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup, the line to fill metal jugs over at the hot syrup vat was long and barely moving. So we took our little pint jug and went back to town to get educated at the Maple Museum. The American (and Canadian, as the nice front-desk lady was careful to point out) Maple Museum tells the story of New England sugaring, with an emphasis on New York State. There's a maple hall of fame, full of photographs and plaques honoring achievement in the maple industry. There's a room dedicated to old logging and ice-cutting gear,with a huge proto-snowmobile and giant cast-iron prongs for lifting blocks of ice. There are bark baskets used for sap collection by local Oswego tribe members, and a sternly worded nutritional and economic-welfare comparision between real syrup and fake maple-flavored "table syrup", with an emphasis on how buying real syrup supports local family-run industry.

And although we now think of maple syrup as the main maple product, grainy tan blocks of solid maple sugar--which provided a much better work-to-money ratio for the sugar producer--used to make up the bulk of a sugarbush's output. In The Maple Sugar Book, Helen and Scott Nearing's entertaining little tome about their time working a small sugarbush in the 1930s and 40s, the Nearings point out the role maple sugar played in fighting the slave trade. In the mid-1800s, at the height of the abolitionist movement, many New England thinkers and activists promoted maple sugar as a cruelty-free alternative to cane sugar, which they saw as tainted by the suffering of the slaves used to produce it on the sugarcane plantations in the American South and in the West Indies. English abolitionists begged their countrymen to start planting maple trees, so as to have a source of sugar that could be cultivated by free men on native soil.



Back at Yancey's, we finally got our jug filled and headed home. The next morning: buckwheat pancakes with lots of syrup!

Buckwheat Pancakes

1/3 cup buckwheat flour
1/3 cup cornmeal
1/3 whole wheat flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2 TB maple syrup
a few shakes of cinnamon (opt)
1 egg
3/4 cup milk, or as needed
2 TB melted butter
chopped toasted nuts or chopped apples or pears, or berries
Maple syrup, warmed

Lightly grease a wide frying pan or griddle. Heat over medium heat. Stir or sift dry ingredients together. Beat egg, milk, and butter in a cup, then stir in gently. Add more milk as needed for a proper batter consistency; thick batter will give thicker, fluffier cakes; thin batter makes thinner, more delicate cakes. Add chopped nuts or fruit, as desired. Pour onto hot griddle and bake over medium-low heat until browned and small bubbles are popping on top side of cake. Flip and cook until browned. Serve with plenty of warm syrup