Recent Foodsville publications by Pinckney

An Almost End User. Chain saws and Thanksgiving

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:03:48

    Winter is coming. We are already a week into November and the leaves, even this far south in NYS, have finally turned colors right before the wind and rain arrived and are dropping like – leaves. About two weeks ago I received a delivery of a half cord of firewood. I thought at the time that perhaps the sticks were too long for the stove, but paid the man and let it go.

   Turns out that much of it was too long for the stove. Most of the pieces were 20” to 24” and our stove will handle up to about 18”, but anything longer has to go in catawampus and the stove door won’t close so all the heat from the fire, plus a lot of the heat from the furnace, blasts out the chimney making a mockery of the whole efficient, low pollution wood stove. I figured that I already have a heavy carbon footprint, what with the house, the cars, the fireplace and all so how much could a little chain saw action add to the grand total. (Turns out about a quart of oil and gasoline is how much in this particular instance)

   I haven’t used this chain saw in a while. I bought it some years ago from The Home Depot, used it a few times and like most homeowners with chain saws put it away against the eventuality that I might one day need a such a tool and when that day came obtaining one would probably be pretty difficult. When a tree falls on the house it is likely because there has been a storm and the power is out; not only your power, but the big box store’s as well. Buying a chain saw when you really, really need it RIGHT NOW is not the time to go shopping for one.

   So, I had this foresight all those years ago and bought a bright nauseous green Poulan saw, a homes owner’s edition with an 18” bar. You couldn’t go logging with this thing, but it would probably be hearty enough in a pinch to clear a tree from the front lawn or off the roof. I imagine John Gotti might have kept something like this around for reasons that don’t bear thinking about. Forget that I brought it up.

   The saw made short work of the long logs, turning them into stove size and leaving me with dozens of 4” to 6” cutoffs. These are great for starting a fire and that’s what I will use them for when they dry out. I got the wood stacked before the rain came, but not the cut offs. To stack the wood, I had to haul it from the front yard where the man delivered it to the back yard. This was done with a hand truck made of steel and rubber. The wheelbarrows that my son loves to use were never an option in my mind. The barrow would have had to be freed from the summer weeds that hold them tight to the fence and the hand truck was just too handy and has the advantage of limited my stupid self to how much I could attempt to move at any one time.

   While the chain saw made this work possible, it wasn’t the entire solution. Several years ago a friend, noticing that I had four sawhorses and he had none, insisted on appropriating a pair. He lives in an apartment so he took the apartment friendly fold up models with the doohickeys that clip on top to hold odd shaped things - like split logs - and they have had their being there ever since. This made it necessary to modify one of the heavy wooden horses.

   Clamps and other thingamabobs combined in an improvisation that made it possible for me to mostly keep two hands on the saw and the split logs mostly on the horse. While I spent time bending and lifting and getting sorer by the minute I started thinking about lunch – I worked through that – and then dinner. That led to Thanksgiving and thinking about how much effort goes into that meal – any feast – today even, but especially a few generations back.

   I talk a lot about eating close to the source and then staying close to the ground with the preparation. The ancestors did it because they had to. They might have had kitchen help, but even the wealthy were never very far from the food or what it took to produce and prepare it. Today is about as close to that time as I am comfortable getting. While we won’t cook Thanksgiving dinner with this wood, it will burn in the living room woodstove. Some of it might fire the primitive smoker; there is some likely material there.

   The turkey will come from a local organic grower and has been ordered; two actually because I ordered one from Heritage Foods and then found another, certified organic, heritage breed, scratch in the dirt, semi-local turkey for about half the price on Local Harvest. One of these fancy birds will rest in the freezer for a month or two until the first one gets used up. There will be a hunk or two of venison. That came all the way from South Carolina, but I harvested it on the family farm and was intimately acquainted with it. The vegetables will be whatever I can scrounge at the farmer’s markets and whatever local produce the local stores will have. If I manage to get to Emile's, there will be pork of some kind, too. A fiber challenged meal, yes, but well advanced in proteins and other nutrients. There will be rice, grown in SC or maybe Texas depending on whom you believe. The Saffron for the rice, always a luxury item, is from Spain by way of Costco.

   The oysters – now there’s a problem. Blue Points from Long Island are scarce and maybe dangerous even cooked. It is likely that the oysters will be from somewhere else. I don’t feel too bad about this. Humans have been moving oysters great distances for as long as they have been eating them. They will just have to be from where ever they be from.

   When it becomes possible to buy good area wines for a price approaching good French wines, locals will grace the table. In the meantime, wine comes from afar. Water comes from the tap. The coffee and tea come from South America and Asia. Again, these are foodstuffs that have usually been considered luxuries and you get them where you get them. The only tea plantation in America is in Charleston, SC and I have never heard anyone rhapsodizing about a cup of Carolina grown tea.

   Desserts will come from frozen fruits and whatever we can get from the area. That means apples. Likely these will be prepared as a cobbler of some sort and a tattin. The cream will come from a cow and be whipped in the kitchen with vanilla from – Mexico is the closest producer - but maybe from somewhere even more exotic and sugar from the sugar barons of South Florida and Brooklyn, NY.

   Even with all these ‘labor saving devices’ – chain saws, hand trucks, mixers, electric stoves and gas burners, getting a feast ready still isn’t nothing. I didn’t raise the turkey and process it. The deer took care of itself and the butcher made it into manageable pieces. Farmers all over the Hudson Valley have been growing things for us and as at most Thanksgivings, there will be more than one cook in the kitchen - or out on the deck with the grill or the fryer.

    In the end, we look to be somewhere in the range of twelve end users give or take one or two this year. None of them will have had to cut wood, though. They can probably stand it.

Striper true to Form

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 18:25:56

It’s October – late October – the time of year that Nagle goes fishing for Striped Bass off Long Island. The call came Friday, “I have stripers, come get some …” I got there this morning after a trip to the Hastings Farmers Market to pick up the end of season vegetables. I loaded a cooler with some venison and plowed down to the city.

Nagle gave me a side of stripper and what looks like an equal amount of blue fish. Blue fish is a favorite of mine, but Nagle-caught striper almost straight from the ocean is something rare. He asked what I planned to do with it. I got the feeling that if he didn’t approve I would have to give it back. I said I would do a couple of things, one of which was to poach some of it as a soup sort of thing.

He looked pained. “You’re gonna make soup with fish like that?!” I hesitated and he said, “At least expose some of it to hot steel right now – for lunch.” I allowed as how I had planned to do that as well with salt and pepper and butter. He didn’t like the butter idea and recommended that the fish be rubbed with a little tasteless oil like rapeseed and then treated to some salt pepper and garlic and then to the sauté pan.

I didn’t want the garlic with it just yet, so when I got home, I cut the belly piece loose, rubbed it with some peanut oil and seasoned it with salt and freshly ground pepper. This went into a HOT pan and relaxed for two and one half minutes whereupon I turned it over. The cooked side looked really nice and brown and I rubbed a little butter on it while it was still hot. After another two and half to three minutes, I turned it over again and rubbed that side with butter.

The little butter that ran off each side turned brown in the pan and I turned the fish every thirty seconds for the next two minutes. Yes, it was obsessive, but the heat penetrates more evenly with the frequent turning. I added a tiny bit more butter each time.

Out of the pan and onto the plate and it was Proust and Madelaines all over. I had to tell everyone about it. Sometimes when I was a little kid eating breakfast on Edisto there would be fresh caught, pan sautéed white fish with nothing but salt and pepper and butter. Here it was again.

I think some things just don’t get better. They get different, but the archetypal form of freshest fish sautéed in a little oil and butter with salt and pepper defines the form.

Maybe I won’t make soup. Maybe I’ll just do the rest the same way and try not to salt it with tears of joy. The blue fish is going into the smoker later tonight …. after we have a little piece of that done in a similar manner, of course. The wife don’t like bluefish. Oh poor, poor thing.

An Old Dining Room as it Should be

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:27:33

When the family used to more or less move to the island in the summer we had pretty much all of our meals at the dining room table in the sunny front room. The house is built like most old southern farmhouses … four rooms on each floor with a central hall running down the center of both levels. Over time, one of the down stairs rooms has become a kitchen and one of the upstairs rooms has been sub-divided to make room for indoor plumbing. (In my earliest memories, the outhouses were still hanging out over the riverbank, but I don’t remember using them. I wasn’t conscious of anything until sometime in the early 1950’s after all and by that time indoor plumbing had become the all the rage and just everyone had it)

I think I was always somewhat aware that the dining room was a special room. Of the four downstairs rooms it felt like the largest. Whether it is the largest or not I can not say, but my brother and his wife (They own the house now) had a luncheon for some people this Sunday and the room revealed itself in its’ real functionality. The table was set for ten. The table is an antebellum endless sort of thing with leaves that just keep slipping in between other leaves. It probably wasn’t ever a fine table, but it was always very versatile. It sat ten people with plenty of elbowroom and could have done another eight before it became uncomfortably crowded.

Because we have all been busy being sick or hunting deer, doing ‘things’ or working on various farm projects none of us had much time to cook so we made plans accordingly. The fried chicken came from the local Piggly Wiggly. Every body in SC can fry chicken, but the ladies of the Edisto Piggly Wiggly do a bang up job. Our hostess kept sort of adding to the bill of fare because, you just never know if there is enough or that so and so will that or that, don’t you know.

We had mashed garlic mashed potatoes with chives, butter and cream. There was pickled okra with tomatoes and cole slaw made with jest cabbage, mayo, celery seed, paprika, salt, pepper and lemon juice. This was a light cole slaw. Home made biscuits with butter and someone’s preserves – probably Smuckers. We defrosted some butter beans just in case and cooked them up with – what else, butter, salt and pepper. There was wine and water. (This old dining room likely didn’t see a lot of wine drinking until the last half century or so) For desert we had brownies with ice cream and coffee. The northerners ate their fried chicken with knife and fork. Those of us who grew up in the place used our fingers. That’s fair.

Two things struck me about this thrown together meal. Three actually, the first being how good it was, especially as it was mostly improvised and pantry items played a very big part. Mostly, this was a non-meat meal and the fried chicken was all the tastier for that. (We did have to go out and get ice cream and celery seeds in addition to the fried chicken)

The second had to do with how well the room worked with all those people at that big table. The house was designed when meals were a way more important part of everyday family life than they can be today. While certainly not baronial in dimension there was more than adequate space to pass things and get up and fetch things and, when so moved, to walk around and serve.

There are two sideboards to accommodate this family style dining but the table is actually big enough to handle everything without the sideboards coming into play. Even when today’s MacMansions - two and three times the size of this old house - have dining rooms they don’t have real dining rooms and that’s too bad. Designers seem to think we can entertain without them or that we can cram more functions and people into the space - and that those functions have equal value with dining. FFfff, say I. FFfff! I say.

The third thing was how pleasant it was to be eating lunch in a room that had been used for this very purpose – eating – for close to 150 years. This has something to do with reason #2 above, no doubt. All the same this pleasant, familiar feeling kept returning. Place memory, maybe.

Bi-Regional, North/South Local Food.

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 20:48:19

    I frequently complain about the lack of local produce in my old home state of South Carolina, about how a place that once produced some of the finest vegetables in the world and shipped them off to the northeast markets, can’t seem to come up with a tomato grown locally or a cucumber or onion these days because Agribusiness has put the small local producers out of business by selling every kind of formerly local food cheaper than local farmers can produce it.

   Contrast this situation with the local food scene in NY, my current home state, and it’s enough to make one weep. Over flowing farmer’s markets and green markets operate all year round. South Carolina is a surprising place, however, and every so often something unexpected and wonderful happens on the food scene. In Columbia there is Caw Caw Creek Farms with Emile DeFelice’s pastured pork and southern style prosciutto hams. Emile has breakfast sausage that’s to die for, bacon that renders enough fat from a pound to fry a couple of chickens and magnificent chops and roasts.

   There is also Michael Cordray’s Cordray Farms in Ravenel. This farm has been around for a hundred or so years according to the web site, but I met Michael because, like many small farmers, he has a sideline business; he runs an excellent deer processing plant and many of us drive by a couple of other processors to get our venison put up by the best. Michael also produces some beef cattle. Usually by the time I am getting my venison done he has sold out of his beef, but I was there a week or so ago – early for me – and his cooler was full of beef and the sign “Beef’s Ready” was still out on the main entrance. Michael’s beef is pastured beef with some grain finishing. I like to avoid grain fed animals if possible, but I thought to try some of the beef.

   The site states, "Since we provide beef from a limited number of small family farms our quantities are very limited. We process only a few cattle a year. It takes about 2 years for a steer to mature. We are slowly increasing our herd, planning now for the 2010 season! As you'll see when you come to visit, our cows graze at will on grass and hay. We grind our own feed from locally grown corn, soybean meal and molasses to help "finish" them during the last few months. They never receive injections, antibiotics, artificial growth hormones or anything that cattle didn't get 100 years ago when Cordrays first started raising all natural beef."

   I was delighted to find that he had several packages of short ribs. He labels them Beef Rib Stew so maybe they aren’t exactly short ribs even though that’s what they look like. I bought three of the five packages there and hauled them back to NY with the deer cuts he had put up for me. We are having dinner guests tonight and I thought to serve them something entirely seasonal and more or less local (to me anyway with my peregrinations back and forth).

   I seasoned the meat with salt and pepper and a little smoked paprika and then rolled the pieces in flour and browned them on all sides. I put them aside and sautéed a mess of finely chopped vegetables – all local from the Hastings Farmer’s Market (carrots, celery, tomatoes and leaks). The pan got a little degreasing with some left over American white wine and then I added in some home made beef stock from the freezer. I put the beef back in the pot with everything and brought it back to simmer and slammed it in the oven for two hours. When finished, I removed the meat; discarded the bones and put the liquids through a food mill and put the meat back in and let it rest. I did taste it, though, I can honestly say that these are as good as any short ribs I ever made.

   Michael has – or had when I was there – just about all the cuts a cow can be separated into. Like I said, he sells out pretty quickly and now I know why. If there is anything left when I get back, I’ll get some more. I have an eye round roast that I intend to do the slow cook way mentioned here. I’m not going to report Cordray's prices because he doesn’t charge enough for what he sells. Besides, he posts the prices on his site. I don't think he ships so a visit is required.

   South Carolina is coming on strong in the proteins – pigs and beef. It’s only a matter of time before someone starts making with the vegetables. There are many folks in the low country and right on up through the low mountains of western SC that know good food and would appreciate being able to buy it – especially locally grown. I hope, while SC is still somewhat under developed and farmers can still afford land to farm, that the remaining farmers find a way to return to growing some of the most nutritious and tasty food in America and selling it locally.

"It’s a Long Road to a Tomato Tales of an organic farmer who quit the big city for the (not so) simple life" By Keith Stewart With illustrations by Flavia Bacarella

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 14:49:23

    My dear one brings me all sorts of books to read. Lately she has been supplying me with books about organic farming and out of the way things like ‘fat. A Misunderstood Ingredient’, and ‘Mrs. Whaley’s Kitchen’. A couple of weeks ago she brought home Keith Stewart’s, ‘It’s a Long Way to a Tomato’ and Tim Stark’s ‘Heirloom, Notes From an Accidental Tomato Farmer’. I love both of these books and plan to write about Starks book in another piece, but I just finished reading ‘Long Road to a Tomato’ while on Edisto Island, former home to the world’s best tomatoes and now barren of any locally grown tomatoes what-so-ever.

    I thought to write about this book first because while Stewart doesn’t really grow lots of tomatoes in comparison with other vegetables he is a true organic farmer in the old, pre ‘gummit’ certified ways. He maintains the official U S Organic designation despite the expense and paper work while many small farmers simply can’t afford to comply – or don’t want to spend the time to do the paperwork to comply - with all that government certification involves. Some say the older standards were better while being less onerous and it isn’t hard to see the hand of agribusiness behind the complex gummit certification.

    I chose to start with this book for a couple of reasons and recommend it for several specific essays that appeal to me. It is, by the way, a series of essays each about two pages long and easier and more informative to read by tackling one a day or every other day or when ever the organic food mood strikes. It isn’t something that one wants to sit down to and read cover to cover. You could, but much would be lost.

    The essays take on different aspects of Mr. Stewart’s life as an organic farmer. The pieces can make one want to get right down to the Union Square Farmers Market for his garlic and herbs or drive one to despair over the fate of small scale, local and/or organic farming and farmers. New York City has always been fortunate in the variety of fresh local foods available in its markets. We have exotic food and down home goods in abundance, but the last twenty years have seen the growth of extensive farmers markets supplying local vegetables and meats directly to the city and this very proximity helps explain some of the problems that the small local farmer faces.

    He has to be near enough to the city to sell fresh foods directly to the public at retail prices. He doesn’t produce enough to be viable in the low margin, high volume food biz and so he has to have a local market willing and able to pay the higher prices required to produce the higher quality local goods. As urban areas expand the farm economy has to move further away from the city in order to afford land to grow on. That land is almost always valued more as housing tracts than small farms. So we go around and around and loose small farms and production to agribusiness far from markets and now are able to buy gummit certified ‘organic’ – of sorts – produce from the A&P.

    The essays run from the early optimistic, “Today I am a farmer, a grower of organic vegetables and herbs, and I can honestly say that I am a happier man.” To the, “My plan is to keep living on this farm until I am no longer able to – perhaps ten more years, perhaps twenty, whatever portion destiny allots me. But I doubt that I will last much longer as the sole driving force of a productive vegetable operation.” Along the way are essays about chickens, weather, farmer’s markets and the efforts necessary to be part of them, knives, dogs, rabbits, tomatoes, potatoes, dairy farmers and my favorite - an excellent tutorial on tractors –“ A man and his Tractor”.

    “To take on this land with just hand tools would be a very daunting task. A dozen men with shovels and picks might put in a week of hard labor to accomplish what I can do with a tractor and a rototiller in a couple of hours…. “ Under the tasks assigned to each of the three farm tractors is, “Restoration of self-esteem when confronted with the limitations of an aging body and other insults of time.” This is a facet of tractor ownership I can well identify with.

    While we in America enjoy an abundance, some would say a gross excess, of cheap, high calorie foodstuffs it is exciting to read and learn about local farmers and their products. It is also daunting to consider their large investment and the low return they receive for their efforts. We don’t eat seasonally these days, what with produce transported sometimes thousands of miles. We can – in NY – get pretty much anything year round. It’s summer somewhere every day. Much of this food has no more in common with local produce than appearance and even that is strained. February tomatoes have much more in common with baseballs than July tomatoes in that they are very round, way out of season in the Northeast and about as interesting eating.

    It’s a good read; I wouldn’t try to read it all at once, but I will read it again I am sure. Mr. Stewart , like some of the people he writes about, is interested in passing along his methods and experiences. He is instructive and entertaining and this is a book to be referred to over and over as we gain knowledge about and recover some of our lost appreciation and experience of local foods.

Purple Haze Revisited

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:39:44

When my child determined that he would attend Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington we were somewhat distressed by the distance involved, but felt that he had chosen the place and we would do our best to support it. He insisted that, “really, Dad – it’s only a six hour plane ride…”. We decided to make the best of it and having old friends and business associates in Seattle settled on my accompanying him to school with his mother visiting in a few weeks.

After getting him there and setting up his dorm room I plucked out my heart, stomped on it and then drove a borrowed BIGTRUCK back to Seattle – in the rain, of course - to stay with these friends for a couple of days. They have a plum tree in the back yard (and countless tomato plants and various other garden vegetables and fruits growing everywhere – even along the street curb) and I’m not saying that these plums make up for the heartache of leaving a child at school three thousand miles from home, but if fruit could make that kind of difference, these plums would do so. Fortunate is he who gets a fresh, tree ripened plum right off the tree in someone’s backyard in Seattle. There is, in my experience, nothing quite so perfectly sweet and delightful.

Cheryl says everyone in the neighborhood calls these plums “Italian Prunes”. I don’t know what variety the plums are and it’s probably best I don’t know because I would spend way too much time trying to find something like them back east and would be, I think, doomed to eternal disappointment. Cheryl had picked a basket full with the intention of making a tart. I wished her well with that, but thought it probably wouldn’t happen with that particular bunch because I had become engaged in a close encounter with them. (She did, in fact, make a tart with some of these plums augmented with some local blueberries. What didn’t get eaten at dinner was set upon by me as breakfast the next morning and I was ruthless)

The first house I ever stayed in in Seattle had several plum trees out the back door. I do not know if I had ever tasted a plum, a fresh plum, before that visit, but I know that I had never tasted fruit like it any where else. I was warned by my host that eating my way around the tree really wasn’t a wise thing to do, plums being the antecedent of prunes and all. He said he spoke from experience, but I had to learn this for myself and I think it was worth it. Perfect purple with a cloudy haze on the skin - I always thought Jimmi Hendrix was singing about acid, but “purple haze around my brain .. “ has taken on a very different meaning for me now. He was a Seattle boy, after all.

It’s not as if there aren’t other grand fruits in Seattle and the northwest. Everyone knows the apples and the peaches. The cherries, fresh from the tree sold out of the back of a beat-up pickup truck by the guy who raised and picked them, make travel weary cherries bought at the most demanding east coast markets seem pale and lifeless. It’s just that these plums are so over the top that, while I can enjoy an eastern grown plum or – in a pinch - one that has traversed the country, they seem wanting after experiencing these back yard delights.

When I was growing up in the south there was a fig tree outside the kitchen door. My father was very fond of these figs, but I found them strange and icky. However, I have learned to love figs and I plan to plant a fig tree or two or three over the next few years and maybe a plum tree if it can tolerate the very heavy, wet heat we have along the southern coast. I know the fig can do it; I sure hope the plum can cooperate. There really is no better way to eat these fruits than right from the tree.

I will have to install a serious fence to keep the deer out of the tree and probably an ariel net to discourage the birds. Seattle has plenty of birds, but so much fruit there is enough to go around. Deer are insatiable. I want to go on about the Pike Place Market, but that’s another piece, I think.

Duck Rillettes from "fat - AN APPRECIATION OF A MISUNDERSTOOD INGREDIENT, WITH RECIPES"

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:18:30

The following is as close a copy of the recipe as I can produce with limited typing skills. The book has a recipe for Spanish Style Pork Rillettes, too. The recipe page says that this recipe/technique works as well for goose and rabbit. "For rabbit use about a pound/450 g of pork belly for every 1 1/2 lb /700g of rabbit, add thyme and marjoram for flavoring and omit the orange."
A couple of pages further on there is a recipe for "Duck Fat Biscuits with Cracklings". That's right before the "Duck Comfit" Oh. My.

More fun for the dog

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:27:15

    I recently had occasion to travel with the dog. There were two dogs the last time I wrote about dogs and feeding. One died of a fast moving tumor. This was awful, but he went fast with the assistance of the vet. The loss left us with the original family dog, a small brindle border terrier with bad breath and a goofy, independent personality.

    I needed to go to Edisto Island, a trip of many hours, and the dog, Glenner, was a good companion in many respects. While her conversation lacked interest she liked sitting or lying on the front seat, especially when there was convenience store jerky in the vicinity. She slept on the front floor and every so often went into the back seat and spent some time in her crate . Aside from the jerky, she didn’t get anything to eat on the drive down or back. Not eating didn’t stop her from spicing up the trip with an every-now-and-then air poop or belch. Borders will eat anything; who knows what she was giving back. It may be that dogs are as omnivorous as people. The boarder terrier certainly seems to be.

    While we were on the island she enjoyed walking up and down a strange road, but being a NY dog she wasn’t used to the pollen load that acres of almost wilderness and heavy vegetation can produce. We would walk a few steps and she would do her usual NY dog deep inhale and start sneezing and gargling and snorting and sneezer clearing and then repeat the act a few paces down the road with a fresh load of new inhalations. I imagine that she will get the hang of it with a few more trips and the sound effects will diminish.

    When we passed a Costco in Charleston I bought her a package of beef stew meat. She got to eat way too much of it for a dog of her size – not a problem as far as she was concerned. Dogs that eat meat make much smaller and less frequent poops. This is a good thing, I believe. Being a border terrier she doesn’t think that the four to five ounces that she gets once a day is anywhere near enough to support her fifteen pound self and one day she found a bag of dry food behind the kitchen door. The walk the next day was both productive and urgent.

    What’s this got to do with food? Well, not a lot as far as people go, but raw meat is important to dogs and it makes most of them smell better. It certainly makes my dog smell better, but if you didn’t know her before she started her raw meat diet, you might not think so on meeting her. I read that green tripe makes a great dog food. I reason from there that deer tripe might also be beneficial and seeing as we have more deer on Edisto than Lapland has reindeer I intend, the next time I take a deer to the processor, to ask him to wash and save the tripe for the dog. I know that a gut pile left in the woods is almost always devoured within a day or two so it seems that animals like it well enough.

    I have been giving her a little dry food with her beef so as to keep her somewhat regular – roughage you know. She went through a phase a couple of weeks ago of eating the leaves from the tomato plants. I think, I hope, that’s over. The leaves make me itch and break out if I handle them too much and are reputed to be somewhat poisonous. They don’t seem to have much affect on her, but she is hard on the plants.

    We got back to Glenner’s home base a few days ago and she is delighted. It’s cooler, the meals are more regular and she can sniff around and not gag on heavy and unfamiliar dusts. She is back to sleeping on her futon, eating her daily beef and all’s well. Woooof.

fat, AN APPRECIATION OF A MISUNDERSTOOD INGREDIENT, WITH RECIPES by Jennifer McLagan.

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 18:14:14

    When Julia Child was a newbie on the television she encouraged the lavish use of butter and other fats. This earned her some high praise and some scorn. Fats were out of fashion and considered dangerous. My own father suffered from coronary artery disease and had been placed on a low fat, low cholesterol diet. Being a physician, he more or less went along with this prescription and when we ate beef it was almost always flank steak. Margarine was substituted for butter and morning bacon and eggs went the way of the Edsel. Today, we might think that the substitution of margarine for butter may very well have made my father sicker with big doses of trans fats. He never quit smoking, though, and that surely didn’t do him any good.

   In the mid 1990s, at the age of 42, I was recovering from a big honking myocardial infarction and someone thought to give me a copy of Dean Ornish’s book about reversing heart disease ….. that pretty much took fat and cholesterol out of my diet for a number of years. One of the physicians saw me reading it one day and said to his interns – and me – that Dean Ornish had some points to make, but he thought it very likely that anyone other than Dean Ornish or a person who thought of food as nothing more than the consumption of necessary calories and nutrients might find it hard to adhere to.

   I filed that away and proceeded for years to practice low fat and low cholesterol cooking and can say that it was a challenge that eventually proved beyond me. I water sautéed things; I bought the lowest fat meats and gave up pork all together as both high fat and low taste. Marketers had managed to make pork “the other white meat”. Flank steak became my staple beef and fish became a mainstay. Vension mostly replaced beef – when I could get it – and skinned chicken breasts cooked with lemon and herbs became ubiquitous. I began to feel that if living without fat didn’t make you live longer, the tedium of subsisting without it sure made it seem that way.

   Over time fat started to reclaim the good opinion of nutritionists and cooks and some physicians. I was eating such a low fat diet that on some days I couldn’t remember my telephone number. The neurologist I consulted suggested that I add some fat back into the diet and that I give up taking a certain cholesterol lowering medication. At that point my cholesterol was down in the 120s. It worked. I could find my house keys again and generally recall my telephone numbers. All this is to begin to talk about the book, fat, AN APPRECIATION OF A MISUNDERSTOOD INGREDIENT, WITH RECIPES by Jennifer McLagan.

   The dust jacket is a photograph of three beautiful lamb chops with almost as much muscle tissue as fat. Bones are an after thought in these chops, their only function being to give meat and fat something to cling to. Over time I think we have begun to understand that fat is an important part of our food. At least I have come to that conclusion after reading several of Michael Pollen’s books and the Berkley Health letter and health columns in general. The type of fat – or an excess of one type of fat – is probably very bad for the human constitution. Thank you very much, though, there are many kinds of fats – animal fats - available to us.

   This book is an exploration of the many different animal fats and their uses for the person who might have run away from this food. It has little to do with vegetable fats other than some passing references. It’s about animal fat.

   “ In the 1950s, coronary heart disease emerged as a leading cause of death. Scientists searched for reasons to explain this phenomenon, and one hypothesis suggested that the increase in heart disease might be related to the cholesterol levels in our blood. Soon, a theory was advanced suggesting that increased consumption of animal fat raised our cholesterol levels and resulted in heart disease …. Thousands of years of human history showing the importance of animal fat in our diet were overlooked, and instead it (fat) was labeled a greasy killer …. ‘low fat’ and ‘non-fat’ became the new mantras and since none of us wants to die any sooner than is absolutely necessary, we obediently replaced the cholesterol-containing animals fats in our diet with man-made ones”.

   I have gone on at length in other posts about real food and the benefits thereof. This is my kinda book. I love it. Besides making the case that fat is good for us it reminds us how to use them. It is divided into four sections.

“1. butter: WORTH IT
“2. pork fat: THE KING
“3. poultry fat : VERSATILE AND GOOD FOR YOU
“4. beef and lamb fats: OVERLOOKED BUT TASTY”

   From Section 3, poultry fat, the following;

   “Unlike pork and beef fats, poultry fat doesn’t marble the birds’ flesh. Instead most of it is found just under the skin and in lumps in the bird’s cavity. As with meat, it’s the fat which gives the bird its’ flavor. …… Poultry fat is not only important for a birds flavor, it’s good for us, too. Many cultures believe in the restorative qualities of a bowl of hot chicken soup, and we all know it’s the perfect food when you’re under the weather. It’s not simply its warmth, aroma or digestibility that makes you feel better. Chicken soup really is good for you, but only if it has those pools of golden fat floating on top. All poultry fats contain the monounsaturated fatty acid palmitoleic acid, which is believed to boost our immune system. Chicken fat has more palmitoleic acid than other types of poultry fat. So what has been instinctively understood for hundreds of years, science has now validated: chicken soup, with a layer of fat, will cure what ails you.”

   This works for me. In addition to providing a justification for eating fats, it gives us some pretty tasty ways to go about it. It explains the difference between Clarified Butter and Ghee and the making thereof. I didn’t know there really was any difference. I certainly had no idea that a jar of ghee might be aged for a hundred years. Brown butter ice cream has caught my attention, as has a recipe for Poached Shrimp with Beurre Blanc and Spinach.

   I won’t go into the pork section except to say I intend to make absolutely everything in it except maybe the lardo – not having access to caves and marble containers. And anyway, it is somewhat available in the NY area. The various rillettes are making me itchy and I am just waiting for cold weather to do the Slow Roasted Pork Belly with Fennel and Rosemary.

   The beef and lamb chapter is the thinnest of the four, but there are some lovely things in it. I don’t know if I am up to the Whole Roasted Veal Kidney. I mean, I know I’m not, but maybe I will find that on a restaurant menu one day. There is a recipe for “Traditional Christmas Pudding” which I plan to try this year. Unlike my last years Christmas pudding, this one is made with mostly suet and a little butter. The Fruit Cobbler - made with a cup and a quarter of suet - is promising.

   I do hope my cardiologist doesn’t subscribe to this site.

Not your everyday tuna fish

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:15:25

This is straight from Marcela Hazen's, Marcella's Kitchen.

Tuna spread with capers.
"A painter friend who is as gifted a cook as he is an artist asked me to have tea with him at a smart new Italian place on Madison Ave. With tea we had little soft rolls with a buttery spread. My friend marveled over the spread, asked what it was and could I get him the recipe. 'But it's so simple,' I said. 'It's just good canned tuna beaten with butter and capers.' 'Why have you never put it in a book?' he asked. 'It's so simple that I paid no attention to it.' I explained, 'but if you like it that well, I'll put it in my next book.' This is that book. The recipe is for Hector"

I make this somewhat regularly these days for small gatherings, when asked to do something as a house guest and sometimes just to have around. Marcela says if you put it in the refrigerator, bring it back to room temeprature before serving it. She likes to serve it already spread on crackers or bread. That's fine, but I usually let people help themselves. They start out light, like it, go to a heavy dollop and realize that's it's pretty rich and come back to a self regulated reasonable amount until it runs out. She allows as how it makes "a memorable tuna spread for sandwiches." It does, indeed, do that.

Farmer's Markets. IT'S TIME!

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 21:13:25

    The stalls at the farmer’s market are getting bigger each week because they have more and more stuff to sell. Being as how we are in the high season of the farmer’s markets here in the lower Hutson Valley when the produce starts to overwhelm the farmers, the vendors and the consumers the time seemed right for a completely local dinner.

   Thirty minutes at the Hastings market provided us with the following; two young chickens fresh from a chicken yard, Several pounds of heirloom tomatoes, red, green striped and yellow; A half dozen ears of corn, two pounds of “The country’s best mozzarella”, a locally baked baguette, several pounds of bright green beans, some raspberries and blue berries and some Jersey peaches. The one thing I would loved to have found, but haven’t ever seen at these markets, is butter. The butter came from I know not where.

   Not available at the market, but still local, were two Magret of Duck from the Hutson Valley. Pantry items included onions from who knows where, olive oil from Fairway and alledgedly from Italy, sweet garlic from France and some little odds and ends, like walnuts, flour and parmesan and Romano cheese. Heinz produced the cider vinegar.

   The garden came through with an abundance of basil and rosemary as well as some parsley and sage. The feral cherry/grape tomatoes produced a quart of nice pre-prandial bites rolled in sea salt. Okay. The salt was from France and is a pantry item.

   So dinner for six – all local. H’ors d’houvres consisted of lightly toasted thin slices of the baguette topped with smoked maggret with a tiny nubbin of sweet soft goat cheese. Other little nibbles were made from the same toasted baguette with pesto from the garden and some toasts with just duck or goat cheese.

   The salad was made with chunks of the local tomatoes tossed with a glug of cider vinegar, salt, local cucumbers, slivers of onion, corn kernels and a little basil. This combination makes it own dressing and a piece of white baguette dipped in the residual liquor is a thing to remember.

   We pushed limbs of rosemary under the breast skin on the chickens and placed some more in the cavity along with a head of garlic sliced through the equator; Lots of salt in the cavity, too. The chicken fat was placed on top of the chickens and the whole thing sprinkled with smoked paprika – a pantry item. After about an hours roasting time, potato wedges from the valley were added and cooked in the chicken drippings along with some more rosemary and salt.

   The market had produced some beautiful local corn. That was briefly exposed to boiling water and brought out to the table with butter.

   Desert was the cobbler I wrote about a few days ago from the food channel’s Paula Dean. It can be found here. It was made with the Jersey peaches and the New York State blue berries. This time I used the correct ingredients and as good as it was the last time, it was better this time around. The out of town addition was Hagen Das vanilla ice cream although whipped local cream would have been good, but like butter, I am not seeing any whipping cream in the market.

   Several folks requested a dose of espresso afterwards and I was too happy to oblige. I think espresso can be enjoyed after dinner as much of the caffeine has been cooked off in the roasting process. Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but I’ m sticking with that belief as it works for me.

   This is the time to get to the markets. The foods are fine and fresh. The fruits and vegetables are exploding. Come on – go get yours while it’s out there.

Much to do about pigs

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:23:05

If you have an interest in how the food you eat is grown and processed, especially pork, you will find this link of interest.
I recieved a Googlealert for Evergreen State College, the school my son is going to attend this fall, and it led to this site. It should be of parrticular interest to the porkers.

Fruit Cobbler EASY and the time is right

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:48:29

    This recipe is straight from the Food Network and can be found here.
    However, if you don't do links it is reproduced below. With fruit being so available right now there won't be as better time to make this although we sometimes make it with frozen fruit in the winter.
    A niece made it on Edisto Island and it was great. I messed with the recipe in NY and I shouldn't have. I substituted maple syrup for one of the cups of sugar and that made it too runny and I didn't have self rising flour so used King Arthur White Whole Wheat. The cobbler part was a bit dense and heavy as a result. I did add some blue berries to the peaches at the last moment and that was a happy addition as were the few remaining fresh figs. I did NOT peel the peaches and everything was good with that.

Eat your greens, hear me!?

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 19:46:21

    Maybe fifteen years ago, we were invited to a lake in New Hampshire. That’s where I think it was, anyway. It’s been a long time and I have unfortunately and regrettably lost all contact with the people who invited us. It was somewhere close to the Canadian border and as far north as I have ever been while remaining in the U.S. It was very hot in the day and quite chilly at night. Being from the south, this was a new phenomenon to me.

    It was old family sort of place in that the only people who owned land around the lake had been in some way connected by family or money. The lake was so cold that I couldn’t swim in at all. Our hostess, being a very tough woman, swam the length and breadth while I sank, rock like and had to hitch a ride behind the canoe to get across the water. It is the only time in my life that I thought I might drown. I simply couldn’t stay afloat.

    The water was so pure and mineral free that in the days of steam locomotives this water was carried around in tanker cars to be used like today’s NASCAR fuel. It had no detrimental effect on locomotive boilers. (That’s what they told me. I was a guest and who was I to question the assertion)

    There had been good fishing on the lake at some point judging by all the big fish mounted on the various walls. There didn’t seem to be any fish in the lake at all when we were there and the word was that the water had become too acidic from acid rain that fell all around the place. So the water was cold as ice, clear as glass and practically sterile.

    The first night we were there was the last night of the season that the patriarch was in residence. He left the next day, but because he was there that night, the place was all staffed up with cooks and housekeepers. When he left the next day, so did the staff and we did our own cooking for the remainder of the week, I don’t remember what we fed ourselves, but I vividly remember the first night feed as it was something I had never encountered before, but which I prepare to this today.

    There was a grand pork roast and I have made myself well known on the pork front. There were home baked breads that were marvelous, but the dish that took me by surprise was the beet greens. The beets themselves were essentially Harvard Beets, just like you find them in the Joy of Cooking. Along side of the beets were the beet greens, cooked spinach like with their chopped stems adding color and texture.

    I cook beet greens whenever I get them and have been known to scavenge the greens that customers have the vendors tear off at the farmer’s markets.

    Here’s what I do. I sauté’ them in butter or a little oil with some chopped onion and maybe a little garlic. When they are good and wilted, I add the par-boiled stems (chopped in 1” lengths) some chicken stock and let them cook for a bit until they are tender. When done, I cook off the remaining liquid and add a tablespoon or two of cold butter and stir it around, off the heat, until it melts.

    Tonight’s experiment will include the greens from radishes along with the beet greens. These greens taste peppery in their raw state and I am excited to see how they cook up with the less assertive beet greens.

    Anyway, when you get fresh vegetables with greens attached, try eating them. Often they’re really good…. Not carrot greens, they were nothing to get excited about – so much so that I don’t remember what they tasted like – just the resolution to not bother with them again.

Deer Tenderloin

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:53:27

Not everyone has access to venison and for those who don't, this could be done with beef. I am fortunate to have a ready supply of deer meat. Many people find venison dry and tough and sometimes gamey. If it's gamey, it probably wasn't handled right and something was cut that shouldn't have been, but there is really no excuse for it to be dry or tough. Venison is beyond lean so attention must paid and the cooking time carefully monitored. Cooking just a little too long will flash the meat over to well done and a few seconds longer and you have tough.

The deer we get in SC are small by most standards. The tenderlons are really small. A small deer might give you a pair of tenderloins that weigh - between the two - a little less than a pound. It goes without saying that tenderloins are not loins. Loins are bigger and a bit tougher in a relative sense. If you have the bigger loins, this would work nicely, too; just pay attention to the internal temperature.