Why mow it when you can eat it?

Today I wandered around our yard with a basket and came back with a salad.

It had chickweed greens and flowers, dandelion greens, bittercress greens and flowers, creasy greens, violet leaves, and sorrel in it. Chickweed and violet are mild and moist, peppergrass and creasy greens are spicy with a hint of bitterness, dandelion leaves (before the flowers bloom) are pleasantly bitter, and sorrel is distinctly sour.

The boy thought it was too many flavors in one salad, but to me it just tasted like today: riotous spring!

Hint: If you want to encourage more edible (and medicinal) weeds in your yard, dig up a bit here and there. Lots of tasty plants like to grow on disturbed ground.

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You know your lawn is full of wild onions.

Go pull some.

(Make sure they’re wild onions, not something else that grows from a bulb. Hint: wild onions smell strongly of onion.)

Clean them up. (Tedious, but worth it.)

You also might want to shorten them. They do tend to tangle up.

Saute them with butter and salt.

So tasty.

(We had ours with spiced barley and goat chops.)

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This morning I was re-reading the (very timely and very wise) discussion of bird-roasting in a cookbook I usually love. But this time I noticed something that made me gasp and smack the page. The sentence began: “Remove and discard the lump of fat…”

Discard the lump of fat?!?! Is she crazy? Schmaltz is the most wonderful stuff. To discard it is absolutely ridiculous. (How very American, really, to remove and discard the lump of fat. The most nutritious, energy-rich part. The most flavorful part. To throw away the fat of the land. Such a waste, such a waste!)

Okay, okay, I’m done channeling the Ashkenazi grandmas of the world.

I’m just here to remind you that poultry fat is lovely stuff. If you’re roasting a bird this Thanksgiving, you should save its fat in a little jar in your refrigerator. You can use it to sauté vegetables, to flavor beans, to enrich sauces, to enliven soups… anyplace that wants a bit of tasty poultry richness. (And who wouldn’t want that?)

Just pour the extra fat off the juices in your roasting pan. And save the fat from the broth you make with the bones. And that little lump of fat inside the bird? You can leave it on if you like, and it will melt as the bird roasts. Or you can cut it off and render it as you would any other fat. Just please don’t throw it away, okay?

Happy Thanksgiving!

In case you’re geeky about fatty-acids (like I am), here are the details on all kinds of schmaltz (USDA data for 1 tablespoon of each):

Chicken fat: 2.7g polyunsaturated; 5.7g monounsaturated; 3.8g saturated.

Duck fat: 1.7g polyunsaturated; 6.3g monounsaturated; 4.3g saturated.

Goose fat: 1.4g polyunsaturated; 7.3g monounsaturated; 3.5g saturated.

Turkey fat: 3g polyunsaturated; 5.5g monounsaturated; 3.8g saturated.

And for reference…

Olive oil: 1.4g polyunsaturated; 9.9g monounsaturated; 1.9g saturated.

Butter: 0.4g polyunsaturated; 3g monounsaturated; 7.3g saturated.

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Look what I got from the farmer down the road: gorgeous, creamy leaf lard!

What’s that? Did you whisper “Ew, lard!”?
Take a deep breath, it will be OK. The weird, illicit shiver Americans get when they hear someone say “lard” is rather new. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of “lard” as an insult dates only from the 1940s.

See, chances are your great-grandmother cooked with lard. Likely your grandmother did too. (There’s a reason older people remember “grandma’s pie” and “grandma’s fried chicken” so fondly.) They probably only switched to poisonous hydrogenated vegetable shortening in the fifties or sixties, when “experts” started to warn about the dangers of saturated fats, and Procter & Gamble picked up on it in their Crisco* advertising. (”It’s all vegetable. It’s digestible!”)

Funny thing is, according to the USDA, lard contains more monounsaturated fatty acids (think olive oil) than saturated ones. Here’s the fatty acid breakdown for one tablespoon of lard: 1.4g polyunsaturated; 5.8g monounsaturated; 5g saturated. (For reference, a tablespoon of butter: 0.4g polyunsaturated; 3g monounsaturated; 7.3g saturated.) So even if you buy the “saturated fat is the devil” theory (and I don’t), lard is not unhealthy.

So how did we get to the point where the word “lard” must be said with a whisper and a giggle? It’s really rather strange. People sigh about indulging in “too much” butter. But if you suggest using butter in cooking, no one looks at you in horror. The word “butter” doesn’t evoke gasps or blushes.

Whatever the issue, I think it’s time we got over it. Lard is a wonderful cooking fat. There’s nothing in the world that can equal a leaf lard pie crust for flakiness.

Unfortunately, you can’t buy real lard in the grocery store. Grocery store lard is partially hydrogenated to give it a uniform texture and a longer shelf life. (It’s really just Crisco made from industrial pig fat instead of industrial soy and cottonseed oils.)

There are a couple of places online that sell pure rendered lard from happy (read: well-treated on small farms) pigs. Mother Linda’s is one, though she doesn’t always have enough to supply all her customers. And there’s at least one supplier on LocalHarvest that will ship.

It’s much easier to get lard from a local pig farmer or butcher in fresh, unrendered form. This means you need to melt it down yourself. But that’s not so hard. It’s really rather fun.

If you want to use your lard to make pie crusts, try to get leaf lard (the soft, creamy fat from around the pig’s kidneys). It has a unique crystalline structure that makes incredibly flaky pastry. Fatback is a harder fat from (you guessed it) along the back of the pig. It’s old time Appalachian food—the classic addition to a pot of greens. (Farmers sometimes also sell mixed fat from other parts of the pig, but the quality isn’t as good.)

To render lard, just chop it up the best you can (smaller pieces will render faster) and put it in a heavy pot with a bit of water on the bottom. Put the pot on low heat. Stir as often as you can remember. It will take hours to render. You can speed the process up a little by squishing the whole bit with a potato masher once it’s started to melt. Don’t be tempted to turn the heat up. It will make the lard taste greasy and fried.

When the unmelted bits start to sink, strain off the nice, clear lard. This is the stuff for pie crusts. If it looks like there’s still a lot of fat on what’s left, put it back on the heat to render some more. This second batch will be stronger tasting than the first, but still useful for things like cornbread and greens—and frying, of course.

Strain your rendered lard through cheesecloth into clean jars. You can store the extra in the freezer.

Happy baking!

*Yes, I know there’s “zero trans-fat per serving” Crisco now. Turns out that may be even more poisonous than the original. Are you surprised?

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When I asked a farmer for these lovely dried October beans, he was surprised. People buy them fresh for shelling, but not for drying. The same goes for limas and butterbeans.

Have people forgotten about dried beans altogether?

Someone said “they’re too much work.” Not really. Not if you’re the kind of person who likes to sit on the back porch with a glass of wine every once in a while. Why not shell beans and drink wine? Why not have a bean-shelling party if you have a bunch?

Freshly dried beans are a revelation. I’m not exaggerating.

People who know him will tell you that this boy of mine can be picky. He was not a bean-eater before he met me. A few years ago, I fed him some big, meaty white beans I’d grown in my garden. Just boiled up and served with salt, olive oil, garlic, and rosemary. I got the sighs of satisfaction usually reserved for steak. “I didn’t know beans could be like this.”

Right. Some things: Canned beans are not really beans. They are mushy bits of cellulose and salt. The dried beans found in healthfoodstore bulk bins are not usually beans either. They are old, dead, shriveled bits of cellulose without any salt. Don’t even talk to me about dried beans bagged in plastic on grocery store shelves. Ancient. Rocks. Not food.

So. Where do you get real beans? For the most part, you have to get them from farmstands, farmers’ markets, or your garden. And like I said, sometimes you have to encourage your farmers. They don’t know people want dried beans.

People don’t know people want dried beans. And trust me, they do. All they have to do is taste them. Flavor. So much flavor. And I’ll tell you another secret: freshly dried beans don’t take a year and a day to cook like old dead ones do. You soak them (for a few hours or a few days—whatever works for you) and put them on to simmer when you start to cook. They’ll be done soon enough.

Good beans have so much of their own flavor, they don’t need a lot of help. Just a dab of fat (olive oil, schmalz, bacon fat), some onions or garlic, a bit of herb or spice. And salt. Enough salt is key. But don’t add it until the beans are almost done—it can make the skins tough. (I like to cook beans ahead of time and let them sit in their lovely broth for at least a few hours. That way the salt soaks in and they are wonderfully silky and people can’t believe how good they are.)

Some information on bean varieties: The ones I fed the boy that time were Drabo beans. I can hardly find any reference to them online. But they’re good. Very good. Fedco usually sells the seeds, but apparently their grower had a crop failure in 2007. Fedco has a great selection of bean varieties. You should grow beans. They are ridiculously easy to grow. Just keep half an eye on them for the growing season and pick them when the pods start to dry out. Don’t have a garden? If you live in California you are a lucky bastard. I was at the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market in San Francisco this summer, and there was a stand selling maybe 30 varieties of heirloom dried beans. Good Mother Stallard, Red Nightfall, Goat’s Eye. (Yes, they were $5 a pound. But I calculated—that’s still cheaper than canned beans.)

Some opinions on bean nomenclature: October beans are the traditional Appalachian “shelly” bean. Some people say they’re the same as borlotti or cranberry beans. But I’ve grown borlotti beans, I’ve grown cranberry beans, and I’ve grown October beans, and I can tell you that they are not the same. So it won’t surprise you, then, that to my tongue limas and butterbeans are not the same beans either. Try shelling butterbeans. They are flat. You hardly think there’s a bean in there. Limas are fat. And they taste different too. Try them. Eat real beans. You’ll love them, I promise.

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I promised to talk about what to do with all that zucchini, didn’t I?

Well, my favorite way to eat zucchini is grated and sauteed with lots of butter and garlic. But there’s only so much of that a person can eat.

While I was thinking about interesting ways to preserve zucchini, I remembered an old-fashioned zucchini-mustard pickle that one of our neighbors used to make when I was little. It was yellow, oniony, and a bit sweet, with lots of mustard seeds in it.

(The neighbor ladies weren’t allowed to give me cookies, as my parents were into full-on Jethro Kloss–style healthfoodism. Eventually, after shaking their heads and clucking their tongues—what’s childhood without cookies?—the ladies compromised with my mother and gave me jars of pickles instead. Not a bad deal, really. A jar of pickles lasts a lot longer than a cookie.)

I was excited to try to re-create the yellow zucchini pickles of my childhood. But here’s the thing: they were cooked vinegar pickles, and I’ve been really into raw fermented pickles lately. I figured if I made a raw pickle using similar ingredients, the flavor would likely be similar. But the texture would be really different. And I don’t really like the crunchy-but-grainy texture of raw zucchini.

My solution was to grate the zucchini and make a relish, hoping that the crunch of the zucchini would be pleasant this way.

Here’s what I did:

Grated up one oversized zucchini, minus the seeds. (This is a good use for monster zucchini.)

Mixed in one chopped red jalapeño and one thinly sliced onion.

Salted the mix. Well. Until it tasted nice and salty.

Added spices: turmeric, mustard seeds, allspice, cinnamon, pepper.

Packed it in a jar with two cherry leaves. (You could use grape leaves, or oak, too. This is to keep it from getting mushy.)

I squished the relish down until it was submerged in its own juice, and kept it there with a “pickling rock” about the size of the mouth of the jar.

If you haven’t made fermented pickles before, I’d suggest you read a bit about technique before you make any. Sandor Ellix Katz’s Wild Fermentation is a good place to start.

I let this relish ferment for about 5 days. (It was hot out, so it didn’t take long. At more reasonable temperatures it’d probably take a week or so.)

It turned out really well—delightfully tangy and mustardy. We ate it on goat burgers with roasted peppers the other day. The boy kept shaking his head and saying “Mmm.” He ate three.

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September lunch out on the back porch.

The leaves on the walnut tree are starting to yellow and fall.

A nice wind, and the summer humidity is finally gone.

We had a pleasant dry rosé from the winery over the hill.

Oh, and food. We had food.

Simple pepper salad. Just sliced ripe peppers and red onions from the farmers market with a bit of salt and the boy’s homemade wine vinegar.

Butterbeans! My favorite. I was so happy to see them at the market this week. Simmered in salt water, tossed with butter. Nothing better in the world.

Goat shoulder chops from our neighbors at Cedar Dawn Farm. Rubbed with bay leaves, hot pepper, and salt. Pan broiled.

So good.

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First it was ten gallons of tomatoes to can, then six pecks of peppers to roast.

These were “seconds” from a local farmer—the slightly overripe or funny-shaped peppers he can’t sell to restaurants. At $6 a peck, they were absolutely worth it. But patient? No.

These peppers were really, really ripe. And that means really, really sweet. But it also means we had to drop everything to process them right away. And considering we had quite a few other harvest tasks to get to (cucumbers that needed pickling, beer that needed bottling, corn that needed shelling), that was a bit of a pain.

First we had to clean them. Rinse, cut out the bad spots, repeat. Many, many, many times. The boy was grumbling: “Are we really going to need so many roasted peppers this winter?”

After they were all cleaned, it was roasting time. We did some outside on our little grill and some in the oven under the broiler. They need to be nice and blistered and black so the skin will come off after a bit of steaming. (Put them in a closed pot to cool and they’ll slowly steam themselves.)

The next morning, peeling. This is a sticky business. You need a bowl for peppers, a bowl for peels, and a bowl of water for rinsing your hands. Careful not to waste the tasty “liquor” at the bottom of the steaming pot. (Some people peel outside because of the mess, but we live on a farm, so flies are a problem. I just resigned myself to mopping the kitchen floor.)

Part way through peeling, the boy tasted a bit of pepper. Wide eyes. “Oh, wow.” No more complaining from him.

The flavor really is amazing. So much better than any roasted peppers you can buy in a jar. Intensely sweet and bright and peppery.

We put ours in quart jars, destined for our new chest freezer. (You could pressure can them, but that’s a pain, and I don’t have a pressure cooker big enough for quart jars. You can also keep them in the fridge for quite a while if you make sure the tops of the peppers are always covered in olive oil.) We got about twelve quarts, not counting all the ones we’ve eaten in the past few days.

(Goat burgers with roasted peppers and zucchini relish? So good.)

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I. Have. Been. Canning.

I saw our neighbor at the farmers’ market last week. She said “Hey, do you want any tomatoes? I have extra.”

With my food-hoarding instincts, there’s no way I could pass that up.

Ten gallons later….

Well, let’s just say it’s hot in the kitchen.

If you haven’t tried canning, tomatoes are a good way to start. Home-canned tomatoes are so much better than store-bought.

You can actually just toss the cleaned tomatoes in jars and can them that way (”raw pack”), but I like to get the skins off first. Tradition says to dunk them in hot water for a minute or so to make them easier to peel, but I think that’s messy and you lose a lot of the lovely tomato essence in the boiling water.

A few years ago Jeffrey Hamelman showed me a better way. Jeffrey is a baker, and he roasts his tomatoes in the oven before he cans them. This way the juices are concentrated rather than diluted, and the skins are loose enough that you can usually pull them off with a pair of tongs. Much less messy. Just put a pan of tomatoes in a 350 degree oven for a half hour or so. They’re ready when the skins start to split.

And I make tomato paste with the skins and the leftover juice. Cook them down over low heat for a couple of hours, stirring often. When the skins are pretty translucent, strain the mix (or use a food mill). Then put it back on the stove over low heat until it’s as thick as you want it.

Back to the kitchen. (My salsa isn’t canned yet.)

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