Tomatoes

Tomatoes have been around farmers markets for a few weeks already, but it seems it's just been in the last few days that they have started appearing in great quantities. I've been eyeing them, trying to figure out how we would be able to afford to purchase enough tomatoes--even at their cheapest, they are about a dollar a pound. I have absolutely no problem with paying farmers fairly, but since I've only had two weeks of employment this summer, money is getting tight. In order to really put up enough salsa, soup, marinara, and just plain tomatoes to last us a full year, I need over a hundred pounds. I couldn't bear the thought of a tomato-less winter, so I kept looking around for slightly damaged or over-ripe tomatoes in bulk. As luck would have it, I found out that the University of Tennessee Organic Crop Production has just this--plenty of tomato "seconds." This is what I hope to be only the beginning of the tomatoes for the season; I'm using the very last of the tomatoes from these boxes this morning, and will be getting a couple more boxes on Friday.

As I've been making my way through the tomatoes, I've also been thinking about my purpose in putting up. Although I love preserving fruit, even in its most utilitarian form--in extra-light syrup--fruit still doesn't seem quite as necessary as putting up tomatoes, soups, stock, and other savory items. And because putting up tomatoes--and other vegetables--creates something which will sustain us in the winter months, there is more urgency in the process. The relative fleetingness of the tomato season makes the tomatoes precious, and I almost have a reverence for the jars of tomatoes in my pantry. I'm trying to say something that I can't quite vocalize, or perhaps something that I understand so well, that there are no longer words for it. Why do I preserve? Why do I make the effort to obtain such a heavy load of fruit and then spend several full days in the kitchen monitoring the simmering, and the processing? Because this is what there is here and now. Even though I did not have a hand in growing these tomatoes, they are of this land, and with my efforts, they will last a year, until the next tomato season. Preserving emphasizes the value of what is in season; there is an aspect of making do with what one has here and now, rather than seeking the same food on an as-needed basis. Anyone can go to the store and purchase almost anything--salsa, tomato sauce, canned tomatoes--on a whim. Preserving is deliberate. I have to plan for the full year when I put up; prior to canning, I'd never really thought about how many jars of marinara we go through in a year, but now, I could tell you an exact number. Last year, I only canned a dozen jars of plain tomatoes, and by early April, we'd run out; we ended up buying a couple cans of tomatoes throughout the spring, but it was not the same. The flavor was flat, and there was no satisfaction in opening them. This year, I know better. I know that to many, these kinds of efforts sound a little crazy; but just you put up a few jars of roasted tomatoes, open one in the middle of January (to eat on toast, pizza, or in soup), and you'll know where I'm coming from.

Peachy Coffee Cake

The early peaches started coming in here in Tennessee at the end of June, and although there was a lull in varieties ripening last week, by mid-July (in just a few days) peaches should be in full-swing. Before I started canning, I only purchased a few peaches a year--beyond eating them fresh and baking with them, I didn't quite know what to do with them. I especially didn't know about the versatility of peaches--I never thought that they could be made into a salsa, or a barbeque sauce, or peach butter. I made all three (slightly different versions) last year, and kept being surprised by the ways in which peaches could be transformed by the different flavors and textures. So far (already this year), I've made a batch of barbeque sauce and taught a canning class on the peach salsa; both came out exceptionally well, and I've gotten a few incredibly enthusiastic reviews of the barbeque sauce (what can I say, I took it to a party where there was a hot grill and some corn, asparagus, and zucchini--of course they got slathered in the sauce and grilled!). But what I'm trying to say is--if it's just minutes away from being peach season again, the peaches that were canned last year need to be consumed as soon as possible.

Last year, I also canned peaches in light syrup, and we'd been enjoying them in our cereal and in fancy rum drinks; when I checked in the pantry, there was a lone jar of these very peaches still left, right next to a jar of peach butter. I took out the jars and carried them around with me for a little while before I remembered a fall-inspired coffee cake from Celine Steen's The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions. The original recipe uses ginger syrup, roasted apples, and apple sauce to add moisture and sweetness to the cake--and I have to say, the original recipe makes one of the most wonderful coffee cakes I've ever had. However, the peaches also work wonderfully well, and provided me with a good opportunity to use up those last few jars before I put up this year's harvest. 

Ingredients:

For the cake:                                                                            For the Streusel:
1 cup peach syrup (from canned peaches)                       1/2 cup pecan halves, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup peach butter                                                               1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup vegetable or canola oil                                            1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cup whole wheat flour                                                    2 teaspoons vegetable oil
1 cup all purpose flour                                                                                
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 cup canned peach halves, diced

Process:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease a 9" round cake pan or an 8" square pan.

In a medium bowl, combine peach syrup, peach butter, and oil. In a large bowl, sift together flours, baking powder, salt, and spices. In a separate small bowl, combine the streusel ingredients and set aside.

Fold wet cake ingredients into dry, being careful not to overmix. Fold in the diced peaches.

Pour the batter into the greased pan and spread so the batter covers the pan evenly. Sprinkle streusel evenly on top.

Bake for 35-40 minutes, until the cake is golden brown and firm in the center. Transfer to a wire rack and cool before removing from the pan.
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The cake isn't overly sweet, and isn't overly peachy--it's everything I want in a coffee cake: slightly crumbly, moist, and flavorful. If you don't have the peachy ingredients available, now you have a good reason to put up peaches so you can make this coffee cake later in the year.

Making Polenta

Vegetable stock and polenta

In the last month or so, we've been eating a lot of greens: the arugula and turnips have done incredibly well in our community garden plot, and once the CSA season began, we started getting spinach, chard, mustard greens, three different kinds of kale, and more arugula. This sudden abundance has challenged our creativity--we've made curries (both Indian and Thai), used greens in pasta, had wilted greens as a side, but still sometimes had more greens than we knew what to do with, and wanted to expand our repertoire. Every now and then, we'd buy pre-made polenta in the plastic sleeves, at about $2.50 per pack. Matt would

Garlic scapes and green onion

slice it up and fry it in a pan with garlic and olives, adding the greens at the end, and wilting them--and it makes for a very good light lunch or appetizer. And then one day, I had an epiphany: the "grits" (also known as coarse-ground cornmeal) sold in the bulk section of our coop is polenta! I don't know why it took me so long to realize this--maybe because I don't like grits (something about the mushy texture), and have never associated squishy grits with the crispy-on-the-outside and savory polenta. Whatever the reason for my previous oversight, I'm glad that I've made the (mental) leap because polenta is incredibly easy to make and so cheap!

Quick sautee in olive oil and salt

Adding stock

Not only is polenta cheap, but versatile, too. The spices and the liquid ingredient can be varied according to the occasion. What I had on hand were green onions, garlic scapes, and vegetable stock. (Remember when I said that I "wasn't thrilled about canning the stock?" I take it back. I've used up almost all of the seven quarts of stock--some has gone into soups, but my polenta discovery will have me using stock much more often, for sure.)

The basic thing to keep in mind about polenta is that the liquid to grain ratio is about 3 to 1; you could use water for the liquid, and as long as the polenta is organic and good quality, the final result would probably be wonderful. As I was making this particular polenta, I kept thinking of the flavor combinations that I could make in the future; sun-dried tomato and basil (or oregano); cilantro and jalapeno; pumpkin and thyme...

Polenta gets pretty thick; keep stirring!

Allowing the polenta to firm up

All this talk about polenta, and no recipe yet. What can I say, I got carried away contemplating it!

Recipe:

• 2 green onions, white and green parts, chopped
• 2 garlic scapes (or a clove or two of garlic), minced
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon dried basil (or other herbs)
• 4 cups vegetable stock
• 2/3 cup of water (as needed)
• 1.5 cups polenta/ corn grits/ coarse-ground cornmeal

Sauté the onions and garlic scapes in olive oil for a few minutes, just until they're starting to cook. Add the salt and herbs, stir to combine flavors; pour in the stock and bring to a steady simmer over medium-high heat. Once the stock is simmering, add the polenta in a slow and steady stream, and stir constantly with a wooden spoon or spatula for 25-30 minutes. As you're stirring, be sure to stir from the bottom of the pot, as the polenta will become quite thick quickly--and you want to both keep it from burning and keep it cooking for the full time, or else it will be too gritty. Add as little as 1/4 and as much as 2/3 cup of water during the cooking process--the polenta should be quite thick, but not too thick to stir effectively. At the end of the cooking time, taste and adjust spices; take the polenta off heat and transfer into a greased 8"x8" (or a 9"x9", depending on how thick you like it) baking pan, and allow to cool for a couple hours.

After the polenta cools, you can slice it and store in an airtight container for up to a week, refrigerated. As I mentioned earlier, to fix it, just fry some up with more garlic, onions, and greens. You can also decrease the recipe and use 1 cup of polenta for 3 cups of liquid, but (personally,) I like a thicker slice of polenta.

Polenta is also something that is often sold locally, and thus could be a delicious platform for an almost all-local meal.

Plans and Provisions

Same soup, a couple months ago.

In a few weeks, Matt and I will be spending nine days in Louisville grading the essay portion of the AP Literature exam. We love the city--it's not too big, but still has things to do, and really good restaurants that we've come to like over the last few years. We go to Louisville at least a couple times a year because Matt's parents live in Ohio, and Louisville is just about the halfway point between there and Knoxville. 

ETS, the testing agency that hires teachers to grade the AP tests, pays for much of the stay--the hotel and some lunches are covered. However, the lunches are often not suitable for vegans, and from what Matt tells me, if there is anything vegan, there's not much. 

In the last couple of years, I've stayed behind at home and eaten raw for ten days or so; this year, I'm glad to have been accepted to be a grader. Because we're both going to be there, I want to be sure that we have food to take up with us. This is where our pressure canner comes into play: I'm planning to make and can a couple different soups, so we can take jars of soup with us--they won't need refrigeration, and a jar is just the perfect amount for lunch. Today I made the lentil soup that has been a favorite for the last few months. The batch made nine pints. I'm still getting the hang of the pressure canner (it's only the second time that I've used it), and it was a stressful couple hours to get the pressure canner ready, sealed properly, venting, and to the right pressure to can the soup. All the jars sealed incredibly well, and the Tattler lids are especially concave, indicating a very strong seal. Matt's going to try one of the jars of soup for his lunch tomorrow, but a good few or the others will be packed away and awaiting the trip north. 

There have been a couple times that people have expressed surprise and dismay at the cost of our pressure canner; nonetheless (and despite having used it only twice so far), I think that it is more than a worthwhile investment--it will last us a lifetime, and it will be so useful! I love that I am able to can soups with it, and to have those jars in reserve for when we need them. Yes, it takes a good bit of extra time to plan ahead, but to me it is worth it. I think many people forfeit such things in favor of spending money on other things, or sticking to convenience--after all, it's much easier to buy soup in cans; but good quality and organic (vegan) soup is expensive (whereas the soup that I made today cost at most seven dollars or so). The main issue, too, is time. Xan expressed it best in a recent blog post, "When I tell people about this [in my case, canning], the near-universal response is awestruck (sometimes patronizing) admiration, followed by the statement 'where do you find the time' or 'well, that's great, but I don't have time for that.'" There is always time if people want to make time for things; I know that I'm mostly unemployed for the summer, but last summer, when I was working a shit job full-time, I still found time to can almost every other day in July and August. And speaking of (mostly) not being employed over the summer--it was a choice on my part because I knew that I could trade a few months' income for the ability to be at home and to have the full summer season to volunteer at Beardsley and other farms, and to be canning. It's a different way to make provisions, not using money, but using skills and connections.

Strawberry Season

I knew that it was going to rain today, and so I made time to go down to The Fruit and Berry Patch to pick the first (for me) strawberries of the season. Here in East Tennessee, strawberries have actually already been around for a couple of weeks, but I've been resisting buying them, even at markets, saving myself for the enormous satisfaction of picking them myself. So yesterday afternoon, putting down ungraded papers and leaving the landlord in the middle of fixing a window that was broken during last week's hail storm, I went to pick strawberries. I think this is the first time that I've ever been berry-picking alone. When I started out, I was alone in the strawberry field--it was mid-afternoon, and the sun made the berries practically radiate that ripe strawberry smell. It was a wonderfully sweaty and gratifying experience; I picked ten pounds of berries, most of which are already designated for various projects.

After I learned how to can (only a year and a half ago?!), and then canned barbecue sauce in the fall, strawberry jam was my first spring project. It turned out fine, but it wasn't anything to write about (and I didn't, in fact); it was runny, and a little over-cooked, and a little too sweet for me. I liked it fine, but I think there's still a jar of it left. So I took it upon myself to try and make a strawberry jam that would translate the true flavor and excitement of the berries that I love so much. I looked to other bloggers for inspiration, and can say that the first strawberry jam of the season--strawberry-rhubarb jam--was a great success.

I didn't have a lemon on hand, so I substituted the lemon zest in the recipe with orange zest. This jam came out still tart, and even though I had slightly less rhubarb than the recipe suggested, it came out wonderfully. I can't quite tell that the rhubarb is in the jam, but the strawberry flavor somehow seems more genuine--maybe it's the sharpness of the rhubarb that carries it through.

I have some strawberries macerating in the fridge, awaiting another jam project; strawberries--I now know--signal the beginning of the full-swing canning season. After strawberries, the blueberries, blackberries, peaches, and plums come rolling in, one right after the other. And I'm looking forward to it all.

If you're looking for something to do with all these strawberries that are going to be pouring in for the next few weeks, and need a little guidance with canning (or if you would just like to try a new recipe), you can sign up for one of the upcoming canning classes--there's one next Saturday. Let me know if you are interested, and please--spread the word to your friends. There's very little that is more exciting than opening a jar of home-canned strawberry jam, and being reminded of the wonderful flavor of fresh-picked strawberries during the month of November!

African Yam Soup

There are many foods and flavors that systematically avoided until I became vegan. Until about three years ago, I refused to eat greens (raw or cooked), beans, peanut butter, popcorn, onions, anything spicy...(the list is quite long--too long and embarrassing for me to flesh it out here). When I became vegan, that all changed, almost overnight; when I stopped eating meat and dairy, I suddenly wanted and loved all those things that I'd previously refused to eat. From the way that I lovingly talk about massaged kale salad, you'd never be able to tell my previous mis-inclinations. Every now and then, however, when I read a new recipe, I am filled with the old qualms--especially if it's a soup recipe that includes ginger, garlic, cloves, cardamom, allspice, cinnamon, cumin, chile powder, cayenne pepper, orange juice, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, miso and peanut butter. Oh, did I mention that once I categorize a spice as either sweet or savory, I have a hard time using it for its opposite purpose? So when I saw the African Yam Soup in The Artful Vegan cookbook (the ingredients of which are, for the most part, listed above), I was intrigued, but very hesitant. How could orange juice and cinnamon ever go together with onions and tomatoes?!

Here's the truth: I'd recommended this soup to a friend a couple months ago, when she'd gotten into a food rut, and had all these extra sweet potatoes sitting around. I thought: this soup sounds so adventurous; maybe she'll try it and tell me how it tastes! Well, my friend loved the soup (and at the time I thought she was crazy). It took me these couple of months to work up the courage to try making it, and I'm sorry that I've waited this long. Once everything is cooked together, the soup gets blended, and served with cilantro and roasted peanuts. We stirred some leftover black beans into it--just for added texture--and ate this soup for lunches last week. It was spicy, and tangy, and satisfying; the orange juice and cinnamon that I was worried about so much gave it that extra depth and interest. 

And the soup also gave me a chance to use one of our last jars of spicy tomatoes that we put up last summer. Next year--as I've told myself numerous times already--I'll put up more tomatoes, and keep the recipe to this soup marked and on the ready once autumn begins.

Dessert at a Moment's Notice

Canning has changed the way that I look at food in several ways: for one, I am more used to having food around. And even if what comes out of a jar isn't the centerpiece of a meal--the sauces, condiments, jams, and pickles have become indispensable in the every-day. Multiple times a day, I open jars--either something from the pantry or something in the fridge--to add to a meal. Canning has also made cooking easier, with some of the decisions about ingredients made months prior, at the moment of canning conception.

When I got a craving for dessert on Monday night at 9:15 PM, I knew that I could turn to the pantry to provide for me. I plucked a jar of apple-cranberry relish, and looked at it for a few seconds before declaring that it would be just right in a galette. In fact, The Millennium Cookbook has a recipe for something very similar to this. I used their recipe for a walnut pastry crust, plopped down some apple cranberry relish, and thirty minutes later, we had (an albeit late) dessert. If it's been a while since you've had a galette, I highly recommend it: it's easier than a pie, less messy than a cobbler, and still a great platform for the fruit filling.

Winter Shadows and Marmalade

On Sunday, I am teaching a canning workshop and teaching people how to make marmalade. The thing is, marmalade is still rather mysterious to me.

I made this apple-rosemary marmalade last month, and a few other kinds of marmalades since then, but I'm still now quite sure what happens to make a goo of rinds and pulp actually form into something so wonderful. I hope that by Sunday, I'll know a little more, or just be able to humbly admit my shortcomings to the class.

Canning

A week and a half ago (or so), I went to a canning/pickling workshop with my friend Charlotte. The workshop was at the local community house, and there were about a dozen aspiring canners there; in about three hours' time, we made and canned (under the supervision of the canning workshop leader) Dilly Beans, Pear Chutney, and Pickled Daikon and Golden Beets. After going to the workshop, I couldn't stop thinking about canning--it was so easy! I suddenly had this new technology of preserving food at my fingertips! And so, I started planning a canning day for myself.
As with any food event, there was the question of what to make; I browsed and contemplated many recipes and finally decided on BBQ Sauce, Tangelo Marmalade, and Pickled Peppers.
Two of those, I knew, would be more involved recipes, and the peppers would be something easier--I had gotten a handful of banana peppers over the weekend, and our own little cinder-block garden had produced a few poblanos and jalapenos.
I planned the day along with my friend Megan, as she had an interest in canning things and is in possession of a canning pot; it also turned out that Megan and I make an incredible canning team--we work well together, and she's not afraid of picking up hot jars with her bare hands. (There she is, pouring sugar into the marmalade pot!)
We worked tirelessly for hours. One of the two large burners on our stove quit working soon after we moved into the house, and this was what slowed us down quite a bit, as canning involves several things going at once: a pan to sterilize the jars, whatever is being canned, and the big canning pot to process the jars once they're filled. Here is a picture of half-way through the day: the BBQ sauce was already blended up (I used fresh tomatoes to make it) and in a bowl, ready to be ladled out into jars; the tangelos ready to be cooked down for the marmalade; the peppers chopped up and waiting in a bowl... Including cooking time (and time to go out and get more jar lids, as we filled up more jars than we expected), we were hard at work for about six hours. And of course, as we were hearing the little "ping" of processed jars sealing themselves, all that work was worth it. I was especially pleased with the way the BBBQ sauce came out--we have enough to give to friends and family, and some
to use ourselves.
However, the marmalade never "set up" as promised by the recipe, which never mentions pectin... The taste was wonderful, but I was really hoping for marmalade, rather than tangelo drink mixer--we'll have to try it again, with pectin this time. I'm also looking forward to canning tomatillo salsa. And rosemary jelly. If you haven't tried canning, it's rather easy if you have the necessary tools. Also, it would help if you are making only one thing to can (especially if it's your first time). The sense of accomplishment in seeing the finished product is pretty great--and renewed each time I see the jars I purposefully left sitting out on the kitchen table.