I’ve heard for some time that beet greens (literally, the green, leafy part of the beet plant) are quite tasty, and I like greens, so I was curious to try them.  But I never did, because beet greens are always sold with beets attached, and if I bought them, I might have to use the beets.  I guess I could have cooked the greens and tossed the beets, but that just seemed wrong.

So I was amazed when I discovered nearly beet-less greens at the farmer’s market. There exist varieties of beets that are grown primarily for their greens.  The greens grow big and tasty, and the beet (root) part is small, stunted, and not meant to be eaten. Perfection! At last I could try some beet greens in good conscience.

The verdict: tasty.  They’re very mild, and ever-so-slightly sweet, not cloyingly sweet like beets.  In fact, they taste more like spinach than beets, and had almost none of the bitter flavor that so many people dislike about greens. If you like eating healthy but aren’t a fan of kale, you might give these a try.

I prepared my beet greens the way I prepare most unfamiliar foods: sauted with olive oil and garlic. I served them over polenta, with some mozzarella cheese on top.  The bunch in the picture made a greens-heavy meal for one, but could comfortably have fed two.

As you might expect, croissants make wonderful French toast. They are rich and tender and easy to eat. (I like to think there’s something fitting about turning French croissants into French toast… though I doubt they make it this way in France.) They don’t need maple syrup to make them taste good – fresh fruit does the trick much better.

My “special occasion” for making it this morning was supposed to be the approaching end of strawberry season in DC. Vendors at the farmer’s market were telling me there were only a couple weeks left, so I figured it was a good time for French toast and strawberries. But then we found the first raspberries of the season, so we had to change plans and have French toast with raspberries instead.

Good, fresh raspberries are precious. They’re hard to find, they’re pricey, and they don’t keep well. But I love them so much that it’s worth getting them whenever they’re in season (and that it’s worth taking up limited patio space on a crazy experiment to grow them myself – which has yielded a few flowers so far, so it seems to be working!)

They do keep quite badly – I’ve had too many bad experiences of leaving raspberries in the fridge even for a day, and finding them moldy. That’s just heartbreaking, so I always try to eat them the same day I get them. It’s not very hard.

I didn’t do anything special to make the French toast. I used one croissant per person, and made my usual batter of one egg, an equal amount of milk, a big pinch of sugar, and a bit of vanilla. (That amount was just right for 2 servings.) Then cut the croissants in half, coat both sides in batter, then cook each side until it’s lightly browned. Serve it with any sort of fresh berries and, if you want to be truly decadent, some whipped cream or creme fraiche.

Then go dream about it until it’s berry season again.

It is the perfect time to make plans for eating more sustainably over the next 9 months or so when good local food is easy to come by. I’ve got my resolution – more like a master plan – for this year already.

In the past, I’ve always tried to go to the farmer’s market every week, and that’s where we get most of our produce and eggs during the local growing season.  My favorite market, in Takoma Park, has a huge selection including almost every kind of vegetable, eggs, dairy, meat, and a handful of specialty items. If you can make a farmer’s market or farmstand part of your weekly food shopping, or even go a couple times a month, that’s a good resolution for eating more locally.

Or, you could try a CSA.  CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and it’s a system where you can sign up with a local farm (most are run by individual farms) to get a weekly box of whatever’s good.  They vary in length (most run from spring through early fall) and in the details. Most have a set of pickup times and locations, and you just need to find one that’s convenient; but some will do an extra dropoff if you get together a bunch of interested neighbors or coworkers, and a few will even deliver to your house.  Some will let you sign up on a week-to-week basis (good if you’re traveling a lot), but in most cases you’ll subscribe for the full season.

The challenge of a CSA is that you can’t usually choose what you get.  Your box will contain whatever is ripe that week.  If the farm has lots of tomatoes, you’re in luck.  If this week it’s kale and collards, you may find yourself flipping through cookbooks trying to find something, anything new to do with greens.  And if, for example, your whole family hates zucchini, there may be a few weeks when your CSA share will make you sad and you have to force most of it on your unsuspecting neighbors.  But it’s a great way to challenge yourself to cook more (you’re more likely to cook vegetables if you have them on hand), it can be convenient to pick up your weekly share, and you’ll be surprised with new, exciting, and sometimes unfamiliar foods.

A CSA isn’t for everyone (it’s not really for me), but if it sounds appealing, now’s the time to sign up.  A lot of CSA’s fill up long before the season starts.  While farmer’s markets aren’t even open yet, it’s the perfect time to research your CSA options.  For DC-area CSAs, check out this listing from the Washington Post. If you live elsewhere in the US, Local Harvest is a great resource for local foods of all sorts, including CSAs.

Then there’s the home garden.  There is no more local food than what you grow for yourself.  If you’re concerned about staying organic, your garden is the only place you have complete control.  And the vegetables will always be fresh and delicious.

It isn’t always easy to garden in urban areas.  Until we moved last year, we had zero outdoor space for growing.  But if you have even a little outdoor space, you can grow something in containers.  And if you have none at all, you can try for a community garden plot, or borrow space in a neighbor’s backyard.  If you really want to garden, there are always options.

Our food resolution this year is to grow as much food as we possibly can on our 8×15, partially shaded patio.  We tried to grow a number of things last summer, after we moved in, without much success.  I blame the rain, which started the same day as our hasty post-move planting, and lasted for a month without pause.  If I can blame it on the rain, it makes me feel better about my chances this year.

Despite (or perhaps because of?) last year’s failure, I feel compelled to go overboard this year.  Since we’re not in the middle of moving (yay!) we can actually plant things at the appropriate times, plan out the layout of our garden, and even start seeds indoors.  And we’re doing it all.  It may end up being madness, but hopefully the madness will give us a decent harvest of our own food. I want nothing more than to get up in the morning and pick some lettuce and a tomato to go on my sandwich for lunch.  Or to come home and pluck fresh herbs and a head of kale for dinner.

We’ll see how it goes.

That’s my resolution.  What are you doing to eat more sustainably this year?  Have you tried a CSA?  Are you starting a garden?  Tell us in the comments!

My extra motivation to sleep in came from my Sunday farmers’ market haul.  Nathan and I had trekked up to Baltimore, where their farmer’s market is impressively large, hugely diverse and, while it’ll never compete with my local market in my affections, does have better prices and some good bargains.  For instance: a great big basket of seconds tomatoes for $2.50.  The basket was probably over 3 lbs of tomatoes, and it was too much of a steal – I had to get it and make sauce.

Tomato sauce, simmering away

Making tomato sauce is a little labor intensive, but the real reason I haven’t done it in years is that it’s just not economical.  No matter how good the sauce comes out, it takes a huge volume of tomatoes to make a respectable amount of sauce.  Even mediocre fresh tomatoes tend to be pretty expensive, and good fresh tomatoes are really, really expensive if you buy them in quantity.  Maybe you’ve got a great big garden, but the odds are you don’t have enough tomatoes to make sauce.  If you do have that quantity of tomatoes to spare, you’re living the good life.  That’s why, if you ever get a good deal on a big box of tomatoes, you should pounce.

Because these tomatoes weren’t great, but let me tell you, they made a damn good sauce.  Most of them had huge, ugly bruises; a couple were starting to turn fuzzy; and several felt too hard when I cut into them.  But once I chopped them up and cooked them down, some sort of magic happened.  They tasted like the most tomato-ey tomatoes you’ve ever had.  And that’s the reward for spending a rainy afternoon chopping tomatoes and making the house smell delicious – the best sauce you’ve ever had.

There are two keys to making sauce (besides having lots of tomatoes): peeling them, and seeding them.  Neither of these things is hard to do.  But, they can take a little time if you are doing them a lot.  It helps to crank up the music, or bring a friend if you can.

Peeling tomatoes is actually a neat trick, if you’ve never done it en masse before.  The secret is blanching: dipping the tomatoes in hot water long enough to release the skins.  First, get yourself set up with a pan of boiling water, deep enough for a tomato, and a bowl of ice water.  Then just cut a small, shallow ‘x’ in each one with a serrated knife, dunk them one at a time in boiling water and let them sit just until the skin starts to pull away – about a minute.  Then, move them quickly to the ice water, and let them sit until you can handle them.  The skin will just slide off: magic!

It takes a lot of tomatoes to make sauce!

Seeding is similarly easy: slice the tomato in half along its equator, and then squeeze each half over a bowl until the seeds and pulp come out.  (Did I mention it helps to get meaty tomatoes, the kind that are more flesh than juice?  No surprise, but it helps!)  You don’t have to be a perfectionist, either.  A few seeds in your sauce won’t hurt you.  Once the seeds are out, just coarsely chop the flesh.  (When you’re done, you can strain the seeds out and save the tomato juice, which you can drink or use in place of stock; it’s like a bonus.)

Then, you get cooking.  There are lots of variations on tomato sauce, and you can get as creative as you want.  My rendition was, I feel, pretty classic: I sauted an onion and a few cloves of garlic in olive oil, until they were just starting to brown, then added the tomatoes, along with some basil, oregano, salt, and pepper.  I let it simmer for about an hour and a half, until most of the liquid cooked off, and was left with a nice chunky, flavorful sauce.

The best part was that I served the sauce over homemade gnocchi – but that’s a story for another day.  The moral here is that homemade tomato sauce is amazing, and if you get a good deal on a couple pounds of less-than-perfect tomatoes, you should take it!

Have you ever made sauce from scratch?  Was yours more creative than mine?  What did you do?

There’s delicious, fresh food all around, much of it so fresh and ripe and tasty that it requires very little preparation.  In winter, nothing tastes that great on its own, so it takes a relatively high dose of effort and creativity to turn out a tasty meal.  In the summer, no such thing – just cook (or not) and eat.  If you don’t want to worry about what goes together, don’t worry.  It’ll taste great on its own.

This makes it kind of hard to be a blogger, since blog posts are supposed to have interesting ideas and revelations.  Or at the very least, recipes.  Talking about how I just had a great ear of corn with a little butter and salt doesn’t make fascinating reading.

But, if you’re a new or reluctant cook, or trying to green your lifestyle, it’s the perfect time to dig in, because it is that easy to cook good food.  I believe that a huge part of living a healthy, sustainable life is cooking for yourself.  How can you really support local food if you don’t cook?  How much can you really lower your carbon footprint if your food is flown in from California or beyond?  Cooking is a critical step, and yet in some ways it’s among the hardest obstacles to overcome.  A lot of people I talk to are hesitant about cooking, or don’t know how to get started.

Tackling this problem is one of my goals with this blog – to show how you can cook good food without a lot of planning or effort.  Summer is the best time to learn to do that, but first you need some good, fresh food.  Start with your local farmer’s market, farmstand, or whatever source you can find. Right now is when the markets start really booming.  I was stunned today at how much new stuff had suddenly appeared at my local market in the past week, and for $40, I came away with quite a haul:

• corn on the cob
• carrots
• blueberries
• green kale
• garlic
• tomatillos (more on these later)
• zucchini
• eggplant
• yogurt
• quark cheese
• farm-fresh whole milk and chocolate milk (really good chocolate milk – some of you will understand when I say it rivals Hartzlers’ chocolate milk)

To me, that seems like an impressive amount of food, especially considering it’s all fresh, organic, and amazingly good.  You could probably buy more for that amount of money in the grocery store, but none of it would taste as good (by virtue of being transported from far away) or be as healthy (by virtue of the industrial farming behind it – modern hybrids grown in poor soil, which describes most vegetables at grocery stores today, have a demonstrably lower nutritional value than what you’ll find at the market).

Now that you have it, what do you do with it?  Some of it needs – indeed demands – only the most basic treatment.  For example, what could I possibly do with my corn besides shuck it, put it on the grill for a few minutes, and eat it with a little butter?  That was half of dinner tonight.  And even if you’re not a creative or confident cook, I bet you could find several ways to use blueberries or carrots without trying too hard (including just eating them straight!).

The less familiar foods might be trickier, and more intimidating to experiment with.  Sometimes you’ll find foods at a farmer’s market that you’ve never eaten before, or even never seen before.  I’d say, if they look interesting to you, buy them.  You’ll figure out what to do with them.  Often, the farmer who sells it to you can offer some advice on the best simple preparations: steam it; saute it with olive oil; roast it in the oven.  These sorts of preparations are easy to learn, and most vegetables are kind enough to follow similar rules to tell us when they’re ready – usually cook them until they’re just tender when pierced with a fork.

In either case, you can probably make it taste good without doing much to it, and that’s good news, because it’s summertime, and we’d all rather spend less time cooking, and more time eating.  Here’s to simplicity!

Pesto, made with garlic scapes and spinach

They are garlic scapes, and they taste, well, like garlic.  People also call them garlic curls or pigtails.  They’re the green part of garlic that pushes up from the ground while the bulb is still growing.  You can pretty much only find them in late spring or early summer, and pretty much only at farmer’s markets or CSAs.  In the early part of the season, you can cut them, chop them up, and saute them like garlic.  Or, you can make pesto.

I made up this recipe last weekend, and then made it again last night because it was so good.  (It came out better the first time, honestly – I think the second batch of scapes was a little tough and didn’t puree nicely.)  This is also a perfect sort of hands-free cooking recipe, because the ingredients really do just go together in whatever portions you prefer.  It’s all about adding things, tasting, and adding more things until you get it right.

I will warn you, though: people say scapes are milder than actual garlic, but this was still really strong.  Really strong.  It rivaled the dinner I had at The Stinking Rose, a San Francisco restaurant that specializes in garlic.  If you love garlic, you’re in for a treat – and even then, use with care.

Garlic scape pesto is great over pasta

I served this dish two different ways: once straight over spaghetti, and the second time with ricotta and whole wheat pasta spirals.  Both were excellent, and both left garlic coming out of our pores.  Another cool thing: because there’s little or no basil in it, this pesto doesn’t turn brown as soon as you make it!

Got another great use for garlic scapes?  Please share!  I might like to try something a little less intense, next time…

Garlic Scape Pesto

Combine the following in a food processor, starting with the lower-end amounts:

• 1 bunch (4-6) garlic scapes, cut into pieces to make them easier to puree
• 1/4 to 1/2 lb baby spinach (or even more)
• some basil leaves (optional)
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
• olive oil (add a little at the beginning, then more to get the desired consistency for the sauce)
• salt to taste

Put your starting set of ingredients (or as much as will fit) in a food processor.  Start on low, and work up to a high speed, stirring by hand as needed.  If your food processor is like mine, you’ll need to mash the pesto down and away from the edges of the bowl every few minutes.  Once you start to get a smooth consistency, with as few chunks as possible, start tasting and adding more spinach, cheese, and olive oil until you’re satisfied with the garlic-to-everything-else balance.  Be patient, and keep processing until you’ve got a nice puree.

Serve fresh over your favorite pasta.

Sign for the Austin Farmers' Market

Hands-Free Cooking has been quiet over the past week, but my life has not!  I’ve been off at South by Southwest (SXSW), hanging out with some very cool geeks and spending so much time talking and thinking about blogging (along with the rest of that social media stuff) that I haven’t had any time to blog!  But, as I was surprised to discover, there are tons of sustainable foodies at SXSW and in Austin, and I got to meet a lot of them.

Austin seems to have a strong and growing local food contingent.  I met someone from the recently formed Resolution Gardens, a local Austin organization which previously planted vegetable gardens in unused space in local families’ yards, and has since expanded into offering gardening classes and helping home gardeners sell their produce to local supermarkets.  This is a great system – it helps families get more delicious, healthy food, makes productive use of land that would otherwise just grow grass, and supports the local food economy.  They have plans to grow and become a really serious resource for home gardeners in Austin.  I wish we had something like them in the DC area.

There’s also a lot of local food pride.  I was out for a walk and accidentally discovered where a farmer’s market is held (though I wasn’t there at the right day or time – and I don’t even know what seasons it runs).  I liked this sign: “just-picked Texas goodness.”  It makes sense: local food should be a matter of local pride, and I don’t know any place with more local pride than Texas.  Maybe that’s a message we should be using more, with a little friendly competition.  If someone claimed that a tomato that travelled a thousand miles from California was better than a tomato grown in your home state, would you be inspired to prove them wrong?

It wasn’t all local to Austin, either.  There are a lot of groups out there using technology to support the sustainable food movement.  One of my favorite examples was Farms Reach, a beta site that’s connecting chefs with local farmers to order and pick up produce online, thus mitigating one of the big challenges of navigating the local food scene if you’re preparing food on a large scale.  Serving local food in restaurants is becoming very “cool”, at least in my area, but the restaurants that do it tend to be high-end and pricey.  Maybe a service like Farms Reach will bridge the gap and make it possible for more restaurants to feature local produce.  They’re just working in California now, but planning to spread to other areas soon.

One challenge I heard discussed was the problem of compiling a full, public list of farmers’ markets and other local food resources.  There are some pretty decent ones, but none are complete or make the data available to coders.  It’s tricky: there are thousands of small farmers’ markets around the country, and they’re constantly changing.  Still, it would be very cool if we could pull this data together and make it open for use on the web.

I also spent a lot of time learning and thinking about blogging – in general, as well as specific to this blog.  I’ve got a lot more thinking to do, and I won’t write here about the technical things that I learned, but you’ll probably see some changes here over the next few weeks.

Fresh porcini mushrooms (WikiMedia)

Some things are worth spending silly amounts of money on, and porcinis are one of them.  Their flavor was rich, dark, and earthy; they tasted more mushroomy than any mushrooms I’ve had.  There’s a reason why they’re considered gourmet.  You’ll more often see them dried, and adding just a few dried porcinis can light up a dish.  Still, the fresh ones are something else.

I think a lot of home cooks, especially new or timid cooks, avoid buying nice or expensive ingredients for fear of ruining them in the cooking.  If you have something special to work with, you want to do it justice.  My usual method of becoming familiar with new ingredients is to saute them with olive oil and butter, but in this case, I wanted something a little more substantial.  So, I went to the books.  I found a recipe in “Moosewood Cooks at Home” for Broiled Polenta with Mushrooms and Cheese, which I made once before with ordinary mushrooms, and seemed perfect for my porcinis.  (The recipe called for dried porcinis – I substituted my fresh ones.)  In fact, the mushrooms stole the show.  This is a real treat and feels appropriately fancy, though the preparation is fairly simple.

Broiled Polenta with Mushrooms and Cheese (from Moosewood Cooks at Home)

• Cook polenta (1 cup coarse cornmeal, 3 cups boiling water) over low heat until thick – stir so it does not burn.
• Saute some garlic and a couple cups of chopped mushrooms (I supplemented the porcinis with some button mushrooms) in olive oil until they are a little soft and the oil is absorbed.  Add about a tablespoon of wine, some salt, and herbs if desired, and cook another minute or two.
• Spread the polenta in an oiled baking dish.  Top with the mushrooms, then some grated cheese (we used feta; the original calls for mozarella and cheddar) and broil until the cheese browns.  Serve hot!

The Takoma Park Farmer's Market

Squash, apples, carrots, and sweet potatoes are around for much of the winter

Tons of mushrooms - a special treat

Local cheese, year-round

Eggs, jams, and beeswax candles - but the eggs are sold out!

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I’m a bit of a farmer’s market fanatic.  During the spring, summer, and fall, I make it a point to get there nice and early, almost every single week.  During the winter, I go less often, but I still try to go every couple weeks.

I’m lucky – most farmer’s markets close down when the weather gets cold, and don’t open again until late spring when the first early vegetables are popping up.  But in most metropolitan areas, there are one or two markets that run year round.  And for those who venture out in the cold, it can be well worth the trip.

The Takoma Park Farmer’s Market, just outside DC, is one of these rare year-round markets.  I’ve visited a couple times since New Year’s, which is when a large number of vendors pack up and take their winter break.  Fruits and vegetables are slim – today there was just one stand selling winter vegetables like onions, sweet potatoes, and carrots, and another selling mostly apples.  But, there are plenty of other local foods to enjoy, plus some surprises – vendors who sell at other markets for most of the year, but move to Takoma when their usual market shuts down.  So in addition to bakeries, free-range eggs and meat, and local cheese (which are there all year), this week we had a mushroom seller, a milk vendor (for the first time!), and greenhouse lettuce.

While it’s cold, winter visits to the farmer’s market can be cozy in a way that doesn’t happen during the peak season.  There are fewer people and no lines.  There’s less competition – though even on a cold day like today, one vendor was sold out of eggs by the time we arrived around noon.  With a smaller array of items, you can explore those unusual things you never think to buy during the summer.  Case in point – today I bought some goats’ milk, just because I was curious to try it.  (And next time, I may buy more to make cheese!)  To me, it’s worth the trip just to get eggs that I know were humanely raised.  But if there’s a year-round farmer’s market near you, it’s worth investigating – you may make some interesting finds!

There aren’t compelling nutritional benefits to choosing one color of cauliflower over another – Wikipedia tells me that the purple variety has more antioxidants, but that’s about it.  The best part, I think, is the effect on the plate.  It made a great contrast with the green of the kale, and a nice change from the bland look of white cauliflower.  (Not to mention the wow factor for those who’ve never seen it before!)  It’s possible to make great, delicious meals using only white foods, but a plate with just one color feels a bit like deprivation.  Maybe colored cauliflower is a good way to brighten up a meal.