Vert-à-Go

TV chef Jamie Oliver appeared in front of the UK House of Commons health committee yesterday, testifying about how he believes the downturn in the economy could lead to people eating unhealthier food. Huge numbers of people simply no longer know how to cook, he claims, and over the years have grown to rely heavily on fast food, junk food, takeaways, and prepared meals. Oliver’s TV series ‘Jamie’s Dinners’, about his uphill battle to improve the eating habits of schoolchildren, certainly seems to bear up that assertion:

But what will happen to these people as real food grows increasingly expensive? Oliver says that in the past, people were able to use their cooking skills to make nutritious meals even when money was tight, but now there is a generation of young people who are nervous about using raw ingredients and simply don’t know the first thing about how to prepare them. He fears that these people will be forced by sheer economics to eat even more of the cheap (and usually nasty) food available, which could lead to an even bigger obesity problem in the UK, especially among children.

Of course, the UK isn’t the only place feeling the effect of higher food prices, the ubiquitousness of fast-food restaurants, and the rise of obesity. In the US, it’s even worse. And at least one fast-food chain is now explicitly using the shaky economy as part of their newest ad campaign. In this ad for KFC’s $10 Challenge, a family visits a grocery store and tries to buy all the ingredients for a chicken supper for under $10, only to throw their hands up in failure and, laughing, run out of the store to KFC to buy supper instead. It really has to be seen to be believed.

I don’t have the time or space to rant about how offensive this ad is on so many levels (mocking people’s money problems! insulting their budgeting/grocery shopping skills! having the gall to claim that fast food is equivalent to home cooking! assuming that no one already has a single food staple in their cupboard!), so I’ll leave it up to chef Kurt Michael Friese on Grist, who explains in detail about how he beat KFC’s $10 ‘family meal’ challenge. And he even gives you the recipes at the end. Beat that, KFC!

photo by naathas

I went through the fridge today and finally dealt with a weird assortment of things that had been lying there neglected for some time, including:

• a 1L container of partly-cooked pumpkin (about 1 week old)
• about 2 cups of buttermilk (waaaaay past its best-by date–but buttermilk can stay good for weeks. Just make sure it hasn’t permanently separated)
• 1/2 cup of half and half (expiring today)
• 2 links of garlic farmer sausage (1.5 weeks old–I’d bought it fresh at the farmers’ market, so I wasn’t worried about it)
• rather limp-at-the-end green onion (1.5 weeks old)
• some beets, complete with starting-to-wilt greens (1.5 weeks old)

First I took the pumpkin (we had roasted it and used half for soup last week before running out of ambition–a whole pumpkin can be rather overfacing all at once!) and cooked it for about another 10 minutes in the microwave because it was still rather hard. Then I puréed it, getting about 3 cups worth. The purée, along with the buttermilk, was just what I needed for these fabulous and fibre-rich pumpkin chocolate chip muffins (I stuck the other two portions of pumpkin in the freezer for future use):

A most virtuous pumpkin chocolate chip muffin

Dry ingredients (combine in a large bowl)

• 1-1/4 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup wheat bran
• 3/4 cup ground flaxseed
• 2Tb wheat germ
• 1Tb cinnamon
• 1Tb baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 cup chocolate chips (I used Cocoa Camino’s fair trade organic chocolate chips for the first time, which were delicious and completely worth the extra 80 cents)

Wet ingredients (combine in a medium bowl)

• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 cup pumpkin purée
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup All Bran Buds cereal

Add the wet ingredients to the dry, stirring until just mixed. Bake at 400F for 20-25 minutes. Keep a close eye on them–I have found 400F to be a little hot for them in my oven and had good results at 375F today for 20 minutes only. You don’t want them to get dried out. My original recipe says that it makes 12, but I today got 12 large ones as well as a full pan of mini-muffins (based on 12, they are 210 calories each, with 6 grams of fat and 8 grams of fibre). I took the mini-muffins out at the 15-minute mark.

Afternoon snack out of the way, I used up the rest of the (shall we say mature?) ingredients in a hearty soup for supper. I combined two different recipes (here and here) to approximate a favourite restaurant dish of mine:

At-home Summa Borscht (because you can’t go to Taunte Maria’s every day)

• 3 cups of 1/2-inch cubed potatoes
• about 4 cups of water (if you had a ham stock or a bone to throw in, that would work well)
• 2 links farmer sausage, casings removed
• 1/2 cup green onion, chopped
• dill to taste (1/4 cup of fresh dill is best, but I used the last of the dried stuff from the garden because that was what I had on hand)
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1/2 cup half-and-half
• 1 cup chopped beet greens
• salt to taste

Put the potatoes in a large saucepan with the water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until the potatoes are tender. While they are cooking, cook the farmer sausage in a frying pan (break it up with a spoon, but keep it fairly chunky). When the potatoes are ready, stir in the sausage, the green onions, dill, beet greens, and buttermilk. Bring it back to a simmer (until the beet greens are tender–you don’t want them to turn to sludge). Season to taste–depending on the saltiness of the sausage, you may not need to add any salt at all. Stir in the half and half before serving with some lovely bread & butter (and don’t forget the dill pickles!).

Cleaning out the fridge=good food. Go see what you can rescue before it’s too late!

photo: my 2008 Weird James Beard Award winner

When you grow your own food, you inevitably produce some bizarre specimens from time to time. Nature isn’t perfect–no matter what those bins of clone-like supermarket produce or air-brushed food magazine photos might lead you to believe. This prejudice against misshapen vegetables is responsible for supermarkets rejecting thousands of tons of perfectly edible food every year, which, if farmers cannot sell elsewhere, is relegated to compost or animal feed, or simply left to rot in the field. It also forces a significant number of farmers to use pesticides for purely cosmetic reasons.

How did we reach a point where so much food is wasted or unnecessarily doused with chemicals simply because someone decides it doesn’t look pretty enough to eat? I believe that a vicious circle has been created between consumers, who refuse to buy blemished produce, and supermarkets, which respond to and then further feed that choice by only stocking cosmetically uniform produce. Generations of people have become so removed from the food production chain that they no longer understand that vegetables come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, that they are grown in fields exposed to insects and the elements, and that the best-tasting fruits and vegetables are often the funniest-loooking ones. Because they’ve never grown their own food and usually have no idea who is growing the food they buy or how they’re doing it, their main instinct in the supermarket is fear*–fear that can only be assauged by seeing the same reassuringly familiar and homogeneous produce every time they walk in.

Thankfully, there is a growing backlash against this produce perfectionism. I also hope that as more people take up gardening, they will develop an emotional investment in their food that will keep them from cavalierly tossing a not-so-perfect specimen. Indeed, I hope that they will embrace them and celebrate them (and, if possible, eat them)!

This year, I’ve given my annual weird vegetable award to the potato above, which is shaped like some kind of…well, I’m not exactly sure, but it’s got an interesting snout, at any rate, and it looks quite jovial. For more amusing examples of Regular Food Gone Horribly Wrong, visit MoFA (Museum of Food Abnormalities). And please comment about or send pictures of your own strange home-grown examples!

* fear of eating food that ‘tastes gross’, fear of eating food that has gone bad, fear of germs and dirt on food, fear of getting sick from food, and the deep-seated fear of acknowledging that food is produced in the real world and isn’t just magicked out of thin air by white-clad fairies.

On a cool-ish day like today, when three-quarters of our household has been felled by a rotten cold, it seemed like a good time to make something warm and comforting to eat for supper. Somehow a salad just doesn’t seem that appealing when you’re nursing sore throats! (Cold cucumber slices might be the exception.)

My crisper drawers are filled to bursting with vegetables at the moment, some of which have been there for quite some time. Normally I am much better about keeping track of what’s in there and not buying anything unnecessary, but a combination of events have left me with me with double quantities of rather aged vegetables: first, I was away for a couple days last week, and then my neighbour left for 2 weeks, generously gifting me with the perishable contents of her fridge. We’ve been harvesting daily from two garden plots, and yet I was still unable to resist buying not just one, but TWO bags of new baby carrots* the other day, despite already having a nearly full bag of old crop carrots languishing in the fridge. This plethora of carrots had further managed to hide a truly elderly bag of celery from sight, and I also had a bag of beet stems which I had somehow not yet found a use for, despite pulling them out to look at them every day for two weeks.

To make things short, I had a lot of veggies that wouldn`t even win second prize in a beauty contest, and they weren’t about to get any prettier. But as any restaurant chef (or your grandmother) knows, after you clean out the fridge, it’s time to put soup and stew on the menu–slow-cooking brings new life to sad sack vegetables. There’s no need to be scared of them and you don’t have to throw them out just because they’re not at their peak anymore. After all, you wouldn’t chuck away an entire apple just because it has a little bruise–you just cut around the bad spot and eat the rest, right?

I gave my last-ditch stew some extra summery zing with fresh green beans from the garden and lovely earthy new potatoes. And I have to say that it was absolutely delicious. Now, I just need to tackle that 20lb case of ripe peaches and that huge bag of rhubarb…**

11th Hour Stew (aka It`s Now or Never)

• 1.5 pound package of stewing beef (Benlock Farms, via the Saskatoon Farmers’ Market)
• 2 small-ish onions (old crop, so one was going a little dodgy on the outside–just peel off the offending layer/s), chopped
• 4 carrots (which needed a good shave to get rid of those white hairs, frankly), sliced into rounds
• 3 stalks of celery (what I could safely rescue from that limp old bag), chopped
• a big fistful of beet stems (well-picked over to get rid of the dodgy ones), chopped
• one clove of garlic lurking in the butter compartment, chopped
• a half-bag of last year’s frozen fresh tomatoes (about 2 cups) which I had discovered in the freezer and which was starting to form ice crystals since I robbed half of it for something else last month
• half a dozen mushrooms (the last of a bag), chopped
• a nice big handful of green beans, broken into bite-sized pieces
• 6 small/medium new potatoes, quartered
• a bottle of Paddock Wood Vienna Red beer (any beer will do, as light or dark according to your taste)–or use water or vegetable/beef stock

Brown the beef in a bit of oil in your big stewing pot, throwing in the onions and garlic partway through. Then add all the vegetables (apart from the beans and potatoes), the frozen tomatoes, and the beer. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and slowly simmer for an hour and a half, adding water if need be. Twenty minutes or so before you’re ready to eat, add the potatoes. When the potatoes are tender, throw in the green beans for five minutes or so while you’re setting the table. They should still have some bite; don’t cook them to within an inch of their life.

Serves 4 with bread, butter, and dill pickles–you’ll have leftovers for 2 that you could serve over egg noodles–go grab some at the farmers’ market!

* Sovereign Colony’s new crop of carrots are now available at the 8th St Sobeys! These are the most delicious carrots you can buy at a big chain grocery store, and they`re grown just down the road in Rosetown. Keep an eye out for their potatoes, which should be arriving at Sobeys soon too.

** Tomorrow! I`ll do it all tomorrow! August`s bounty has a habit of turning me into Scarlett O`Hara.

photo: spinach soup–it’s all the rage with the preschool set (today, at any rate)

As I mentioned last week, we’ve been doing some thinning out at the community garden plot. Some of the spinach had gotten quite large and was starting to bolt, so we stripped it, stuffed it into a couple of bags, and stuck it in the fridge. Then I got busy and it sat there for a week. Or was that nearly two? Oops!

I tentatively stuck my nose in the bags yesterday and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. Greens picked from the garden will last way longer than those you buy from the store because they haven’t taken a week or longer to get to you (incidentally, your risk of getting sick from home-grown greens is also way smaller than commercially-grown greens, although you still need to take sensible precautions while growing and preparing them). You wouldn’t want to make a salad out of the leaves in my fridge at this point–the leaves were rather mature to be eaten raw, some of it was wilting a bit (ok, a few of them were wilting a lot), and there were some yellow/damaged leaves which needed to be culled. It didn’t look real pretty, but overall it was still perfectly edible–a perfect candidate for soup.

I made a very quick and easy cream of spinach soup for lunch from Joy of Cooking: All About Vegetarian Cooking (2 minutes of chopping, 8 minutes of stirring, 5 minutes of casual supervision/pureeing resulted in 2 meals’ worth of soup). The recipe isn’t available online so I won’t infringe copyright, but I would highly recommend any spinach soup recipe that features nutmeg. My nearly-3-year-old got up from her nap and immediately requested a second cup of it for her snack (I suspect the fact that her daddy grew it made it a big draw!).

I’m expecting another couple bags of soup-grade spinach to be lugged home today or tomorrow, so there will be plenty of opportunity for further experimentation. Chilled pea and spinach soup? Spinach and chickpea soup? It’s so satisfying making a delicious meal out of something that you might unthinkingly throw out just because it doesn’t look ‘perfect’, and the possibilities are really endless.

(photo: Egg yolks, the day after–and only one casualty)

We thinned out the voluminous swiss chard at the community garden yesterday, so for supper I made a Swiss chard and tomato frittata from the Moosewood gang. The only difference was that I cooked it till nearly done on the stovetop, then sprinkled it with parmesan cheese and put it under the broiler for a few minutes to finish rather than flipping it over. We had hot buttered whole wheat toast along with it.

I thought it was delicious, and my two preschoolers even ate it all up. I didn’t personally learn to love chard until I was an adult. In fact, when my sisters and I were kids, we used to try and herd the chickens towards the Swiss chard part of the garden, hoping they would peck it to pieces (sadly for us, this did not work). So I was impressed that the kids were so enthusiastic–but I suspect that serving rhubarb crisp with ice cream for dessert is a powerful incentive for cleaning one’s plate!

The only problem with frittatas is that they call for a lot of egg whites, which means you end up with leftover egg yolks. You certainly don’t want to have to throw them out. Despite the dire things you may have heard about cholesterol and eggs, egg yolks (and, in particular, yolks from free range hens) are a nutritional powerhouse. But what can you do with the leftovers?

What to do with leftover egg yolks

If you’re going to use them within the next day, you can place them very carefully (whole) in an airtight container (they will start to get hard on the outside within a day or so and won’t be good for much after that)

If you’ll use them within 2-3 days, place them very carefully (whole) in an airtight container and very carefully cover them with water. Gently pour off the water when you’re ready to use them. This will work best with good quality eggs with a resilient yolk (standard grocery store egg yolks tend to break if you even look at them funny).

You can also freeze them, but they should be used for baking or cooking rather than an omelette. You can freeze them individually in an ice cube tray (break up the yolk a bit, but don’t beat it) or else gently mix a larger number of yolks together. You must also stabilise them before freezing or they will become lumpy and unusable when they’re thawed out. To stabilise them, decide whether you will want to use them for a sweet or savoury dish in the future, and add a sprinkling of either sugar or salt to each yolk (or 1 tablespoon sugar/salt per 1 cup of yolks). Place in an airtight container and don’t forget to label it ’sweet’/’savoury’ and list the number of yolks. They should last for about a year–thaw them out in the fridge the day before you plan to use them.

(photo: So pretty! vanilla pudding with raspberries and mint)

I plan to use my six leftover frittata yolks for this delicious vanilla or chocolate pudding for dessert tonight. I’ll probably make 1.5 batches to use up all the yolks at once–it keeps for 3 days in the fridge, so I seriously doubt that leftovers will be a problem! The free-range eggs I buy will lend it a lovely buttery tint–it would also be a good time to try the rum raisin pudding variant.

Don’t fancy pudding? You could turn those yolks into a bernaise/hollandaise sauce, pasta carbonara, or some classic desserts (creme brûlée, zabaglione). This enthusiastic thread at the Chowhound forum has some more great ideas.