tayberries at lone pine farm

If you can find tayberries, this cross between an Aurora blackberry cultivar (an Oregon varietal, thank you very much) and a raspberry, by all means buy them immediately.  In my neck of the woods, Lone Pine Farm in Junction City had them for sale yesterday, so I snapped some up to make delicious jam.  The tayberry is an exquisitely beautiful fruit, and it’s a bit tarter and muskier than a boysenberry (which you can see pictured in my masthead above).  Dark red and elongated, the tayberry tastes far more complex than either of its parents, almost like a raspberry on steriods, dreaming dark dreams.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

And some are born to jam their plight.

 

fastest pickle in the west

I once had a boyfriend who was so desperate for pickles, he’d even drink a jar of pickle juice.  I still haven’t quite forgiven him for scarfing down my expensive, hand-crafted practically Kobe-beef-fussiness-quality Japanese pickles that were carefully stowed away in my tiny apartment refrigerator in Tokyo.  Bonzai, cried he, and shinkansened out of town before I could beat him with a keisaku.  Thanks to his quick escape, we are still friends today, and I feed him pickles when I can.

So this post is for him.

It’s also for anyone who likes new dill pickles, the ones you get for free in New York delis, the half-sour ones.  Sometimes called refrigerator pickles, mine are much better (she said, humbly) because they have the spirit of half-sours but take less than half the time of than regular refrigerator pickles.  I developed the recipe while making real new dill pickles, a dubious wild fermentation preparation of whey, brine, and sitting on a counter for a couple days.  (The Master Food Preserver in me says no, the mouth is saying let’s go.)  When they work, they’re wonderful, slightly fermented, bright lime green, crisp, lovely.  When they don’t, well, you could die of botulism.

But the pickles I’m touting here are absolutely safe, and while not as good as real, fermented new dills, they are an excellent substitution and they only take a few hours to make.  Having a BBQ this weekend?  Try making these in the morning and serving them with your ribs in the evening.  The pickles last about a day, but the quality starts to deteriorate after that, so plan accordingly.

The preparation is inspired by Japanese cucumber salad, and also by my great-grandmother’s recipe for sweet and sour vinegar cucumber salad.  In both of these salads, the cucumbers are sliced, salted, and left to sit in a seasoned vinegar and water solution.  The Japanese sometimes add seaweed or sesame seeds; my great-grandma added thinly sliced white onion.  I was making my regular new dill pickles, as I mentioned, and I ran out of the requisite whey before I ran out of anything else, so I was inspired to turn a long wait into something fresh and salad-like, but with dill flavor.  I thought it might be an amenable idea to add pickling spices, garlic, and a couple heads of fresh dill to a brine and serve the cucumber “pickles” that night as a salad.  And sure enough, it worked.

Can you tell I’m super pleased by this one?  I am.  I have pickle addicts to feed.

Fastest Pickle in the West

• 4 cups sliced pickling cucumbers (1/2-inch slices)
• 3 cups cold water
• 1 T. sea salt
• 1 t. white vinegar
• 1 T. pickling spices
• 1 t. brown mustard seeds
• 3-4 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 fresh dill heads, or substitute 2 t. dill seeds (not weed)

Wash pickling cucumbers well and slice.  Make brine of water, salt and vinegar.  Mix well, then pour over cucumbers in bowl or plastic container for marinating.  Add pickling spices, mustard seeds, garlic and dill.  Cover container and refrigerate at least 4 and up to 12 hours.  Does not keep for longer than a day or two.

 

ab ovo — tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 400 AD

We’re still struggling through over temperatures well into the 90s, and the last thing I feel like doing is cooking; even starting up the grill is fatiguing.  So I’ve been thinking about summer appetizers, those light, fresh, simple nibbles that highlight one or two ingredients and delight the eye and tongue with something unusual, and thought I’d feature a few of these beauties in the upcoming weeks.

These recipes will contain some ingredients which aren’t available widely, but they are fun to play with if you can get your hands on them.  I’ll suggest substitutes when I can.  What’s most important is to experiment consciously and purposefully with just one or two flavor combinations.

The first in my series of summer appetizers is an adaptation from the Culinaria Italy cookbook. Inspired by the fabled gourmand of ancient Rome, Apicius, who was likely a composite figure who created the world’s first cookbook, this recipe takes what was originally a sauce for soft-boiled eggs and returns it to the egg — in a deviled-egg-type sweet and sour stuffing of pinenuts and lovage.  I love the idea of lounging about in white togas with broad purple edging, and eating beautifully prepared, local stuffed eggs, with, say, peacocks strutting to and fro and slaves to refresh your gin-n-tonics (which were not Roman, but the British have Roman blood, and well, it’s *my* fantasy, ok?).

The fish sauce might be the strangest item in this recipe, but it approximates the popular Roman fermented fish condiment, garum or liquimen.  If it wigs you out, just use salt, and in all cases, use it sparingly.

Lovage is one of those perennial herbs that takes a while to get started but then stubbornly persists on little water and filtered light, year after year.  It has the taste of strong, sweet, lemony celery. It can easily overwhelm a dish with its perfumey, vegetal bitterness.  In short, we don’t see it much in American recipes except for the occasional soup.  But as a main attraction in a simple small dish, it can be refreshing.  You might choose to substitute celery leaves, or even tarragon, which would work well but change the character of the dish.

To make the perfect hardboiled eggs, follow my recipe below.  You won’t get the hard, dry yolks or the greenish cast that comes from overcooking the eggs.

Pinenut and Lovage-Stuffed Eggs

In ovis hapalis: piper, ligusticum, nucleos infusos. Suffundes mel, acetum, liquamine temperabis. (Original recipe in Latin)

12 hardboiled eggs

1/2 cup pine nuts, soaked in verjus, or a sweet wine such as Riesling, for 15-20 minutes

2 T. finely chopped lovage or celery leaves

1 T. honey

1/4 t. freshly ground pepper

2 t. vinegar

few dashes Thai fish sauce or salt to taste

Prepare hardboiled eggs by placing eggs in cold water and turn heat on medium high.  When water starts to boil vigorously, remove eggs from heat and place in bowl of cool water to stop cooking.  Cool eggs and peel.

Slice eggs in half lengthwise and carefully remove egg yolks to bowl, reserving egg whites for stuffing.  Combine pine nuts, lovage, honey and egg yolks.  Crush with wooden meat pestle or any heavy pounder until pine nuts are mostly smashed.  Add pepper, vinegar and fish sauce or salt, mix well, and stuff the eggs.  Garnish each egg with a lovage leaf or a few reserved pinenuts that you have roasted until light brown.  Refrigerate eggs until serving.

AND…for your picnicking pleasure…

Bonus Potato Salad with Eggs, Pinenuts and Lovage

This preparation also makes a great potato salad, according to Retrogrouch, who ate it all as I was cleaning up the kitchen.

Boil 2-3 medium waxy potatoes. Cool potatoes and slice or cube while still warm.   Combine potatoes with the crushed pinenut and herb preparation above, then add 3-4 chopped hardboiled eggs.  Add a handful of parsley and more lovage, if you have it.  Blend with 1/4 cup mayonnaise, or to taste, and salt and pepper.  Chill for a couple of hours before serving and keep cold in cooler if you plan to serve it outdoors or after a Roman orgy, since it is highly perishable.

 

my reputation spreads far (harrisburg) and wide (one person)

After my shift slinging no-bake breakfast bars — the Food Pantry Project recipe of the month — at the Coburg food pantry, I hightailed it north to Detering’s Orchards in Harrisburg to feed my food-drying addiction.  While I was immersed in green beans, a friendly face smiled at me and said, “nice day for cherry picking!” and “you’re Eugenia from Culinaria Eugenius, aren’t you?”  She didn’t seem to be concealing a weapon, so I came clean, and discovered I was talking to Eat Local Eugene, another local food blogger, who had rushed over to the farm after work to pick cherries and found, well, me.  I was very sad I didn’t have time to follow suit, but my dehydrator — like a crack pipe or a mound of fries or dirty Serge Gainsbourg videos on the Internet — was waiting for me at home.  Not that I’d know anything about the Serge Gainsbourg videos.

But Eat Local Eugene made a good point:  it’s cherry picking time, and the time is now.  They have lovely Bings and Royal Annes at Detering’s, and the price for U-pick can’t be beat.  I was told that the pie cherries (the sour, ruby red ones) will be ready any day now, so please give them a call to see if they’re available before you go to the orchard.  I dried a bunch of fresh Bings and some frozen pie cherries, and they both turned out sweet and tart and lovely. Can’t wait to use them in salads and desserts…

And Eat Local Eugene, I’d love to see what you did with yours!

 

raspberry jamboree

Alone this week, I busied myself with a borrowed dehydrator, a bottle of wine, a flank steak, Ore-Ida frozen hash browns, tofu, crummy supermarket grape tomatoes, a pint of succulent local Bings, frozen blackberry puree, and a half-flat of Willamette raspberries. Honestly, I feel like I could desiccate anything.

But this is about raspberries, and the time of the year I simply love the best. I still think it’s miraculous that raspberries grow so well here, and they are beautiful and delicious and huge. My raspberries, razzleberried up in the first shot here, are coming along slowly, given that it’s only their second year, but my Meekers are amazing and my Newburghs, although a bit rougher-looking than the perfectly conical, tight-fleshed Meekers, are sweet and delicious. My Amity and Heritage raspberries, and my single black raspberry, a Munger, are taking their own sweet time. So I went out an bought some Willamettes, not nearly as nice as Meekers, but still much better than anything you can get in the supermarket.

So I set about trying to destroy them.

First, I dried a few pints, against the advice of the Preservation Wise Ones, who said that the quality doesn’t hold up. I thought they’d be good thrown in cereal. I still do, although the sweetness was largely sucked away and they turned very seedy, even the largest ones.

Next, I added a handful of raspberries to a jar full of Italian white wine vinegar, along with some Szechuan peppercorns and star anise. The mild sweetness of the raspberries seems to be working well with the floral heat of the peppercorns and the spicy undertone of the star anise. The vinegar needs to sit and steep for a couple weeks before using it. Making flavored vinegars is a forgiving, beginner-level activity that everyone should try! You should avoid containers with metal caps. Don’t worry too much about fresh herbs or fruits spoiling in the concoction– the vinegar is a great preservative — but aim for no more than a ratio of 1:3 fruit:vinegar.

I thought I’d use the vinegar with grilled chicken and fruits, and in a contemporary “shrub,” which is an old American summer refresher. Think perverse Lime Rickey.

Raspberry Shrub

1 T. raspberry vinegar, preferably homemade

1-2 T. sugar, or to taste

pint glass filled with ice

carbonated water or club soda

fresh mint to garnish

Mix together vinegar and sugar until dissolved. Add vinegar mixture to glass filled with ice, then top with carbonated water. Garnish with mint sprig. Drink shouldn’t be too sweet for maximum refreshment.

By the way, it’s not local, but if you can afford a bottle of St. George’s Aqua Perfecta Meeker raspberry eau-de-vie or raspberry liqueur, be sure to pick one up. And another one for me, kthxbai.

 

it’s time for another edition of blog hits

I’m still loving the bejeezus out of what search terms hit my blog. This edition has a farm theme:

• will cats eat my chickens?
• will chickens attack each other?
• will chickens eat mice?
• will my chickens attack cats?
• will mice eat each other?

Sadly, I have no answers. The food chain is a cruel and mysterious thing.

And I still don’t have a recipe for “shake and bake meth,” nor do I plan to post one ever. But friends, you can get all your “how to cut an orange” tips from me, since that’s still my number one search query. Orange ya glad I didn’t say banana?

 

so hot

…and I’m not at all feeling sweet.  So what’s a little-bit-country, little-bit-harajuku girl to do?  Why, drink mugicha, of course!  Mugicha is roasted barley tea, consumed cold ‘n’ roasty in the hot Japanese summers.  All over Japan, from Tokyo 10-foot-square studios to Fukuoka Zen temples, when the cicadas drone their death song, the people drink ice-cold mugicha in sweaty glasses.  Since it’s just barley, there’s no problem with over-caffeination, and since there’s no sugar, you don’t even have to worry about cavities.  I suppose it might even be good for you. And I suppose you can roast your own barley and it would taste even better, but with heat like this, who wants to stand over a hot stove?

So I cheat, and buy a big bag of “suntea”-type packages of mugicha at Sunrise Market on 29th, and it couldn’t be easier to pop a package into a cold gallon of water and wait until the tea turns golden brown.  I usually keep a pitcher of mugicha in my refrigerator when it’s as hot as it is here in Eugene this week.  And for once in my life, I don’t envy my cats, who are doomed in their little furry bodies to drink only dull water.

 

farm day at sweetwater farm!

Before I left for the weekend trip, I had the great pleasure to visit my CSA farm, Sweetwater Farm east of Creswell.  Creswell is a short drive south of Eugene, a small town and rural community nestled in its own little valley.  Farmer John and Lynn welcomed us with home brew of the regular and root beer varieties, a potluck, pizzas made in their brick oven (which sadly, I missed due to tardiness), and an herbalist table with minted elixirs of red clover and nettles. Lynn and I took the Master Food Preserver training program together, and I’m volunteering to help the CSA folks out with questions about how to cook with the vegetables in the shares.

The big joy of the 20-acre farm, of course, was the tour provided by Farmer John.  As I said, I was late, so I was fortunate that he was willing to do one last tour, and I happily tagged along, listening to an articulate, passionate disquisition on soil additives, crop rotation, experimentation with chicken feed and greenhouse rows, and all manner of things.  He showed us the bakery in progress, the lumber kiln, and the dank and mysterious mushroom hut, where shiitakes and oyster mushrooms bloom like pale, fleshy flowers.

The fields, immaculately maintained, are grouped by plant type.  The brassicas have their own area, the twenty-odd types of potatoes (some of which are pictured above) grow in neat mounded rows next to a field bursting with hard red wheat (pictured with daisy).  But where were the Yukon Gold potatoes?  Why, in the shares, of course!

Rows of Asian greens fill out another field, and garlic has its own real estate.  Tomatoes and peppers and herbs — really most of the hot weather crops — grow carefully in greenhouses dotted around the property.  Cardoons — cardoons!! — line the long driveway up to the farmhouse.  They are pictured here, the things that look like artichokes.  I had never seen a growing cardoon.  Farmer John said that in Italy, they bend the stalks and cover them with soil to get the blanched white color.  There were strawberries, some small fig trees and the beginnings of a plum orchard, and god knows what else.  The man even has an entire row of wormwood (Artemesia absinthia) and has faced — it was rumored — the green fairy.

We got to see an old Ponderosa Pine in a lovely wooded meadow, a relic, said Farmer John, of what the whole valley used to look like centuries ago.  Hundreds of chickens wander around several large fenced areas, and you can see how happy they are by the size and quality of their eggs.

Sweetwater Farm has been in operation for 20 years, and doing natural or organic farming the entire time.  They used to supply produce to high-end restaurants, but now they just grow for the market and the CSA shares, to maximize freshness and variety.  The vegetables are beautiful, and the breadth of what’s available there is really unusual for a small farm in the Willamette Valley.  I was glad I had the opportunity to visit; thanks John and Lynn!

And one last shot:  I love living in Oregon. Yes, this would be purple mountains’ majesty above the fruited plain…of amber waves of grain.  You know you want it.

 

with this food i thee wed

Just returned from a sorely needed mini-vacation to the San Francisco Bay Area.  Retrogrouch was at a conference in Canada, so we had to celebrate our tenth anniversary when we returned.  And what better way to do it than by sharing a meal with friends?  Ah yes, sharing the meal we had catered for our wedding ten years ago, with the same wine.

La Méditerranée in Berkeley is still going strong, serving the same pomegranate chicken, fruited garbanzo pilaf, Middle Eastern dips and salads, dolmas and chicken filo fingers it did in 1998.  The 2006 Husch Pinot Noir from Anderson Valley was no 1995, alas, but it was still good enough to remind us of how delicious life can be together.

I decided to pick up the food when I was driving down College Avenue, and saw the restaurant.  Packed in airtight plastic containers, layered with icepacks, and carefully ensconced in the cooler I’ve started taking along with me everywhere I go in the car, it was just fine on the journey back home.  The restaurant didn’t bake the filo, so I just popped it in the oven to crisp up the top, and microwaved the other items that needed heat, and we were good to go.  May the next ten years be as easy as that.

 

strawberries fading fast and news from your hostess

See what happens when you go get your oil changed in Eugene?  Jam ensues.  Yeah, yeah, I couldn’t resist another flat of Bentons when I passed the fruit stand on West 11th, and this time I was not sucked in to pectin-free promises, so I made a light, lovely batch of low-sugar pectin strawberry jam with pinot gris syrup and Szechuan pepper.  I used Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s recipe for Sweet Cheeks Pinot Gris Syrup, which is basically a bottle of wine reduced by half, then fortified with sugar.  The peachy, honeysuckly aromas of the Pinot Gris were then punched up when I macerated a couple of tablespoons of Szechuan peppercorns in a still-hot half-cup of the syrup. Szechuan pepper is such a beautifully floral scent, and it complements strawberries particularly well.  With the Pinot Gris syrup?  Oh la la.

If you’re thinking about preserving strawberries this year, you should get a move on, since this hot weather is wrapping up the season very quickly.   Next up:  blueberries!

And by the way, the reason I was getting an oil change is because I’m going on a little vacation over the weekend.  During that time, I’ll be writing up a post about a fun visit and tour of my CSA, Sweetwater Farm, in Creswell the other day.  Suffice it to say, I was very impressed by the farm and the sheer breadth of the projects Farmer John and Lynn are undertaking.  If you find my blog because you’re associated with the CSA, hi and welcome!

And to everyone else who has been reading the blog, thanks for stopping by!  I’ve noticed my hits have really increased in the last few weeks, and I’m frankly amazed that so many people are interested in my grumbling.  I’d love to know more about the people who are interested in my blog: are you Oregonians?  From Eugene?  Interested in recipes?  Techniques?  Local food politics?  Please don’t be shy to comment and say hello!