The Omnivorous Fish

Well, I’m in Vegas, but this morning I hit Santa Monica Farmers’ Market. A an old, dear friend’s mom is in town, and it’s criminal that I have yet to cook for this woman, so Monday we’re rectifying that. Here’s what I found that really blew my skirt up:

Celery- Yes, not usually much of a fan, but this was no ordinary celery
Nettles- Stinging nettles, but big mofo stinging nettles, perfect for soup
Fava beans- need I say more?
Strawberries- not good enough to kill for, but good enough to get down on the ground and vibrate for
Leeks- beautiful, tiny leeks from Rutiz Farms, home of the Orgasmic Arugula
Green garlic- what’s better about spring, exactly, than green garlic?
French fingerling potatoes- just a hint of chestnut in the flavor- excellent for composed salads
Citrus- holy shit I will never cease to be blown away by meyer lemons and blood oranges at the farmer’s market

So here’s what I have in mind for monday, criticism encouraged:

Mostarda of Celery (this is where celery [though usually fruit] is cooked in a syrup with spices to make a conserve) with fresh ricotta on crostini with my special olives: oil-cured sicilian olives macerated with blood orange juice and zest

Nettle and rice soup with bacon- a venetian style minestra-risotto

Panelle- Fried squares of chickpea flour polenta- palermo style- with a salad of favas, salame calabrese (spicy), ricotta salata and whole chopped (meaning pith and all) meyer lemons

Pork Butt Roast (the top part of the foreleg that I sometimes call shoulder, but is not accurate in English) with braised leeks and Sicilian potato salad (cooked potatoes, extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar, frsh mint)

Strawberries alongside Lebanese rosewater-flavored baklava. Yes, Rose, Danny Thomas was one, too.

I have several interesting pink wines laid in to help this process. Let me know what you think of the menu as a whole.

Well, crap, I lived. Thanks to everybody who came for Easter, from as far away as Simi Valley… sheesh!

Having its roots in a pagan festival, Easter brings to mind the cycle of life for me. There’s still a nip in the air, but here we are, eating peas. There are some dead leaves still visible in the mulch, but there’s enough sun to get artichokes. It’s a time of transition and renewal, much more than New Year’s, which- especially in the Northeast- is a time where gray and cold transitions into grayer and colder. Some lentils and pork don’t quite signify the revolution that a change in weather and new life do.

It’s easy to be philosophical when you spend a lot of time in the garden. To take dirt and some alien seeds and eggshells and mere effort, then to yield- with the forbearance of time- something alive that will perfume the sights and smells and energy of your home, and eventually nourish your body; this is a miracle. It’s especially dramatic, of course to live in California, which is rife with biology in a way that I can’t imagine any other state being. The shifts in temperature, not only from time of year, but from elevation, landform and ocean, along with an abundance of conserved areas not far from- and often within- populated areas make for a surrounding of life unlike any I’ve seen in this country.

artichoke in flower

So, all that said, I still have a mountain of peas to deal with, and- out of nowhere- the strangest craving for meatballs. I haven’t historically loved meatballs, but I figure there has to be a way for me to like something that is made of ingredients that I like. My mother’s recipe reads not unlike a meatloaf recipe, with beef, breadcrumbs, eggs, parsley (always dried, which smells of grass clippings to me and may well be), romano cheese… and that’s about all I can think of. So I said to myself, what could be different?

This brings me to one of the cookbooks in the Reference Section. These are seminal volumes that we go back to for answers, not necessarily for new inspiration (unless we’re feeling retro/classical). Among these are, of course, The Iliad and The Odyssey, that is to say Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volumes 1 and 2; Larousse Gastronomique; its Italian sister Il Cucchiaio d’Argento; The Joy of Cooking; and baking treatises, like The Cake Bible and The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion. These are all stately final-authority type tomes, but there are some more modest books in the category, too. One of them is Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cooking, a book truly ahead of its time, and while it makes no claim to be an exhaustive study of the cuisine, it is a collection of historically sound, well-tested recipes designed to capture the interest of an American audience. The Lutece Cookbook is a similar study of the evolution of haute cuisine in America’s restaurants. These books have something over the encyclopedias that precede them: they give us a solid answer without exhausting us with information. Case in point, Marcella’s Classic Italian Cooking > index > meatballs > answer. The answer? Milk soaked in bread in place of the breadcrumbs. I should have known this, having made many forcemeats exactly the same way, but hey.

So, peas and meatballs. But not together- not for me, anyway, although my old buddy Marianna puts peas in damn near everything. I used to think this was a palermitana (Palermo-style) but I later learned this was a Marianna, in an effort to get her kids to eat something green. I know I talk about Sicilian food a lot, and I love food from all over the country, but I have a special fondness for Northeastern Italy. Friuli, Alto Adige and Veneto- not to mention Istria and the Slovenian provinces that are no longer part of Italy politically- are regions that straddle cultures, truly. Sicily’s food culture is a fascinating sum of its parts, but the Germanic and Italianate influences in the Northeast- although coherent- are distinct.

And the Venetians love their rice. They love rice so much that it would be impossible to say that any way of cooking rice is the “Venetian style” since there are about 30 ways they cook rice that are all more or less “standard.” They even have different styles of risotto. In springtime, when the peas first arrive, people go nuts with the classic risi e bisi, rice and peas. Not exactly a minestra, but decidedly not a risotto, it’s a thick soup of rice, peas, onions, stock and just a taste of pancetta (the salt of cured pork always makes peas taste sweeter). How thick? I describe it like this: you want it to be like a cooking risotto that you’ve just added liquid to, but it has yet to be absorbed.

This is one of those dishes that every Mamma in Veneto will tell you definitively that this is how much pancetta is right and this amount of liquid. However you make it, you can hardly go wrong. It’s a light but flavorful primo that follows the grows-together-goes-together truism: try serving it with grated piave and a young Soave (not Rico).

And really, why not follow this with a rich meatball in a slightly acid tomato sauce? With a little frisee salad, it’s dinner.

Listening: “The Preacher” Jimmy Smith

If you could hook a scanner up to my brain, you would see something like this:

But it’s not from my brain. It’s real. It’s from the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market. Jesus I love spring.

From left to right:
Seascape strawberries, leeks, spring onions, zucchini, asparagus, russian banana potatoes, mature and baby artichokes, italian parsley, thyme, marjoram, fava beans, english peas; then on the far right from closest to farthest: miner’s lettuce, flowering arugula, eureka lemons, morro blood oranges, garlic and some of the most flavorful arugula I’ve seen in a long time.

Holy goat.

Listening: This American Life

I’m exhausted, and I’m on an adrenaline rush from a gorgeous day out and about in the farmland south of San Francisco. I can barely talk, but I’ll let the photos do the work.

Let me take the opportunity to thank Tana “Banana” Butler from I Heart Farms for taking time to share this incredible landscape and charming grandson with me.

First, we visited former Tai Chi instructor Bob Thorson and his partner Jean Harrah at Deep Roots Ranch in Watsonville. They bought the farm- so to speak- from Jean’s parents who had rented the land to berry farmers who left the soil in less than ideal shape. Bob and Jean- with help from Gort the Dog, have grown a beautiful and fully functional animal pasture in its place, with grasses, clover and wildflowers growing as high as me in places.

Gort

View from Pig Pen- not kidding

After lunch and some misadventures with a group of septuagenarian cyclists, we hit the Farmers’ Market, where I got to meet Joe Schermer from Dirty Girl Farms- which, by the way, is in the city limits of Santa Cruz, also unbelievably, neighboring another farm.

I also got to meet Joe Rubin from Live Earth Farm just as he was giving what-for to some old bat preoccupied with USDA organic, trying to tell him that “we” need the USDA to tell us what is good and what isn’t. Joe’s answer? Buy produce from a farmer who lives in your community that you can talk to and visit the farm.

Joe Rubin

This woman, who- by the way- is at a farmers’ market talking to a farmer, tells Joe that people aren’t going to talk to farmers. I almost grabbed her by the cheap straw hat and said, ‘Yeah, foxy mama, let’s trust the government with our food just like foreign policy. Yeah!.’

Theresa’s Produce

Anyhoo. I also met this very nice/cool woman named Theresa, the name of whose farm I didn’t scribble down, but I did take a picture of her beautiful self, beautiful produce and rocking t-shirt (it’s the most basic precept of organic farming). John Gorzynski, if given an ear to bed, can go on and on about “the husbandry of the soil.” If you have the opportunity to have your ear so bent, I recommend you listen.

Theresa talked me into some Berenice Lettuce, which is a slightly bitter green oak leaf variety; and she twisted my arm damn near out of its socket to buy some garlic scapes, a few weeks ahead of NY’s scapes, no less.

Theresa and Her Cool Shirt

The day sort of randomly ended with us cooking the spoils for dinner at Tana’s with her partner Bob and their super cool grandson Logan (Logie-O), who discovered this rocking hiding spot at the market.

Logan’s Feet

Listening: The rental car has a jack for an iPod. We love that. Right now, it’s REM: Orange Crush.

Cacti and Lemons

The Long Beach Farmers’ Market is a perfect example of how you can vote with your dollars. It’s not in downtown LA, it’s in the middle of comparatively sleepy Long Beach, centrally located (which in California means a short drive) and teeming with local produce. I talked to farmers from Lancaster (95 miles), Fresno (240 miles) and some other places I can’t recall just now. Some were organic, some weren’t but they all were happy to talk to me about how they farm, even if in halting English. A cursory examination of prices puts most of the produce available on par with or cheaper than area markets, and if you factor in quality, forget about it.
Long Beach Tomatoes

There were several kinds of tomatoes, but the stands weren’t overrun with expensive (and pretentious) heirloom varieties. Mostly red cluster varieties, there were a few yellow and orange cherry-types. Piles of cactus and pasillo peppers (that is to say poblanos, not pasillas) flanked more familiar chard, beans, carrots, turnips, squashes and watercress. The obligatory Hass avocado, too, was abundant, its somber color offset by baskets of fresh cayenne and bird chilies.
Avocados

Too late for them in New York, I took advantage of some unbelievably flawless Italian eggplants (with hardly a seed in them). Enormous, healthy, tight-skinned onions piled high at several stands, competing for attention with heaps of white and red persimmons and crimson pomegranates, stacked up two and three feet high. I also encountered four or five varieties of cilantro, but strangely only one of mint (spearmint, my least favorite), plus a host of local things I didn’t recognize and, unfortunately, didn’t have time to stop and talk about.
Long Beach Cherry Tomatoes

I love learning new things about food, especially about foods I think I am familiar with. Nuts, often, get taken for granted as a barely perishable commodity, stored nearly indefinitely in the freezer. In New York, certainly, I buy them in the grocery store, since nuts make rare appearances at the greenmarket. They have always seemed more like flour or sugar than like peaches or onions. At this market, there were at least two farmers selling only nuts, the boastful Peanut Man (who, to be fair, sold real nuts, too) and the farmer from Lancaster, who was only too happy to help us choose from among his almonds, pecans, walnuts, peanuts and macadamias (California having recently begun giving Hawaii and Brazil a run for their money). He also had black mission and calimyrna figs, dried, but recently dried, and bursting with moist, figgy-raisiny goodness.

So what lesson did I learn? Just like any other seed pod, nuts are better when fresh, too. Snacking on some fresh-from-the-tree almonds, we were amazed when, after about 20 seconds of chewing, our mouths lit up with the Technicolor taste of almond. The almond of almond extract and almond cookies and almond ice cream, a taste delivered to us mostly through unnatural flavorings, turns out to be as real and as vibrant as a kick in the nuts.

Did I mention that I missed peaches? I went away before they came, and got back after they were already gone. The season in California, clearly, is a bit longer for peaches, especially Last Chance peaches, a variety, not an admonition. Last Chance have an excellent smell, tender flesh and clean taste, although they don’t have the peach-orgasm intensity of flavor one expects of the earlier varieties.

Caramel-Baked Peaches
Serves 4

Pie is too hard. I don’t have time. I don’t have the trick with dough. Whatever. They’re all excuses. The only excuse I’ll accept is “I ran out of flour.” Then you merely bake your fruit by itself.

I love baked fruit. I love apples and Bartlett pears baked with streusel, or just by themselves. Peaches lend themselves to caramel (and almonds) but it could easily be any combination of apples, pears, peaches, apricots or nectarines, with or without the sugar, keeping in mind that the softer fruits (and the sugar, for that matter) will cook much faster than apples or pears.

½ cup sliced almonds
6 peaches
pinch of salt
1 cup brown sugar

Toast the almonds in a heavy dry skillet over medium-high heat or on a baking sheet in a 350 degree oven, stirring often, until lightly browned and fragrant.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Split the peaches in half and remove the stone (you may peel them, but I prefer them unpeeled, I hardly ever peel fruit). Cut each half into 3 to 5 slices, depending on size and preference. Arrange in an enamelware or glass baking dish and sprinkle with salt and brown sugar, coating peaches thoroughly. Arrange almonds on top. Bake for 12-17 minutes, until caramel is mahogany-colored and peaches are very soft, but still intact. Cool slightly and serve.