The Prize

At the end of last November this box of locally grown produce was the grand prize of a raffle at a fund raiser for Waltham Community Farms. All of the vegetables had been harvested from the farm, most in the …

Duck Confit

 

For, perhaps, the first time in this year of charcuterie, I did not know what to expect. I was sure I had confit at one point or another in my culinary life. I spent seven years (albeit all during my naive twenties) with an expense account, after all, have traveled internationally, have written about food. But for the first time I approached a recipe truly not being able to picture the end result. I had pork confit once – the chef claimed to have spent all afternoon making it and was very proud. But I found it unremarkable; just room temperature fatty shredded meat to spread, awkwardly, on toast.

But still, I read and re-read the recipes. I plotted my path to obtain the ingredients (this being my first charcuterie effort as a part-time resident of the city of New York). I did a little research.

Hmmm…. did you know that confit is simply a term that means immersing meat or produce in a substance for preservation or flavor. Fruit can be confit-ed by cooking in sugar or honey, vinegar and water, similar to a jam. I have unknowingly confit-ed roasted peppers and tomatoes in olive oil to preserve them for a bit longer than their brief shelf life in raw form. And now, I can say, I have confit-ed duck.

It was so easy. And tasty.

 

I figured that the most time intensive part of this effort – which simply involved mostly passive cooking – would be finding the ingredients. I hoped to source my protein from the Union Square Farmer’s Market but figured that I might have to venture further afield for the fat. In the spirit of confit, I planned to buy whatever meat looked good – and was not extravagantly expensive. However, that I would be making duck confit was decided as soon as I walked into the square and met Matthew from Hudson Valley Duck Farm. I told him of my confit aspirations and asked his advice. It was easy he said, just cook the legs low and slow in the smallest pot in which they would fit in a single layer.

“I don’t need extra fat?” I asked.

“You’ll end up with more than enough when you are done cooking these legs,” he assured. He also added that I could salt and season them at least overnight – but if I wanted to let them sit in the fridge for up to a week, tightly wrapped in plastic, the flavor would only improve.

In the end I seasoned the two legs I purchased from Matthew with about a tablespoon each of salt and herbes de provence and wrapped them in plastic for three days.

On day three I washed and patted the legs dry, and then arranged them skin side down in a smallish oven-proof sauce pan. I baked them for about three hours at 200 degrees, and then took the top off and finished it off for another twenty minutes or so. The fat was beautiful, golden-tinged and clear while the meat was beginning to roast, but was still tender. The fat was not completely covering the meat, as I imagined it might by the recipe instructions. Was this still confit, I wondered?

I poured the fat into a half quart canning jar, and then, when the legs were cool enough to handle, I separated them and added them to the fat. They meat fell apart in my hands and I couldn’t resist taking a taste. It was fatty and unctuous, perfectly roasted and tender. The two legs, including the rendered fat, but after discarding the rest of the skin, perfectly filled one canning jar. I made sure the meat was covered in fat and then let it sit on the counter for the next two hours before dinner.

 

For dinner, I picked up a strong semi-soft cheese that I thought would go well with the confit, and a loaf of fig bread from a local artisanal bakery. At home, I had perfectly ripe tomatoes from a previous farmer’s market excursion that needed to be eaten, and made a salad of them with basil from my front patio. My husband, Steve, opened a bottle of a bordeaux-style red wine. And we ate.

It was just meat in a mug of fat, as Steve pointed out, but it was delicate and flavorful. The confit held up well to strong cheese and wine, but on its own with just the fig bread, the meat’s sweetness shone. We ate not quite half of the jar, and I capped it and placed the rest in the refrigerator, despite my (relative) comfort that it was shelf-stable. I marveled at the simplicity of preserved meat in a jar, whose roots can be traced to the time of the Renaissance in rustic southern France. I may not have been able to picture confit before that afternoon, but I know to which standard I will hold all others.

 

Small Town Farmer’s Market & Freezing Peaches

I was visiting my hometown of Fredonia, New York for a few days that finally, for the first time, coincided with the new local farmer’s market. That this farmer’s market is only two summers old is worth noting, as Fredonia is home of the first Grange in the United States (location, about three blocks from the shot above). Sure, this area has always been known for its agriculture, and road-side farm stands have long been offering local produce (and sometimes, produce from far away as well, but that’s another story), but the local farmer’s market represents, I believe, a shift in the way that my hometown neighbors think about where their food is from.

When I was young we often frequented the road-side stands during the summer and fall (I most vividly remember choosing ears of sweet, perfectly ripe corn) in addition to the tomatoes, zucchini, raspberries and other surplus items Nani or Grandma handed off when we visited. The farm stands were easy -  we passed a half dozen on the road that led from my childhood home to the closest town center – and the produce was at the peak of ripeness. OF COURSE we would buy from the local farmer who had harvested that morning rather than buying corn from the supermarket, with its browning silk and dry husks.

When and why did this mentality change? I wonder. Because about the same time I moved out as an adult, first for college and then to a big city eight hours away, my grandmother’s garden began to shrink and the supermarkets grew. Lives got busier. There were fewer mouths to feed. The big grocery stores just made shopping so convenient.

I see now that my urban gardening efforts were influenced by my small-town agrarian upbringing: the idea that we only ate corn in the summer because that was the only time it was available (other than in cans). I started growing things to recapture those flavors; my appreciation for the environmental, economic and health benefits came later. And I would like to think that my efforts helped to inspire my parents to both, separately, re-incorporate local and seasonal produce and products into their diets.

Not that I can take all of the credit. My efforts were followed by a societal (re)surgence of farmer’s markets, organic growing practices and general thoughtfulness about where one’s food came from. I saw more local (to my hometown) farms go organic and stores open – despite the tough economy – that offered locally grown, processed and produced food items. And, perhaps most telling, the new Saturday farmer’s market in the town square was crowded (I’ve been told) from June to October.

I went for the first time this past weekend. My mom and I walked, thinking we would just pick up some corn and maybe some fruit. My aunt had more zucchini than she could ever eat and had recently given my mother several large ones. Her neighbor also uses part of her land to garden and regularly offers up eggplant, peppers and tomatoes. But when we saw these large, fragrant and perfectly ripe peaches my mother insisted we get them.

“Do I have to can them?” she asked. Neither of us relished a few hours in a steamy kitchen during the particularly humid weekend. I told her that I froze my peaches in zip-top bags and would break off pieces for smoothies.

“Perfect. That’s what we’ll do.”

 

We brought home an overflowing eight-quart basket and washed and peeled the fruit. The ripest we sliced and ate right away. My mother made a peach crisp with others and we doused some fresh ones in lime juice (for flavor and preservation purposes) and served them for breakfast the next day. The rest we put into bags that we just barely topped with local apple cider that we had bought at the farmer’s market as well to add acidity to improve the preservation of color and texture. Apple juice would have been preferable, but the spicing of this cider was pretty mild and wouldn’t affect the peach flavor much.

 

We sealed them, squeezing as much of the air out as possible and then laid them flat to freeze. Perhaps, for the first time ever, my mother won’t have to buy a peach from the grocery store all winter long.

 

 

On Garlic and Patience

It was a banner year for garlic, in my garden anyway. Not that planting garlic is ostensibly hard – really the only thing to consider is timing: when the cloves go in and when to harvest. Yet despite that it has taken me three years to get a good crop. The first year was, well, a non-effort. I decided in the spring that I wanted to plant garlic along with my tomatoes, basil and lettuce. Why it never occurred to me to plant garlic earlier in my decade of urban gardening, I don’t know. It seemed… hard for some reason. There’s something comforting about watching plants grow bigger and taller; the ability to see the fruits widen and ripen seems like half the pay-off of a tiny urban plot. And the garlic itself seemed to yield no clues as to how it was grown. Add another item to my embarrassing list of food I had been eating all of my life (I am Italian after all) of which I could not picture how it grew. Even my first garlic scapes – a bag full in my first CSA seven years ago now – did little to shed light on this process. Although, like most of us, I really didn’t give it much thought.

That is until I continued to hone the mix of vegetables in my community garden. I received great advice: grow what you always want more of. Thus the dozen tomato plants and tons of herbs. After paying upwards of two dollars for a head of garlic (a delicious, yet very tiny head), I realized that I should start growing my own. So when I was ordering my seeds in the depths of winter, I tried to look for garlic seeds as well. Yes, well, these don’t exist. At least not in the way that other seeds do. Instead, as a kind friend gently advised, I should plant whole cloves in late fall for garlic the following year. Sadly, I resigned myself to wait another season.

That fall my husband was designated the garlic-planter. I had a crazy week at work and the days were too short to plant in the evening. A freeze was coming after a mild autumn, so he would have to take over the duties. It hadn’t occurred to me that he had never before been set loose on the garden without supervision. The next spring little sprouts of green could be found in random patches around the plot. Some had been planted so deep that they were preserved in the coolness of the dirt and I upturned them with my trowel at various moments throughout the summer, their shoots never finding their way to the sunlight. I wasn’t sure when to harvest them, so I waited until the tops had gone completely brown – perhaps waited a bit too long as some tops had disappeared, leaving no marker for where the jewel of garlic could be found beneath the soil. Our first harvest was little more than a dozen heads, which I dried in the sun for a few days and then braided, hanging the two tails from a bent nail in my basement.

Last year I was determined to get my garlic in the ground by late fall (but not too late) and plant them in neat rows. I had maybe ten heads of garlic to plant and hoped to increase my harvest five times that.

Come spring, I was thrilled to see their little green shoots pushing through the dirt well before last frost. A few months later, their stalks were tall and green, although no scapes emerged. My plot neighbor’s garlic had beautiful pigtails and were taller, more robust looking. Had I done something wrong again, I wondered? When she harvested, I pulled up one head. Still green. I would wait.

If there is one thing I have learned from my garden it is patience. Patience to wait until next year to remember to plant the peas sooner or mulch the carrots better. Patience to wait to plant the tomato seedlings just a few more days in case of frost. Patience to give that pepper – my only pepper, I’ve never been good with peppers – another week of sunshine before plucking from the stalk.

And so I gave my garlic another week. And then a week more. My neighbor had long since dried hers and had added some to stir fries and long made pesto with the scapes. A few scapes did finally emerge – I found out that only some varieties of garlic produce them, which made me wonder if these scaped crusaders were leftovers from the season before – and the stalks widened just a bit more.

Then finally, after ignoring the garden for nearly a week, allowing mother nature to do my watering for me, I returned. The garlic stalks were dying back. The few scapes had flowered and then gone to seed. It was time to harvest.

I took a small shovel and dug around each one, giving a full six inches of space or more to lift the dirt around the head and not slice through it. I stacked them up as I dug around the perimeter of the garden, where I had planted them as a border on two sides. They totaled fifty heads when I was done. It had taken nearly three years of trying but I had finally grown fifty beautiful, perfect heads of garlic. My patience was rewarded.

Pickled Strawberries, Round 2

Of all the wisdom I have imparted in the past couple of years, my pickled strawberry recipe has been one of the most consistently popular posts. I recall being inspired to make these after visiting Garden at the Cellar, a particularly tasty farm-to-table restaurant helmed by Chef Will Gilson, where pickled strawberries were featured with one of the daily specials. The next day I basically swapped strawberries for cucumbers in a pickle recipe to see what might happen. And well, they were a tad strange. Certainly interesting and unique, but it was as if they too perfectly straddled the line of sweet and savory. I brought them to a few dinner parties and friends were excited to taste them, but would chew them thoughtfully, perhaps taking just one more to ensure that their flavors were a bit too odd to go back for a third. I still assert that they can make a nice accompaniment for a charcuterie platter or cheese plate, but only for the more adventuresome palate.

So with this year’s batch of fresh-picked strawberries I decided to tweak my own recipe, this time using my grandmother’s bread and butter pickles as a basis. I made two version, one more local than the other. Both turned out well – although the version with honey is a bit sweeter and more complex. These are certainly on the sweet side – the amount of added sweetener ensured that, although in the future if I started with sweeter strawberries I would cut it down even further. As it was, this season’s berries didn’t quite hold up to last season’s. Like I say in my instructional video, every batch is different. So for all those looking for a pickled strawberry recipe, I ask you to give some feedback on this one. I think that if I were to make this again, I’d stick with honey as a sweetener and add maybe black peppercorns for bite or substitute balsamic vinegar in place of some of the white vinegar. Oh well… maybe next year.

Sweet Pickled Strawberries

*fills about a pint jar of strawberries

In a sauce pan, over medium heat: heat 1 cup vinegar, 3/4 – 1 cup sweetener (depending on sweetness of berries, sweetener used and personal taste) and 2 tablespoons of salt. Perhaps a teaspoon or two of vanilla extract. Heat until the sweetener and salt are dissolved and the liquid reaches a simmer.

Meanwhile, clean and de-stem enough small, ripe, blemish-free berries to fill a clean pint jar. Layer in a few clean and unbruised mint or basil leaves.

Pour the boiling liquid over the strawberries. Once at room temperature, store in the fridge. Let them sit 12 – 24 hours or more before serving.

Watch me pickling!

Strawberry Season & Celebrating Local Farms – Now Multi-Media!

Yesterday, once the clouds broke, I convinced my husband to go strawberry picking with me. I thought I had missed the season, but the late spring and mix of hot and cool temperatures have kept the strawberry fields in full harvest mode. In fact, I had never seen plants so loaded with fruit! Unfortunately, because of the heavy rains of late, most of the fruit was blemished. Some enough to still pick and eat (I knew I could cut off the soft parts and use them in short cake topping or fresh-sliced on yogurt) while too many others were not. And, unfortunately, the flavor wasn’t what I remembered from seasons past. But still, a short half hour later we had almost ten pounds of fruit among us.

From past experience, I knew these had to be processed as quickly as possible. So today I cleaned them all, dipped them all in boiling water for a few seconds (a recent discovery, as this will keep fresh berries from rotting and molding for a few days longer) and froze many of them. You can watch this process here on my Youtube channel. I also set some fresh berries aside for eating, pickled some (recipe and video to come!) and boiled the rest in a bit of honey water for shortbread topping. I decided against jam this year, in part because I will be picking raspberries with my mom, aunt and cousins next week and anticipate a full-on jam session then.

However, what yesterday’s farm visit really did get me thinking about was the fickleness of nature and the challenges of farming. I saw so many strawberries that would be rotting on the vine. Strawberries that were bad before they were ripe; berries that could not have been saved. As I uncovered more ruined berries than good, I remembered the large swaths of the country (the world, even) that are currently in a drought situation, and perhaps just as many areas that are flooded or experiencing epic rains. There are crops struggling to grow in all of these places, and people much more dependent upon those crops than I am upon my strawberries. I thought of the stereotype of the stoic farmer – one who does not express rage or sadness but resignation over a crop ruined by pests or rain or oppressive heat. And maybe for the first time, in my very tiny way, I could understand why. What could the farmer do but watch the last few weeks of rain come down, unable to alleviate the certain consequences. To be a farmer is to anticipate that nothing can be anticipated and plan for any eventuality. For many, that becomes untenable. And for each farm lost, many people lose a local source of food and large parcels of land that have been cared for by generations of one family.

So yesterday, I picked a bit more than I might have once I thought about the fate of my local farmer. And I remembered as well why I made the trek in the rain earlier in the day to shop the local farmer’s market. I was reminded why I am part of a CSA (community supported agriculture) which requires paying for the season’s worth of produce before the sprouts are even out of the ground. Every year I have experienced an embarrassment of riches from my CSA – weeks so full of gorgeous vegetables that it felt like a full time job to eat and preserve it all. But just as easily my weekly take might have been a quart of mushy strawberries, or worse, nothing. A CSA is a way to invest in a local farm, to help insure them against a rainy spring or drought-filled summer. Because I was reminded yesterday that my life is better when local farms thrive, and of course, so is theirs.

Smoking in the City

The biggest question I had was: how do I smoke 5 pounds of pork without my neighbors calling the fire department? The answer, I discovered, was much easier than anticipated. Smoking may be time consuming, but is not difficult. In fact, one of the hardest decisions I had to make what choosing what hunk of meat I planned on smoking for my inaugural attempt.

While I had a few pounds of Chestnut Farm country-style ribs in my freezer, something about smoking felt very “Go Big Or Go Home” so I went to my local butcher and checked out his offerings. On one hand, I wanted something big enough to withstand a few hours in the smoker, but I also wanted a cheaper cut of meat to hedge my bets in case my first smoking effort was a failure. The verdict: a 5 pound, bone in pork thigh, which came in under twenty dollars (and is locally sourced, humanely raised, antibiotic free, yada yada).

The day before I planned to smoke, I made a dry rub with salt, pepper, cumin, coriander, brown sugar, paprika and ground hot pepper. Sweet and spicy – just the way I like it. I covered the pork in the rub and wrapped it in plastic wrap overnight.

The next day I turned my charcoal grill into a smoker. Which, simply put, meant that I put a smallish mound of coals on one side of the grill and lit them, letting them set for maybe ten minutes to heat up. Next I put my smoke box of water-soaked hickory chips on top of the coals. I checked the temp with a grill surface thermometer and placed the pork on the grill when I confirmed that the temp was between 200 – 300 degrees (which it was after the ten minutes or so of prep above). This is the magic smoking temperature range that I thought would be hard to maintain (spoiler: it wasn’t!). The grill top was lowered and I just let it sit there, checking maybe every half hour or so.

For a three hour smoke, I added more coals each hour and I added more hickory chips after about an hour and a half, at which time I also flipped the pork. But in all, the temp stayed pretty constant around 250 degrees, and when it dipped to closer to 200, I added a few more coals.  The smoke wafted out of the half-closed top vent a bit, but nothing to call the firemen about. And yes, my entire block smelled like a smoke house. In the best possible way. After three hours I put the pork in a covered roasting pan in a 250 degree oven with an inch of liquid (I used half-water, half-cider) for another three hours and then, willingly, impatiently, DUG IN.

I’m sorry I was not able to take any pictures of the delicious dark brown crust, or the half-inch red ring around the edges of the meat that I’ve heard is the marker of a good smoke. Please forgive me for not photographing how I used forks to shred the tender pork or transcribing the exact ingredients and measurements of the whiskey barbeque sauce I served atop the meat. But, after smelling smoking pork for six hours, would you have the patience to document everything before digging in? I didn’t think so.

Corned Beef: After the Cabbage

Four pounds of corned beef for two people is a lot of corned beef. Yet it is also not nearly enough. This corned beef was amazing and I had to keep myself from eating half of it in one sitting. After I corned it for four days (one day per pound), I rinsed it and then braised it in water plus about a cup of hard cider for two and a half hours, adding cabbage, carrots and onions in the last thirty minutes. What came next, however, made all the difference: I slathered the fatty side of the brisket with a honey and mustard glaze and put in under the broiler for about four minutes (or until the honey started to caramelize).

The first night I served slabs in a bowl with broth and veggies. Classic corned beef and cabbage. It was good, but the broth was a bit salty and sour. Maybe too much so for a lot of eating on its own. I’m going to doctor it up for a better tasting soup in the next few days.

The following day I made reubens. These were amazing, especially with the creamy, sour, sweetness of all of the ingredients. The basic preparation includes Russian dressing (I made my own with mayo, ketchup, minced home-canned dill pickles) on both sides of the bread. I warmed the sandwich open-faced in the oven: slices of meat on one side, sauerkraut and swiss cheese on the other, and then assembled for a final toasting of the bread. Really, one of the best sandwiches in the world. I would have taken a picture, but I couldn’t wait that long to eat it.

Corned Beef and Cabbage

My mother, a full-blooded Italian-American, loves corned beef and cabbage this time of year. In fact, of the dishes I remember her making many times when growing up, the big pot of corned beef and cabbage is the only one that comes to mind that doesn’t involve red sauce or Italian spices. Thus, when Charcutepalooza’s third challenge was to brine our own brisket for corned beef, I immediately thought of my mother. Unfortunately she is five hundred miles away, but I still have a pot of brining brisket in my fridge at the moment in her honor.

Interestingly, I haven’t encountered much corned beef and cabbage in my past decade-plus of inhabiting the very Irish city of Boston. And this despite that my husband is a musician who regularly plays most of the Irish pubs within a three mile radius (which is many more pubs than one who has not spent time in the Boston area might imagine). I also never noticed it on a menu when I accompanied him on an Irish tour a few years back, where we enjoyed meals of mostly lamb stews or shepherds pie with beef at a dozen or so pubs and restaurants around the west and south of Ireland. So I did a little research and discovered that corned beef and cabbage is not an Irish dish. In fact, Ireland provided much of the meat for cured – or “corned” beef – that was then shipped to England, France and the English colonies from the 1600s to the mid 1800s, often at the expense of the nutrition of the Irish. Some Irish, when they arrived in America, began eating corned beef because of its associations with luxury in their home country coupled with its modest price in their adopted country.

Come to think of it, the corned beef that I have most recently eaten has been in a reuben sandwich from a Jewish deli – and might have been labeled as brisket or brined brisket and not “corned beef”. However the term “corned” refers to the Old English word for “particles” or the salt that was used to preserve the meat, so any salt-cured meat could be called thus. Yum, reubens. I’ll have to make at least one with my cured brisket. Which will be ready in three days and twenty two hours. I am already counting down… Sorry you won’t be able to taste this, Mom!

Corning – or wet-curing – brisket is easy. I heated the salt, sugar and spices to help them dissolve in the water. Note that I heated them in a smaller pot and then cooled that mixture to add to the larger pot with the meat. I could have done in all in the same pot but this way I can start curing sooner because less has to cool before I add the meat.

 

Once the brine was assembled and cooled, I submerged a four pound brisket into the pot.

 

 

And then put a bowl on top to keep it submerged. I will let this sit for four days in the fridge and then will simmer this in a pot with fresh water and spices for about three to four hours, adding cabbage, carrots and onions to the broth in the last half hour or so. Then I will call my mother and tell her that I am thinking of her.