Corduroy Orange

It’s been about a week since I’ve been expecting to taste fresh, local strawberries.

The ones I’ve been expecting grow very close by: in my back yard.  I planted them this year and they seem to be doing quite well.  Every day or two, I’ll look out at them and see a strawberry on the verge of ripeness.  I’ll examine it, and decide that the tinge of pink isn’t quite red enough to pluck just yet; the pale green beneath the leaves is too reminiscent of one of those low-flavor berries imported from out of state.  Instead, I’ll leave it, and when I go out the next day to check it again, it’s gone.

Yesterday, I spotted Flopsy Mopsy Cottontail hopping through our backyard from the vicinity of the strawberry plants.  I have a feeling she’s grabbing the berries before I have a chance to get them.  Either that or it’s the mysterious Greenfield garden thief who to date is suspected of filching my weed whacker, my wife’s hydrangea blossoms, my neighbor’s tomato plant (dug from the ground!), and, most recently, a terra cotta pot of oregano and tarragon that my mom had just delivered from Massachusetts and three hanging baskets of spider plants.  But since one of the berries was left with teeth marks gnawed into it, I suspect the rabbit of this robbery.

Thank goodness for Farmer MacGregor!  There was a quart of strawberries in our Penn’s Corner CSA box yesterday.  Bright red berries, without a hint of green.  Succulent, juicy, flavorful berries that transported me back to the field at the pick-your-own berries place my family went to every year, where I must’ve eaten a quart for every pint I picked.  Vibrant, intense, amazing natural sweetness.  they were incredible.

Strawberry season is short, life is long.  Do yourself a favor: leave the office a little early today and swing by the farmers’ market on the way home.  Today is the opening day of Farmers At Phipps—or, if Squirrel Hill isn’t convenient for you, follow the link anyway, and enter your zip code into the box at the top right side of the screen.  PASA’s search function will identify farms, farmers’ markets, and more local food resources that are close to your home.  Once you know where your local resources are, it’ll make it that much easier for you to take advantage of them.  Believe me—once you bite into a seasonal strawberry, you’ll be hooked on local freshness.

Don’t forget!  Ingredients will be showing at Hartwood Acres this Sunday evening (June 6), at 7 pm;  accompanied by a question and answer session with local food experts and farmers.  The event is free and open to the public—I hope to see you there!

Zarf: An insulating sleeve that fits around a cup to make it more comfortable for the drinker to hold—which is to say that plastic or cardboard sleeve that coffee shops slide around their disposable cups.

My sister actually has a quilted zarf that she carries with her to slide around disposable cups.  Aurora and I tried to convince her that she ought to get a reusable cup instead—she’d cut down on her disposability quotient quite a bit more by reusing the cup than she does by reusing the zarf.  Plus, though it drastically reduces the opportunities one has to introduce the word zarf into conversation, the discounts offered by coffee shops for using your own mug will generally allow that mug to pay for itself within a dozen visits.  She says that she would lose a reusable travel mug, and therefore it wouldn’t pay for itself ever.

It’s true that on occasion I have dropped, left, or otherwise lost a travel mug.  On the other hand, I also have picked up, discovered, or otherwise found replacements.  For instance, my mug that I’m using today came to me from Carnegie Mellon’s Portugal campus via a Forbes Avenue street corner where it had been forgotten.  It’s quite a bit nicer than the mug I left in Berlin, PA three days before I found it.  Easy come, easy go, as my grandfather used to say.  These things tend to have a way of evening themselves out.

Mark your calendars and come out to the Hartwood Acres amphitheater on Sunday, June 6 at 7:00 pm to watch the movie “Ingredients” and participate in a forum and discussion with several individuals active in the local foods scene.

Ingredients is the type of movie that reminds us how much we have to be thankful for in Western Pennsylvania, where we’re surrounded by a productive rural landscape and local foods abound.  And yet, there is still room for growth, still more that we can do to make certain that the production and availability of local foods is a truly sustainable phenomenon and will bless our region for generations to come.

This is Allegheny County’s first event of this nature.  The availability of fresh foods is important to us all.  Come show your support, learn something new, and meet some of the key players in the local foods movement, including Mindy Schwartz of Garden Dreams.  There will be a question and answer session with Mindy and other local foods experts—a great opportunity for you to find out more about where you can shop and what you can do to support local farmers and grow your own local foods.

A trailer for “Ingredients” can be found at the film’s website, www.ingredientsfilm.com.  Watch it—I think you’ll be intrigued.

What’s in my garden this year

Though I live in Pittsburgh, and I don’t have much land, I try to make the most of it and grow as many different crops as I can.  Ordinarily, as we approach Mother’s Day weekend, I would be figuring out what I want to plant first in my garden and making plans to get the plants.  This year, though, I paid a little more attention to plants that can go in the ground earlier and have a decent start.  Plus, I have a fondness for perennials—so long as they’re willing to keep coming back, that’s one fewer plant I have to worry about each year.  Nonetheless, I’m still kind of impressed by how many foodstuffs I already have going—not to mention the ones that haven’t gone in the ground yet!

In my garden already:

(more…)

One of my favorite times of the year is asparagus season.  That’s why I planted a few asparagus plants in my garden last year.  I still don’t know much about the cultivation and harvest of the plants, but I have a full year to research and figure it out, as the one thing I do know about it is that there’s a three-year lag between when asparagus is planted and when one ought to harvest their first crop.

Just because I can’t pull it out of my own yard doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy fresh, local asparagus.  I bought six bunches from Janowski Farm Market on Rt. 30 in Clinton (near the airport).  It is their own crop, and they are selling it for $2.50/pound; three pounds for $6.

When I stopped by Soergel Orchard in Wexford last week, the sign outside proclaimed that asparagus would be coming soon!  A quick phone call to Soergel today confirms that asparagus has arrived.  They are selling their crop for $2.78/ pound.  Other options for purchasing asparagus in Wexford include Kaelin Farm Market and Eichner’s Farm Market, but neither has any asparagus in stock yet (both say soon!).

In Pittsburgh, the East End Food Co-op reports local purple asparagus freshly arrived to the store.  Their price is $5.99/ pound.

Should you come across another source of local asparagus, please leave a comment below to help others bask in the glory of one of the first crops of spring!

Grow Pittsburgh will be hosting a dinner at the Quiet Storm Cafe (5430 Penn Avenue) tonight.

The menu will consist of an apple gazpacho, a red leaf lettuce and apple cider vinaigrette salad (featuring watermelon radishes—a really cool radish that has a green rind and a red center), homemade potato gnocchi, and a choice of lavender-vanilla pound cake or whoopie pie for dessert.

The cost is $25 per person.  Reservations are recommended, and required for parties of 6 or more.  Reservations can be made by calling the Quiet Storm at (412) 661-9355.  Hope to see you there!

As I stopped at the roadside fruit stand today, I decided that I liked the look of the grapefruit and the pineapple.  I got a couple starfruit for good measure because I like them and they’re actually regional here (read: inexpensive) as compared to being such a rare commodity back in the northeast USA.

I spent much of my day today comparison shopping the many small grocery stores in San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, Belize, and had come up with a couple pounds of fettucine and a pound of shrimp as the main attractions for dinner tonight.  As I pedaled my bike down the bumpy dirt path, a plan formed in my mind for a Carribean Shrimp Alfredo featuring regional fruits and their juices to create the sauce.

Carribean Shrimp Fettucine

• 1 pound 36/40 raw shrimp (36-40 per pound)
• 1/2 small onion, cut to very small dice (brunoise)
• 1/2 inch fresh ginger, minced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 fresh pineapple, cut into chunks
• 1/4 papaya, cut to 1/2-inch dice
• 2 grapefruits, segmented, and juice reserved
• 1/4 cup dark rum
• 2 pounds fettucine
• cinnamon
• pepper
• salt
• butter

Heat about 3 tablespoons butter in a large saute pan.  Add a half teaspoon or so cinnamon to the butter, and then put the shrimp into the pan—don’t crowd them, make sure they all fit!  (if not, do them in batches).  Sprinkle the shrimp with salt.  When the shrimp pinkify on their first side, flip them over and cook until they have pinkified on each side and curled into a ‘fetal position’.  Remove and hold.

Add a couple tablespoons more butter to the pan and another good dose of cinnamon.  Then, the diced onion and minced garlic & ginger, all at the same time, followed closely by a sprinkling of salt.  Keep ‘em moving in the pan–don’t give them a chance to burn!  As they toast up and caramelize, put in the pineapple.  This will, in effect, deglaze the pan by cooling it down and adding enough liquid so as to incorporate any fond that may have developed on the side of the pan and give the onions/garlic/ginger enough liquid to simmer rather than brown.

Toss the pineapple to coat it with the oil, spices, and aromatics.  Keep a close eye on it, stirring frequently.  As it starts to take on a bit of a cooked appearance, add the papaya to the pan, and toss to mix thoroughly with the pan’s other contents.

Start the fettucine cooking in a large pot of boiling, salted water.  Stir well as you add it into the pot and during the cooking process to prevent the fettucine from clumping together.

After the papaya has had a chance to cook for 3-4 minutes, add the grapefruit segments into the pan.  These are what is going to make this mess of fruit into a sauce.  Watch as the heat tears those suckers into shreds.  They’re going to lose all body and pretty much disintegrate into a pulpy liquid .  Pour in the rum and give it a chance to boil off.

Drain the pasta.

Add the grapefruit juice into the pan of fruit sauce.

Return the (drained) fettucine to the (empty) pot you cooked it in and stir a couple tablespoons of butter into it to help keep it from clumping.  Add the sauce to the fettucine and stir everything together to mix it.

Return the saute pan to the burner and put the reserved shrimp into the pan to reheat them.

Portion the pasta into six plates and top each with six shrimp.  Garnish further with three slices of fresh starfruit, if you so desire.

Photo credit: Eric Thompson

It’s the end of my first full day in Belize.  I swam in the Carribean and scoped out some tropical fish.  I made tentative plans to go on a fishing charter later this week (so I can prepare and enjoy the freshest seafood possible).  And, most importantly, I went shopping for local ingredients and used them to create some Belizean cuisine.

OK, so I don’t knows for a fact that a Belizean food scholar would deem this creation to be traditional Belizean cuisine…but having created it from local ingredients, I think it qualifies.

Jesse’s Belizean Papaya Saute

• one onion, cut to small dice
• one mirliton, cut to small dice
• one inch of ginger, minced
• 1/4 inch strip of habanero pepper, meat only (no pith!), minced
• 1/2 papaya, cut to julienne
• Juice of 1/2 large lime
• juice of 3 tangerines
• 3/4 cup - 1 cup local yogurt
• 3-4 tablespoons of butter
• salt to taste

Melt the butter in a saute pan.  Add the onion with a pinch of salt and saute, briefly, until it starts to soften.  Add ginger and habanero, and cook until the onion has started to caramelize and the ginger is starting to crisp up just a bit.  Add the mirliton and another pinch of salt.  Saute until the mirliton has softened and is starting to release its faintly tart aroma.  Add the papaya to the pan and toss briefly so that the papaya heats up–but don’t let it cook too long, especially if the papaya is good and ripe–you don’t want it to get mushy!

Once the papaya has had a chance to heat, deglaze with the mixed citrus juices; let it reduce for about 45 seconds, then stir in the yogurt.  Toss so that the yogurt combines with remaining citrus juices to form a sauce, then serve in fashionable bowls to appreciative diners.  Garnish with a slice of lime, if desired.

Photo Credit: Julia Luscher Thompson

I was reading about the most recent ground beef recall, and the article made mention of an industry practice I hadn’t realized existed:

“Companies subject to such recalls are allowed to cook tainted meat to kill the bacteria and then use it in other products, a common practice in the food industry.”

Basically, the beef that shows up in the news for having killed people or caused kidney failure or whatever else can be cooked and re-packaged as your salisbury steak or swedish meatballs or any other pre-cooked beef product that might jump into your grocery cart.

Appetizing, huh?

On Sunday, I got together with some friends to watch the football game. We all contributed snacks to munch on, potluck style. Turned out, everything was made of corn: Doritos, tortilla chips, cheesy puffs, etc. My contribution: corn on the cob.

I grilled the corn at half time, and when I peeled back the husk, the bright yellow color of the unprocessed corn kernels was quite appealing. I proudly brought my contribution into the living room. I grabbed an ear, anticipating the sweet flavor.

Instead, I bit into flavorless, chewy mush. Turns out the farmer I bought the corn from accidentally sold me feed corn. It must’ve been an accident—I can’t imagine anyone selling something so bland and toothsome on purpose!

But, then again, all of the processed corn crap that we gorge ourselves on on a regular basis: the chips and the flakes and the puffs and the curls: all of that is made from feed corn.

I think if we realized what it is we eat when we eat we would be a bit more discerning. But once it’s been spiced and seasoned, processed and disguised; it turns out, we’re all at the feedlot too: eating the same blah, chewy mush as the bovines do.

Moo.