Harvest Season

frozen peaches

This time last year was a flurry of activity in preparation for the winter C.S.A. We'd been working hard since March, but the first touch of cold kicked us in the pants and made us very aware that we had limited time to prepare and store food for all our member families. This winter, the C.S.A. won't be operating, but all that means is that people who've had a taste of what it's like to eat local food through the winter need to take a few steps to make that happen. Saving food for a bunch of families is a challenge, but it's really not that hard to do it for just one.

I recently led a fermentation workshop with the Putnam County Holistic Moms, which was great fun, and we also had a discussion about easy things to do to extend the harvest. Cold mornings may make you think the growing season's all over, aside from a winter squash or two, but that's far from the truth. Here are some quick (and incomplete) lists I shared with the mothers:

Top 10 Tips to eat local year-round

1. Befriend your freezer.
2. Rig up your own root cellar.
3. Cover your crops.
4. Dehydrate.
5. Learn about wild food.
6. Plant edible perennials.
7. Ferment.
8. Can like granny.
9. Sprout.
10. Plant in sunny windows.

There's nothing complicated in that list, and detailed information online about all of it. Type "solar dehydrate onions" (for example) into search and you've got everything you need.

If you're thinking you're done in the garden and that its time to sit by the fire with soup, you're wrong! (Save that for January.) For now, there's work to be done.

September has passed, but I'm including some Sept. chores because there are some that still apply:

September

• Freeze & can peaches
• Freeze raspberries
• Freeze red peppers
• Freeze zucchini
• Freeze greens
• Dehydrate tomatoes
• Dehydrate beans
• Make hot pepper sauce (I'm doing this today!)
• Ferment everything

October

• Can pears and apples
• Freeze cooked squash & pumpkin
• Dehydrate herbs
• Freeze pesto
• Freeze greens
• Peel & dry black walnuts
• Eat pawpaws & kiwis (they'll make you feel like you're in the tropics)
• Pickle wild grape leaves
• Ferment everything

November

• Cover garden
• Make sauerkraut
• Root cellar apples
• Root cellar potatoes
• Freeze greens
• Root cellar turnips, radishes, etc.
• Move mushroom logs to basement
• Ferment everything

December

• Root cellar carrots
• Eat last covered garden vegetables
• Prune perennials
• Can fancy, time-consuming recipes with frozen produce
• Visit winter farm markets
• Ferment everything

If, like me, you find yourself with a gazillion berries or apples or tomatoes all at one time, preserving makes great sense. Nothing goes to waste, and with a little effort now, winter is far, far tastier.

Purslane

Some weeds are tastier than others, and the lemon crunch of purslane makes it really desirable to eat. Yeah, yeah, it's great for you and all that (more Omega 3s than any other land plant), and free and growing in the cracks of your sidewalk, but its flavor makes it one of those plants that makes you wonder why you haven't always been eating it.

Purslane is a succulent, like a jade plant or aloe or cactus. It's the kind of plant they tell Southern Californians to plant close to their house to help save it from wildfires. Succulents store a large amount of liquid in their leaves, or their stems or roots. The liquid in purslane can be used as a thickener in soups, similar to okra.

But the tastiest use of purslane by far is raw, in salads, or added after cooking, and the leaves, flowers, and stems can all be eaten. Greeks and North Africans have made use of purslane the longest, so its no wonder that the majority of purslane recipes combine it with cucumbers, mint, parsley, or yogurt. Mexico uses this plant as their parsley (called verdolagas), adding it raw to cooked foods for crunch, color, and tang.

Here are two recipes that make good use of mid-summer produce:

Grilled Zucchini Salad with Purslane and Tomato
Gourmet | August 2002

ingredients

• 1 t finely grated fresh lemon zest
  
• 3 T fresh lemon juice
  
• 1 T finely chopped shallot
  
• 1/4 t Dijon mustard
  
• 1/2 t salt
  
• 1/3 c extra-virgin olive oil plus additional for brushing zucchini
  
• 1/4 t black pepper
  
• 3 T chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
  
• 4 zucchini (1 3/4 to 2 lb total), halved lengthwise
  
• 12 oz purslane, thick stems removed (4 c)
  
• 10 oz pear or cherry tomatoes, halved lengthwise

Prep Prepare grill for cooking. If using a charcoal grill, open vents on bottom of grill. Make dressing: Whisk together zest, lemon juice, shallot, mustard, and salt in a small bowl. Add oil in a slow stream, whisking until dressing is emulsified. Whisk in pepper and parsley. Grill zucchini: Lightly brush zucchini all over with oil. When fire is hot (you can hold your hand 5 inches above rack for 1 to 2 seconds), grill zucchini, cut sides down first, on lightly oiled grill rack, uncovered, turning once, until zucchini are just tender, 8 to 12 minutes total. Transfer to a cutting board and cool slightly, then cut diagonally into 1/2-inch-thick slices. Toss zucchini with purslane, tomatoes, and dressing in a large bowl. Serve immediately.

Chopped Arabic Salad
Gourmet | May 2004

ingredients

• 1 lemon
  
• 3/4 t sea salt
  
• 1/4 t freshly ground black pepper
  
• 3 T olive oil
  
• 2 (1/2-lb) cucumbers, peeled, halved lengthwise, seeded, and cut into 1/4-inch dice (2 1/3 c)
  
• 1 lb tomatoes (3 medium), cut into 1/3-inch dice (2 1/2 cups)
  
• 1 c finely chopped red onion (1 small) or 1 cup chopped scallions (about 5)
  
• 1 c purslane leaves and flowers (break off with your hands rather than chopping to keep the visual appeal of the plant)
  
• 1 c finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley (from 1 large bunch)
  
• 1/2 cup finely chopped fresh mint

prep Cut peel, including all white pith, from lemon with a sharp paring knife. Working over a bowl, cut segments from half of lemon free from membranes and transfer segments to a cutting board, then squeeze juice from membranes and remaining 1/2 lemon into bowl. Transfer 2 tablespoons juice to a large bowl, then finely chop segments and add to measured juice. Add salt, pepper, and oil, whisking to combine, then stir in remaining ingredients.

Berries Begin

The heat is making a lot of berries ripen very quickly. If you belong to a C.S.A., you might be getting urgent calls to come pick strawberries. Today, we answered that call, and picked as many no-spray strawberries as we could stuff into our mouths, plus some to take home for later. We paused on Main St. in New Paltz to eat some already ripe mulberries, too, off the tree squeezed between the falafel place and the tie-dye incense place.
The mulberries by my house are on the verge of ripening, too: the birds, the squirrels, and I are all waiting eagerly.

If you don't have mulberries in your yard, some good, public picking trees are these: Beekman St. (on the way to the train station) over parking spots #565 and #556. These two trees have branches that hang low over the road, so it's easy to reach the fruit. If you're by the sloop club, check to see if the two June berry trees by the walkway have ripe berries yet, or harvest from the mulberry tree by the tracks, about 10 parking spaces to the left of the entrance to the tracks.

If you're up for a walk, some trees on the way to the old brick factory on Dennings Points have the biggest mulberries I've ever seen.

Happy foraging, and happy eating. Here's hoping you don't get berry juice on your clothes, like me.

Wild Food & Wild People in San Fran

My little heart is warmed by the great outpouring of people working on the Vegan Bake Sale for Haiti. And still, just for a moment, I'm wishing I were in San Francisco.

That's because of the San Francisco Underground Farmer's Market, where food gatherers and producers who aren't certified and who don't work in commercial kitchens can offer their wares for a suggested donation. I'd love to cut out all the extra costs and let people pay what they think an item is worth!

The underground market was brainchild of Iso Rabins, a wild forager, and the founder of ForageSF, who run a "CSF" or Community Supported Foraging. Wouldn't you love to get a wild distribution as beautiful as the box pictured?

Taste of Home

I've been trying to set up this book recommendation thingie, which isn't working because I'm having trouble with the blog settings tool. I tell you this because I keep thinking of interesting books to include. Today it's Foods of the Americas. Like many books I recommend, it's not vegan or vegetarian, but acts as a starting point, ideas for flavor combinations, and different uses for foods you thought you knew how to use. Most cookbooks I'm interested in have something besides recipes to offer, and that is the case here.

I was happy to look through this book which I hadn't cracked in the past year, to think about ways to use ingredients like espazote and masa and annato and hominy that taste like home to me, and new ones, like cattail flour. Because this book is about native recipes, and native people, I'm forced to think about MY HOME, Arizona, not really being mine, and that thinking is interesting combined with very familiar smelling and tasting food. Yes, I can smell and taste just by reading. So there. There is overlap, and influence both ways. Some reviewers of this book have complained that the recipes have been altered to be "too white," which I think in this case meant able to be understood and used by the average non-native reader. Indeed, the Smithsonian was involved in the project . . . it's bound to be a little more sociological and a little less "authentic." And the Americas are kind of large get a taste of. What makes Vegan with a Vengeance, for example, such a great cookbook is not the recipes, but the context, and that is true here, though here it's many contexts. (I know, I used a wildly different book as an example, but you can think of Isa's cat Fizzle giving you Brooklyn junk store tool tips, and understand what I mean. It gives you something to think about, and play with.)

I used to go tamale hunting around Christmas in front of Safeway stores. Women would make huge batches and sell them out of shopping carts in grocery parking lots before the holiday. The trick for me was chatting up enough ladies to find one who was traditional enough to be making shopping carts full of tamales at Christmas, but nouveau enough to do it without lard, or manteca.
This year, I didn't need to hang out in parking lots, because Tucson Tamale has opened, uses only vegetable oil, and were selling tamales (and very good salsa) at the farmer's market. It's like living in a gentrified neighborhood: you're glad for easy access to good coffee, but you worry after all the old neighborhood characters who begin to disappear. Where will everybody go? Tucson Tamale took me one step further away from a familiar culture. Foods of the Americas takes me the other way, one step closer.

It's frightening to think that the shopping cart tamale women might only ever appear on book pages from now on.

While we're on the topic of "this land is not my land," see two interesting tidbits:
1) The work of No More Deaths, activists who leave water out in the desert for border crossers who find themselves in dangerous situations. It was heartening to find signs supporting them in front of many houses and businesses in Tucson this winter.
2) The closing of Arizona's state parks.

*Lostmissing, in picture two, is a project of my dear friend, mattilda, for all the things and animals and people who go missing.

Homeward Bound

One week from today I'll be sniffing desert air. Yep, I'm going to be a tourist in my own hometown, because I've been away too long. I'll be checking out the sites (bat caves!), eating Mexican food that tastes like Mexican food, taking long walks in the desert (secretly looking for jackrabbits and javelinas), and seeking out all of Tucson's local food. I've been reading Tucson bloggers and bloggers headed for Tucson in preparation. Tucson farmer's markets, here I come!

What's in season foodwise in the Sonoran Desert right now? Olives. Citrus. (Oranges and grapefruits and lemons and tangelos and kumquats, oh my!) Pecan, oh, pecans.

I've missed some things, too, like chiles, nopales, prickly pear tuna, and pomegranates, but maybe just maybe I'll find preserves. I've also missed the season of organized mesquite millings, but know I can still get my hands on some mesquite flour to give it a try. It's a little silly to think I have to taste my way through my visit, but fresh orange juice and green chile tamales won't make terrible guides.

Last time in Tucson I attended an animal rights demo, and ended up at Earth First! HQ having dinner and stuffing envelopes with my eighties activist hero, Rod Coronado. Who knows what this visit will hold? Except, of course, plenty of gorgeous food, gorgeous scenery, and gorgeous weather. And that smell...

Deep Brown

I'm still working on black walnuts. With each windstorm, more fall from the trees, and after each storm ends, I go collecting. I always manage to stain my hands, because either I've forgotten my gloves, or they rip, or I can't be bothered to wear them. (It's a scandalous idea to think I can let my hands get farmer dirty, since I make my living by working in an office filled with people with very clean, very manicured hands. I've been hiding my hands the same way I did when I had inky hands in college: I was a printmaker by day, and a waitress by night.)Collecting walnuts in Beacon has turned into performance art, since people are so unused to seeing food harvested in an urban setting. While I was collecting nuts under a primo tree on Fishkill Ave. (and staining my hands), multiple cars pulled over to ask me what I was doing. I felt I should have a big sign explaining. "Walnut harvest in progress." Maybe I'll hang some "Pick Your Own Nuts (FREE)" signs on trees around town.

While collecting and peeling nuts, I've had plenty of time to meditate on all the potential uses for the husks: fountain pen ink, wood stain, fabric dye, temporary tattoo ink, goth lip gloss. Apparently, black walnut husk is a standard coloring agent in both hair dye and wood stain.With all this in mind, I'm going to focus on the nuts for now.

Nuts, It's Fall

Black walnut trees are one of the first to lose their leaves. I can attest to this because it's only September, and my porch needs serious sweeping. But you really know it's fall when, with regularity, you hear the thud of walnuts falling off the trees.

Few humans seem to be using these flavorful nuts, but it's still a race to collect them, since squirrels know their value: there are already nuts "hidden" in every flower pot and nook.

It's dangerous to collect black walnuts. When they're plentiful on the ground, they're also still falling. These babies dent cars, and don't feel great when they bonk you on the head.

The truly fun part is still to come, when hands and clothes are forever stained black while peeling the fruit away from the nuts so they can dry.

Once dry, the nuts store well in their shell. And then you try to crack them. Put away your nutcracker shaped like a squirrel! You need a vice grip or a specially designed nutcracker to get into these super hard kernels.

A lot of work, to be sure. The exquisite black walnut flavor promises to be worth every minute!

Choices

Exercise your right to choose: Don't rely on Key Food for your health and happiness this winter!

Wild Blue Vacation

Thank you for the warm welcome home after vacation! A confession must be made: we spent our time away on an island covered in wild blueberries. Perhaps we should have been picking those tiny blueberries to put up for you for winter, but we were on vacation, after all, so ate to our hearts content, saved none, and left plenty for the many skunks who live there. We hope you understand!

(Our well rested heads are now working hard on making pesto from all the glorious fresh basil, and testing to see if sun dried tomatoes can happen without sun.)

Juneberry!

Today a mystery was solved.

I've lived in this house for six years, and for six years have wondered what a berry tree in the yard was. The combination of not knowing, and the fact of it being a tall tree located on a steep slope, have made it so I've never eaten the berries.

It's driven me a little crazy, though. How can you have berries in your yard and not eat them? Okay, maybe they'd be poisonous, but maybe not! I've always wanted to invite over someone who's a tree identification expert, and happen to bring up this particular tree in discussion.

When the Beacon train station was renovated, some of these same trees showed up in the parking lot there. The other day I threw caution to the wind and tasted the berries. Absolutely delicious.

And today, while visiting friends at the Beacon Farmer's Market, I noticed someone else picking the berries. I immediately ran over to talk with him. He thought I was coming over to tell him not to pick the berries, which is hilarious, because I always think people are going to challenge me, too, when I'm harvesting unused fruits and veggies. But I chatted with him, and he told me all about Juneberries. I ran home and verified everything he said online.

Not only is the mystery solved, but I get to enjoy a whole new fruit!!

Berry Season Begins

Mulberries are ripening, mulberries are ripening!

Most berries come later in the season. Strawberries came before mulberries, I concede, but mulberries are the first berries to show up without any effort at all. And there are gobs of them.

Cookbook queen Isa Chandra Moskowitz has a fab recipe in Vegan With a Vengeance for Sunny Blueberry-Corn Muffins

• 1 c all purpose flour
  
• 1 c cornmeal
  
• 1Tbsp baking powder
  
• 1/2 tsp salt
  
• 1/2 c sugar
  
• 1/2 c corn or vegetable oil
  
• 3/4 c soy milk
  
• 2 Tbsp soy yogurt
  
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
  
• finely grated zest of one lemon
  
• 1 1/4 cups blueberries

Preheat oven to 400. Lightly grease muffin tin. In a large bowl, sift together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt, and sugar. In a separate bowl, whisk together the oil, soy milk, soy yogurt, vanilla, and lemon zest. With a wooden spoon, fold the wet ingredients into the dry. Fold in the blueberries, being careful not to overmix. Fill each muffin tin 3/4 full. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until a toothpick or knife inserted in the center of one comes out clean. Serve warm.Why do I tell you this in the middle of a love song to mulberries? Because, I've improved on Queen Isa's recipe. My zester doesn't work so well, so I replace the zest with a healthy tablespoon plus an extra sprinkle of candied lemon peel, and replace the blueberries with mulberries. You follow? I call these lovelies Wild Sunny Muffins.

Mulberries right now are perfect for picking to freeze, so that you can enjoy awesome muffins in the dead of winter. Pick now to freeze, wait a week or two for those berries you're going to put directly in your mouth. When freezing, spread the berries out on a cookie sheet and freeze first, then put into containers or baggies. That way they aren't all frozen in a lump. When picking, be prepared to get purple palms, foot bottoms, and mouth. Yum, BERRIES!

Take a Few, Leave the Rest

There's an interesting article in the Globe and Mail about fiddlehead ferns and wild ramps. The article says that increased interest in these wild foods is endangering them. For example, eating a mature ramp bulb is eating 18 to 20 years of growth. If too many people eat too many of them, there won't be any more. Likewise, so many people are eating so many fiddleheads from ferns, they are damaging the plants.

In my opinion, this isn't because of a growing interest in wild food, but because of greed. (Like the changing meaning of organic and local, as it becomes corporate lingo.)

As with everything else, in wild food we need to take a little and leave a lot to enjoy later.

Wild Food

People are confused about and intimidated by wild food. We've been an agricultural society for a long time, and that makes it difficult to comprehend great food growing without attention, even though all food was once wild. There are a few exceptions, such as truffle mushrooms, which people know are rare and valued.

Trusted sources for food varies for different people: for some it is a supermarket they are familiar with, for some, health food stores, and for a growing number of people, local farms and home gardens.

When I told my family I had gone out harvesting rhubarb from along the railroad tracks, each had their own reaction.

To my mother, who hails from an agricultural community in North Dakota, it sounded uncontrolled. She wondered (reasonably) if chemicals were sprayed there. Would this rhubarb be safe? DANGEROUS.

My father was a skilled gardener and forager as a child in West Virginia. To him, this rhubarb was appealing as free, fresh food. He wistfully reported that he would no longer recognize the wild plants that used to make up many of his meals. FREE.

My sister in California considers herself a foodie. If "foodie" means "eats anything," then she truly is. She likes the sound of wild rhubarb, too, assuming that it will have stronger flavor than its cultivated cousins. She doesn't remember particularly loving rhubarb's tartness, but she likes the word "wildfood," much like she likes "biodynamic" and "probiotic." FANCY.Two out of three people in my family (test group!) thought my newly harvested rhubarb sounded like good food. Why, then, has no-one in Beacon harvested this huge amount of rhubarb?

I grew up eating out of grocery stores. When I first saw a carrot growing, I pulled it up to confirm that it was, indeed, a carrot, then stuck it back in the hole thinking it could continue on. I've only learned about various wild foods in recent years, and only because of a shift in my own focus. I moved into a house that is host to black walnuts, mulberries, and blackberries. I joined a C.S.A., and my eating became much more locally focused. I've never been a fantastic gardener, and so what comes easily, naturally, makes me all the more grateful.

I think that nobody is harvesting that rhubarb because most people aren't even seeing it.

Now that I'm concerning myself with local food, and the local lack of food (hunger), wild food is that much more important. If you're at all open to it, I suggest taking a look around. (A little guide doesn't hurt, either!)

Thanks to Pickle Girl for the rhubarb picture.

Rhubarb Snack

Time for pie and wine!

I've had terrible luck growing rhubarb, with my plants staying scrawny. Perhaps I've fussed over it to much, since it flourishes with huge leaves along the railroad tracks and at the base of telephone poles. Rather than worry over what I'm doing wrong, I'm just harvesting along roadsides. I even enjoy rhubarb the old-style way: a nice tender stalk raw and dipped in sugar.

Eat Your Weeds

The whole world, including the internet, seems to be covered in garlic mustard right now. While most hardy perennials are just starting to peep out, huge mounds of garlic mustard appear overnight. There are plenty of warnings and alarms about how evil this plant is, how invasive, how it could potentially ruin forests. I tend to get kind of excited about having wild ginger, as it's also called, growing outside my door.

Garlic mustard is edible, and that's why it was introduced here in the first place. I like the approach of keeping these weeds in control by eating them. It's spicy, like horseradish root.The roots are long, but thin, and can be prepared just like horseradish. A lot of people seem to make pesto out of the leaves and roots. And I'm finding the huge roots useful for adding flavor (and good bacteria) to my nuka pickling bed.

Garlic mustard is plentiful during these spring rains, so weed and enjoy.

Planting Trees

Planting trees as a community is an idea that is taking off around the world. From the work of Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai and her Green Belt Movement in Kenya, to American Forests, to much smaller projects, like Trees for Tribs in the Hudson Valley.
These projects focus on trees for shade, for fuel, for beautification, and for creating oxygen and preventing soil erosion. There are also a lot of groups focused on trees that provide food to communities. In many places, fruit from trees is not used, while members of that same community go hungry. Groups like Fallen Fruit and Iskash*taa work to bring people's attention to the food readily available where they live, and access to it. Mulberries and black walnuts are two commonly occurring local trees producing wonderful free food which is rarely harvested.
I'd add "food" to this list!

There are many fruit and nut trees that grow well in the Beacon area: plums, apples, pears, cherries, mulberries, black walnuts, and more. wintergreens hopes to partner with the City of Beacon to plant some food-producing trees on public land. Maybe delicious pawpaws!

Spring Onions

Yum! It's time for tender spring onions! Spring onions are just tender baby onions (or scallions) used before the bulb has time to grow. In the Hudson Vally, these spring up all over the place, wild, before other plants, then often don't mature, squeezed out when other plants flourish. They look like unruly spurts of grass.
They are everywhere I look. In grassy areas, wooded areas, my garden plot. Look, literally everywhere.
So the good news. These tasty little guys can be used any way onions can. In the past couple days I've had them in salad; in tofu scramble; on a flatbread/pizza with olive oil, salt, tarragon, and sundried tomatoes, and I found this recipe for potato and spring onion bhaji, or aalay pyaz aaloo.

Free fresh food. Delightful. Hopefully you have some dried mint to help with the resulting onion breath.

Maple Syrup & Ramps

Sugar maples are everywhere in the Hudson Valley, literally an "untapped" source of nourishment. It's the season right now. The taps flow best when nights are freezing and days warm up above freezing, getting the sap flowing up to a gallon a day. The pure sap boils down to about 1/40th that amount in maple syrup.
Ramps come in April, also in the forest, and are the first wild green food of the season. They are a wild onion (or wild leek), identifiable by their smell and by their broad lily-of-the-valley like leaves.

Get in touch with your surroundings, eat wild!