Carbon Schmarbon

I've just finished reading an inane article on Salon.com by Roberta Kwok; it's typical of the phoned-in, shoddily-researched mumbo-jumbo that passes for left-leaning journalism (having taken its cue, perhaps, from the phoned-in, shoddily-researched mumbo-jumbo purveyed by the right wing as well). The article, "Locally Grown Food Is More Ecological? Not So Fast," points out that farmers markets and the like might not be as carbon-friendly as we think. Heck, in terms of fuel consumption, they might actually consume as much gasoline as supermarkets-- maybe even more!

Here's the logic: supermarket produce may travel further than local produce, but farmers truck the stuff in with much less mega-efficiency than the supermarkets. After all, how many farmers own 18-wheelers? And thus, Kwok comes dangerously close to launching a clarion call to Salon's self-hating pseudo-liberals: buy cosmopolitan! Maybe we're all not such bad people for wanting to enjoy our persimmons and off-season tomatoes at Whole Foods.

I recently heard Bruce Robbins, an English professor at Columbia, make a similarly narrow-minded point. His pseudo-environmentalist appeal to gastronomic cosmopolitanism had, however, a little bit of ideological bait thrown in as well. The "Buy Local" mandate, like the "Buy American" mantra, comes suspiciously close to replicating a form of cultural xenophobia; however good our intentions might be, "buying local" smacks of potential deception. We might think we're doing the right thing, but we're really acting like suckers.

Kwok, to his credit, isn't suggesting that we give up on farmers markets-- he concludes only that he should "leave his calculator at home" next time, in order to avoid getting himself all dizzy over the problem of carbon calculation in the first place.

I'm stunned, though, by the article's lack of consideration for the longer-term economic-- and thus environmental-- differences between the globalization of produce and the support for local farming. For every time a small farm goes under, yielding its land either to sub-developments or to industrial mega-farms, the effects are far more wide-ranging than simply the matter of how much gas it takes to drive to the market, or of how much greenhouse gas an actual greenhouse produces.

Farmers markets benefit farmers-- at least I hope they do-- as do programs that enable markets, restaurants, schools, businesses, and individuals to buy local produce. I'm sure, yes, that there's plenty of driving involved. But every time a farm turns into a "Fox Run Village" or a "Wayside Crest" piled high with eco-friendly McHouses, there's a new bumper crop of cars, traffic, and the inevitable highway-widening and mega-marts that follow.

And yes, the 18-wheelers that heave in the bushels of imported (and sometimes delicious) produce from California or Guatamala to the local Wegman's may be more efficient than Farmer Dan's old Chevy pickup. But I'll bet you dollars to donuts that there will be more 18-wheelers once those farms have gone.

Delayed Gratification... But Gratification

Knowing in advance that we would be out of town for our weekly vegetable delivery, we authorized (read: cajoled) A. and K. to pick up our CSA box from the porch and do with it what they liked.

When we returned home yesterday, they gave us the contents. This, I guess, is what they liked. A. and K. have their own garden, you see. But it's an act of kindness all the same.

Judging from the contents of the box, it would seem that things are starting to pick up. The results remain similar to those of previous weeks:

A small head of iceburg lettuce
A bag of mixed lettuce
A nosegay of kale
A crown of broccoli
Four green onions
A bag of mange-tout snap peas.

In addition, I bought from the farmer's market today a dozen or so garlic scapes, a packet of micro-greens, and some fresh fingerling beets with their greens intact. I'm especially pleased with the garlic scapes, which I'd never used before. They're magnificent: imagine a long bean that tastes like garlic. Eaten raw, they're rather strong, yet much more edible than the garlic bulb. Sautéed, they become much milder and sweeter in flavor.

As a result of this produce surge, virtually everything we ate today was grown within 25 miles of us. We had salad greens with our lunch and dinner. We made an omelet with garlic scapes. And for supper we made pizzas on the grill.

Grilled pizzas are a summer favorite, and for the first time I actually bothered to make the dough. Please don't judge me: it's mighty simple-- especially for a crowd-- to pick up prepared dough from the pizza parlor, and it costs almost nothing. So there's never been much need to make the dough from scratch, and thus I'd never done it. Now I have. The earth still turns on its axis.

For unlike the fussiness of oven-baked pizza, with its algorithms and alembics, grilled pizzas derive their appeal from the intense heat of the grill. They cook quickly and effectively, with wonderful crispness and irregularity. They have, I am sure, a strong following, in spite of remaining one of those cookbook secrets tucked away somewhere in the back pages near the beans, or the desserts and novelty cocktails. But they're a summer marvel; David Rosengarten raves about them in the Dean & Deluca. Ditto Steven Raichlen in his Barbecue Bible. And rightly so: there's no home pizza, in my mind, that comes even close to the texture and flavor of the crispy little pizzas you can make on the grill.

Here's how it works: you heat half the grill to high and half to low. On the hot part you lay out a thin square or a triangle of dough and let it bake for 30-45 seconds, until the dough starts to bubble and firm up. Then flip the dough, and cook the top side for about a minute. Flip again, and move the pizza crust to the cooler side. Then add the toppings; the residual heat from the grill will warm them. We don't use a lot of cheese, so melting things isn't our priority. But it does work; you just can't load the thing up like some Pizza Hut leviathan. This is, shall we say, more subtle fare.

With our vegetable bounty we made four small pizzas. Beforehand I cooked some Italian sausages and roasted a few cherry tomatoes in the oven. I also sautéed up some garlic scapes with the beet greens, adding a little chicken stock and cooking until the greens softened. I did the same thing with the kale and broccoli. These became the toppings; later in the summer, when tomatoes are in season, we'll trot out the more traditional favorites.

Our menu tonight consisted of the following:

Pizza #1: sausage, beet greens, tomatoes, olive oil
Pizza#2: kale/broccoli, tomatoes, Parmesan, olive oil
Pizza #3: sausage, kale/broccoli, tomatoes, olive oil
Pizza #4: Parmesan, olive oil, black pepper.

Duds Day

No, this is not a knock on Father's Day. We had, in fact, a spectacular day on Sunday; it started with a characteristically excellent brunch at the Elk Creek Café in Millheim. I ordered chicken liver toasts to start, which were rich and delicious, and, fortunately, delicately portioned. (This was no Barnie Greengrass-sized ice-cream scoop of chicken liver). Thus I still had plenty of room for a plate of local sausage and eggs. If you haven't tried 'em, you must: the locally-made sausage patties are perfectly-spiced and grilled; the eggs, produced by free-range hens that live down the road, have the darkest yolks we've ever seen.

Then we spent part of the afternoon at a lake, before stopping on the way back for soft-serve ice cream. A fine, fine day.

So I'm not knocking Father's day. What I am knocking are my two worst meals: two solid, hollow thuds that remain, however far away in calendar time, disturbingly present in the kitchen. SW's lament about a bad run-in with the skillet in response to the last post led me to reflect on these bad memories. It doesn't take much to remind me, mind you: the meals were that bad.

What went wrong? Like most disasters, it's rarely one mishap that lies at the source but many: disaster is the effect of overdetermination. I think of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, wherein the murder victim has been stabbed by everyone on the train, and thus by no single agent alone. Bad days in the kitchen are, I think, much like that.

For anyone can, based on a sudden mental lapse, dump a whole soup down the drain by forgetting to place the sieve over a bowl or pot; you end up saving only the useless bones and such. A split second mistake with major results. But the result is simply: no soup. By contrast, it takes a whole symphony of errors to achieve a truly gruesome meal.

I have two that come especially to mind:

The first is something I now refer to as "Pasta Dufresne":

The dish, named in hindsight after the escape scene from The Shawshank Redemption, might look innocuous enough on paper. But in person it was an utter shipwreck. The ingredient list was fairly modest, combining black olives, garlic, and, I think, asparagus in the sauce. And shrimp. Now, some of these ingredients might conceivably belong together. And who knows: with enough white wine and lemon, and no black olives, it might have worked.

But I simply cannot fully describe how utterly inedible this was. The strange thing-- I recall SW's own surprise here-- is that I improvise pasta throw-togethers all the time. At their best, the "throwing together" produces perfectly adequate results. Sometimes even elegant. (In such cases, I prefer to call the dish an insieme. It sounds better).

But this was an instant throw-away: a cestinare.

As I was writing this I asked H. if she could remember what was in it, just to make sure I had the details straight. She rehearsed the shameful litany as if it had just befouled our lips last night.

It had been at least a couple years-- and yet the trauma remains. Disappointments come and go; talent waxes and wanes. But hell, a real disaster. Now that's something.

Part 2: X-Mas Pudding
(to be continued. . . )

Slim Pickings

I returned home yesterday to find our second weekly farm share box. As before, the box was suspiciously light. I instantly grew concerned: was the box going to be half full, as it were, or half empty?

Much as before, the contents of the box were indeed slight:

two heads of lettuce
three bulbous green onions
a small bouquet of kale (a nosegay of kale?)
a pint of strawberries

The strawberries were delicious, and the green vegetables look pristine and delicate. We should have consumed them on the spot, but they stayed in the fridge overnight. But they will soon become a salad that we'll bring to a summer social gathering later this afternoon.

But it's not really that much food . . .

I want to support the local farmer and all that. And I know it was a slow spring. But... but...
would it kill them to put in just a little bit more kale?

Next week we'll be donating the box to our neighbors, so we'll have to get a distant field report about its scope and contents. The following week I will be expecting at least a meal's worth of produce: arugula, spinach. . .

Otherwise I'm going to turn into something of a pessimist: the box will have to be overflowing in order to convince me that it not be mostly empty.


HOWEVER:
(added, 7:40 pm)

We're back to half full.

The limited palette has proven a spur to creative thinking, of a sort. With-- literally-- six leaves of kale to deal with, the usual boil-n-tumble versions of greens cooking would prove bootless. And so I resorted to scouring the fridge for bits and pieces.

There was a butt of salami in the cheese drawer, not enough to serve to guests, but enough to dice up as a flavoring agent. So this went in the skillet, and then the chopped kale. I then braised the kale with some chopped garlic, salt, and pepper. After about 10-12 minutes, I added the three cold potatoes (which weren't dried out, since I'd made them to be served cold in salad: bring to a boil in salted water, cover, and turn off the heat. The potatoes absorb the brine and cook slowly as they cool. The result is moist cold potatoes that don't have that funky used-potato flavor).

I also tossed in a rinsed can of cannelini beans, and some sage from the garden. Drizzled it with olive oil, and voilà: a tapas-like warm salad, the equivalent of sausage and kale soup. But without the soup.

So the kale was enough for a meal, after all. And the sun is shining.

Paradise? Paradise.

Sunday was one of those edge-of-the-volcano days wherein you simply cannot believe that nature is capable of survival under such conditions. Had we stayed in the house, our fate would have been sealed: steam, sulfur, doldrums.

So we went to the beach. Central Pennsylvania lies entirely upon carved-out limestone, so the region is rife with swimming-holes, lakes, and springs. With some dear friends we drove to Black Moshannon, a park up in them thar hills with tea-dark water and a cool breeze. We passed a fine morning there, with the kids splashing in the water and the grown-ups standing, as grown-ups do, knee-deep in the lake, like watchful herons.

And then we started planning dinner.

"Let's make lobster rolls," I offered.

"No," X. replied. "Let's make them au naturel. Why make lobster salad when you can have lobster."

"Tell you what," I said, to complete the syllogism. "Let's cook the lobsters on the grill."

And this is what we did. And-- in the words of Hemingway-- it was good.

But first, there was grilled squid. The tentacles were better than the heads, but it was mostly heads: seared simply, with a little splash of olive oil before and after, a squeeze of lemon juice, and a healthy salting.

Then, later, with the kids bathed and put to bed after another round of splashing and frolicking in the yard, the next act. X. grilled some marinated shrimp, which he let cool and then added to a salad prepared by Y. The salad-- overwhelmingly avocado-based-- was a marvelous emulsion of garden lettuce, lime-juice dressing, and shrimp.

We served it with the lobsters, which had been split down the middle and seared, cut side down, for 6 minutes, and then turned over for another 6 minutes. I seasoned each lobster half with some butter, lemon juice, salt, and pepper as they cooked.

Without a doubt this is how we prefer to eat lobsters, since the quick-kill slicing method effectively doubles the experience-- if not the amount-- of lobster meat consumed. You feel as though you've eaten two lobsters: magic? or miracle? Plus the meat has a smokiness unavailable through steaming-- and thus a more pronounced lobstery flavor as well. The only down side is that you pretty much lose the roe, and the other innards-- the tomally. It's worth it, though, I'd say. Although I'd never turn down a steamed lobster, or, for that matter, any occasion for a clambake.

And then H. made her delightful berry fool for dessert. It's adapted from Bittman: blend a cup of frozen berries-- blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, currants, or a mixture-- with a 1/4 of superfine sugar, and pass the mixture through a sieve to remove the seeds. Meanwhile, toss another 2 cups of the berries with another 1/4 cup of superfine sugar. In a mixer, whip a pint of heavy cream with a pinch of the superfine sugar. Add the purée to the mixer and blend for a pulse or two, and fold in the remaining berries. Garnish with fresh blackberries and sprigs of mint. This makes four servings, which is hardly enough, so if you really crave satisfaction, double the recipe.

And then go to sleep in an air-conditioned room. Feel just a little guilty. But sleep well.

A Pound of (Crab) Flesh

Ahoy, Portia!

The weather here has been so hot and-- if you'll excuse my metaphorical Bouillabaisse-- so clammy that we've resorted to un-cooking.

What is un-cooking? A case in point: when we had some friends over for dinner the other night, the dinner consisted of a salade composée and a crab gazpacho. The crab had been cooked, but not by us. Hence, we un-cooked it. Everything in the dinner was served cool.

The weather remains stiflyingly humid; we feel more lugubrious and heavy each day. Yet the chilled gazpacho lingers fondly in the memory because in addition to its coolness, it offered just enough spice to invigorate our weary, burdened flesh.

Here's how to make the gazpacho; the recipe is adapted from the Silver Palate (based on the, er, "research" for my post the other day):

In a food processor, grind up 2 cups fresh bread crumbs (or grind up some slate baguette to make bread crumbs) along with 3 cloves minced garlic. Place this in a serving bowl.

Then, in the processor, add 1 cucumber, peeled, seeded, and roughly chopped; 2 red peppers, seeded and chopped (or green peppers); 3 jalapeno peppers, seeded and chopped; 1 medium red onion, chopped; and some ripe tomatoes, seeded and chopped. Or not seeded, if you're me.

Pulse this several times, until it's evenly chopped but still slightly chunky. Pour roughly half the mixture into the bowl and stir to combine with the breadcrumbs.

To the remaining mixture, add 5 cups tomato juice and the juice of 4 limes, and blend till smooth. Pour this mixture into the bowl and combine; then add 1/2 cup olive oil, or less. Stir, and season with cumin and salt. Chill

Before serving, add 1 pound lump crabmeat and 1 diced avocado; we served the avocado in the individual bowls, and then passed around a bowl of crabmeat for our guests to serve themselves.

The next day, we had some leftover crab, and made wonderful crab salad sandwiches: sliced heirloom tomatoes, avocado, and old bay-seasoned crabmeat in toasted baguettes.

The heat's worth the pound of crab, I think.

First Box of Summer

Today I received the first delivery from my CSA farm subscription; the woman who delivered the box was a shade apologetic, since it has, as she explained, been a cold spring so far.

The box consisted of the following:

two heads of lettuce (which we will consume this evening)
five radishes (delicious: I even followed Fergus Henderson in making a salad from the fresh radish greens)
four small bulb onions (or fat green onions)
a small bouquet of Kale (for tomorrow, when we make smoked pork chops with onions and apples)

Not much-- and hardly the 25 pounds of Kale I expected when I signed up-- but it all looks perfect, and it's all been cleaned and presented beautifully. I am sure that in two months the 1/2 peck box will be brimming with all kinds of summer squash (there's much humor in the area about "drive-by zucchini hits": leave your car parked anywhere rural, or hell, just drive slowly enough, and you'll find zucchini in the back seat). For now, the yield is about a meal and a half.

Indeed, a slow start, but I have high hopes for the weeks to come. It has been a cold spring, after all. And we did only buy a half share.