Can I Call it Kimchi? vol. 2

Do you ever get the impression that the contents of your fridge are judging you? That the longer an item has been there, the harsher its critique? Or is that just me?

A surprisingly high proportion of my cooking and eating habits are based around trying to make it up to that half cabbage languishing in the vegetable drawer or that barely-scooped pint of rice that came with the take-out food and has outlasted its compatriots, or whatever else is languishing forlornly in there, in the cold and the dark. Okay, so maybe I'm overdramatizing things, but I'm also making myself feel guilty digging into that overanalysis of why I hate wasting food.

But I digress. Pickling is a great solution to this important moral dilemma on just about every front. Not only is a great direction for leftovers, namely those tragic survivors of the vegetable drawer, but, once pickled they stay good for far longer, meaning you can take them off the fridge worry list. You might even be more inclined to use them.


My first adventure with kimchi late last summer really opened it up as a flexible, accessible, exciting framework, both in research and in practice.

Raw-Pack Canning Blueberries in Juice

Yesterday marked the 6th annual Boston Skillshare, and the third that I have been involved with. The last two years, I facilitated workshops on reclaiming yarn, basic auto maintenance, and beginning ukulele. Apparently, I can't stop teaching, even on weekends and vacations. This year, I facilitated a workshop on canning and pickling, by request. I had originally wanted to walk through canning tomatoes, but we have not quite reached the deluge of tomatoes that will be here in a week or two, so I went with blueberries instead. Blueberries are a particularly easy food to can: they don't need to be cooked or cut up ahead of time, and are sufficiently acidic that they don't need to be processed under pressure. I also had the privilege of being introduced to the League of Urban Canners, a group operating in the Boston area (primarily Somerville and Cambridge) to make the most of backyard fruit. If you invite them, they will come to your house, pick the fruit before it falls all over your yard, can it, and give you 10% of what they can. It's a really interesting model that I would love to be involved with if they weren't 2 hours away.

Before we start in with the blueberries, a few words about the role of heat and acidity in safe canning. The whole deal with preserving is to arrest, avoid or carefully control the bacterial and enzymatic breakdown of fresh food. These include such options as freezing, drying, fermenting and canning. Canning preserves food by sealing it away from the air under vacuum and killing any bacteria trapped inside through heat, which works for the vast majority of bacterial species. Clostridium botulinum is a more complicated story. While live C. botulinum are killed at boiling water temperatures, they produce spores which aren't. The spores remain active at that temperature and thrive in an oxygen-deprived environment at between 40°-140°F, (like, say, a can at room temperature) happily producing deadly neurotoxins. The spores can be destroyed at temperatures of 240°F. However, an acidic environment with a pH of <4.6 inhibits these spores, so that the live-bacteria killing 212°F is sufficient. This pH of 4.6 marks the dividing line between high-acid foods, which can be safely processed in a 212°F boiling water bath and low-acid foods, which must be processed using a pressure canner, which can reach temperatures of 240°F.

Blueberries, along with all other berries and the majority of fruits (by the common rather than botanical definition) are classified as high-acid foods, and can be processed in a boiling water bath. The general process for canning berries is as follows:

1. Obtain berries.
2. Wash berries.
3. Load berries into sterilized jars.
4. Cover with hot juice, syrup or water.
5. Seal with lid.
6. Process in a hot water bath for 15-20 minutes.

Super Zucchini Bread with Lemon, Walnut and Basil

photo: Timnath Community Garden

In Vermont, we like to joke that the reason to lock your car in the summer isn't because someone might steal it, but because someone might leave a bushel of zucchini in the front seat. Delicate little fruits grow into baseball bats overnight and invite four or five friends along, too. My childhood memories of zucchini have as much to do with using them for benches and dressing them up in doll clothes as they do with actually eating them. Local fairs in zucchini-prone areas often turn up with events like best-dressed zucchini contests or zucchini races (see above). There's still plenty left over to eat. Besides, who's to say you can't eat your winning car?

For all that they are abundant to the point of ubiquity around here in the summer, I don't actually get tired of eating them. Zucchini (and all of its summer squashy cohort) are ridiculously versatile and, in a number of dishes, seem to vanish entirely (chefs for the vegetable-averse, take note). Zucchini bread is a good example of this.

My dad requested a good zucchini bread recipe the other day, specifically one that wasn't too sweet and used a lot of zucchini. A great many zucchini bread recipes really load up on sugar (and fat, for that matter). The top result for "zucchini bread" on Google contains 3 cups of sugar and 1 cup of oil to 2 cups of zucchini and 3¼ cups of flour in two loaves. That's a sugar-heavy ratio even by cake standards, and a disappointingly low zucchini content.

Swordfish with Peach-Corn Salsa

My CSA keeps me sane in the summer: it helps keep my miserly urges from denying me fresh vegetables and jump starts my culinary creativity in a couple different ways. Not only does the seasonality lead me into the diverse options for familiar vegetables, but it also forces me to try out vegetables I'm less familiar with (see the last post, a study of kohlrabi). This has worked really well for the last few yeas, and both my miserly urges and desire for a varied palate are satisfied.

This year, the farm down the road where I have a share became a pickup location for Cape Cod Fish Share. The fish share does the same things that the vegetable share does for me as regards creativity and circumventing the miserly urges, but also answers many of the sourcing and sustainability questions that keep me from buying fish regularly.

The Kohlrabi: Spherical, but quite pointy in parts!

What is Sputnik doing in my CSA share?!
One of the best parts of a farm share is the surprises: the chances to meet a new ingredient head on, figure out what makes it tick like a tasty bomb, and eat it up. Kohlrabi is one that I'm still figuring out, and the friends with whom I do farm pickup have been left scratching their heads as well. It's only in the share a once or twice out of the year, and each year has slowly revealed its charms a little more. This year, I think I finally have its number.

CSA-share head-scratch staple kohlrabi, which looks like a more organic version of Sputnik (spherical, but quite pointy in parts!), is part of the largely familiar Brassica oleracea crew, which includes kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and cabbage (but not napa cabbage or bok choy, which are Brassica rapa). It's remarkable to think that they're all the same species, but, then again, so are chihuahuas and Irish wolfhounds.

Savory Cantaloupe Salad & Chèvre on Anadama Bread

Perfectly ripe cantaloupe almost seems beyond improvement: the deep, musky perfume hits you even before you sink your teeth into the satiny smooth flesh. It's sweet, but not overwhelmingly so, and has a richness to it uncharacteristic of most fruits.

Sometimes, you just can't help tweaking perfection, though. (Also, not every cantaloupe reaches quite that pinnacle of perfection.)

Stuffed Grape Leaves

Earlier this week, I put up a post about how to collect and can your own grape leaves. The inevitable follow-up is what to do with those leaves once you have them.

Stuffed grape leaves feature in cuisines from southern Europe to Central Asia, though the most common names dolma and sarma come from Turkish (dolmak, "to stuff"; sarmak, "to wrap") — another testament to the broad, long-lasting impact of the Silk Road. Many of these cultures alternately use the same fillings in cabbage leaves.The fillings vary slightly from place to place, but are typically some combination of a grain, like rice or bulgur, and protein, like ground meat or lentils. From there, fillings diverge widely. Some include vegetables like tomato and zucchini. Others focus on adding dried fruits and nuts. They are served in a range of sauces, the most common being based around tomato, yogurt or lemon.

In the interest of feeding a broad group cheaply, my go-to grape leaf filling is based around rice and red lentils. Lentils and rice are about as cheap as protein gets. I specifically use red lentils, which are available in most supermarkets, because they have a similar cooking time to rice. You can use brown lentils if that's what you have, but you would want to parcook them more than the rice and beyond just a quick soak. I also usually include onion, raisins and mint, and simmer the stuffed leaves in a lemon and olive-oil dressing.

Eating the Bike Path: Grape Leaves

The grape may not be gathered from the birch?
It's all you know the grape, or know the birch.
As a girl gathered from the birch myself
Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn,
I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of.

—Robert Frost, "Wild Grapes"

The idea of foraging for wild edibles somewhat romantically evokes trekking deep into the wilderness, but the reality is both more and less romantic: edibles are all around. They are in your backyard, in the park and even growing up through the cracks in the street (which, though tenaciously lovely, you probably don't want to eat). My favorite place to gather wild edibles is the Manhan Rail Trail here in Easthampton. Within a half-mile stretch, you can find chicory, garlic mustard greens, dandelion, blackberries, lamb's quarters, pokeweed, japanese knotweed and grape leaves. There's probably more that I can't readily identify, too. These vary in how accessible they are to eat: blackberries and garlic mustard greens can be eaten on the spot, while pokeweed must be picked very young and boiled (I haven't gotten to eating this one yet, but I have harvested its berries for dyeing purposes). Many of these plants thrive in sunny roadside environments, but best foraging practices recommend collecting edibles at least 20 and preferably 100 feet away from the road. This is what's beautiful about the bike path: it has all of the sunny growing and easy-access benefits of the roadside, but without the exhaust fumes.

Forget Spring Rolls: Summer Rolls

I've been suffering urges to eat live green things by the fistful recently. There's something about the onset of hot weather and the boisterous upspringing of plants that makes me want to rip off their tender little leaves and eat them like a hungry, hungry beast. It's like I'm trying to cram in all of the fresh air and sunlight they've absorbed. I am eating plants the way some ancient warriors consumed the heart of their enemy: to gain their strength and wisdom. There's a Philip K. Dick short story, "Piper in the Woods", in which people, suddenly craving a simpler life, start claiming that they have become plants. There's a certain appeal to it: what if sitting still, smiling at the sun all day fulfilled all of your needs? In the absence of that, or, rather, the presence of all the other things that must be done, or that I do anyway, I try to steal the essence of leafy plants. By serenely dismembering and eating them.

Vietnamese gỏi cuốn, literally, "salad rolls" but also known as summer rolls or Vietnamese spring rolls, combine fragrant, leafy herbs, crisp veggies like bean sprouts and thin-cut carrot and cucumber, and a little bit of protein, usually from shrimp or shredded chicken and roll it all up in bánh tráng, rice paper. Not only do they satisfy my unholy cravings for crisp, green crunch, but they also require very little prep and even less time with the stove going, which is always at a premium when it gets hot out. Even more so, they're fun to put together and make dinner into a great group activity.

Last Minute Gift Idea: DIY Hot Cocoa Mix

Window decor by my 8th graders. Tis the season for geometry!

How do I always end up with such an extensive list of things to do on Christmas Eve? I mean aside from the working flat-out until the day before, inevitable last-minute inspirations for the perfect handmade gift that cannot be made at the last minute, the fact that Christmas Eve is the big celebration in our family, all with a side of being easily distracted?

All to-do list anxiety aside, this twofold revelation crossed a few things off my list in one fell swoop:

1. Hot cocoa mix, even custom hot cocoa mix, is really easy to make.
2. Most people really like hot cocoa.

The hardest decision to make here is whether you want to put together a mix-with-milk or a mix-with-water variety. As much as I'm happy to heat up milk at home, it's not going to happen at work since it's not practical for me to keep milk there. I actually used to keep a tub of cheap cocoa mix at work to add to my coffee in lieu of sugar and milk. I also know that some of the folks to whom I am giving this cocoa mix are not as well-inclined to heat up milk for cocoa. So, I decided to opt for a variety that would work mixed only with hot water.