Dilly Susan K.

My friend Susan died this week after a six year struggle with cancer. Being who I am (and not knowing yet what other memorial will take place), I made her dilly beans. Or rather, made them in her honor.

Beans are high on the best anti-cancer foods lists because they act as protease inhibitors. All dark red and purple foods appear on that list, too, because of their flavenoids. Susan was a photographer and had an eye for beautiful things, so purple beans seem right.


Note that the purple color will disappear into the hot vinegar, turning the vinegar dark, but leaving the beans green.

Too Sweet

Starting with a mention in E Magazine, I've gone down the trail of learning how agave nectar is bad for your health. I like agave as a sweetner. I like how similar it is to honey, how the agave plants are slow growing and without pesticides, harvested without fancy farming machinery, and I like how it ties me to home, to a plant that always grew in my yard.

But apparently it is just as bad for me as all other sugar. It's a bummer, I'd even pushed the idea of it and its low glycemic index on my pre-diabetic mom.
It shouldn't surprise me. Things (like fructose) that don't hurt you in their natural form (fruit) aren't so great once isolated, concentrated, and processed. But I want to believe. That's the trick—the stuff is so addictive that we all want to find the magic healthy sugar that will make our sweets obsession okay.

I'm trying to adjust my thinking. Can I get one bottle of the best agave nectar I can find and treat it the same way I do tequila? Buy the best I can afford and take a year or two to consume it, in tiny portions?

I don't know if I can shake this addiction just yet. Later this month I'm headed for Brazil, where I'll surely buy beautiful rapadura bricks wrapped in banana leaves, drink pure sugarcane juice fresh squeezed at the market, and visit our cousins and drink the cachaça they make. The cachaça is, of course, also made from sugarcane.

I'll consider this whole sugar-is-bad-for-you-in-all-forms thing. In the meantime, shoot me up.

Witches Brew

So, my trick is working—you guys are eating and drinking delicious fermented food and getting interested in the health benefits, and how to make your own. Heh heh heh. Follow me, my pretties.

But then: I don't actually know anything special about fermentation.

What I DO know is this: it's really easy, and really flexible, and if you want to, you can ferment food, too.

Fermentation is a big part of why wintergreens began. I took a little how-to workshop and made my first jar of fermented mixed veggies less than two years ago. I immediately read Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation, and became a little bit obsessed. This was the perfect "recipe" book for me. Regular cookbooks seem like they're telling me what to do, which is a sure way to get no good end result. The bible of fermentation instead tells stories of queers in the U.S. South, of fighting corporate culture, of gourmet food, of living with HIV, of diy ethic, and slips in encouragement and ideas about various fermentation experiments. Perfect for the stubborn. It lets you know you can relax, you're not going to cause anything bad to happen, only good: no poisonings, no illness, just food suited to your personal taste.

People at the market this weekend were asking me the hows and whys of kombucha's health benefits. Again: I don't know. I never took chemistry (preferring physics), and don't entirely understand what's at work in probiotic foods. I figure that there are other people to take care of this part, to test and prove and explain. To me it's a magic little witches brew. My role is making great tasting ferments available in Beacon, and convincing you to try making them yourself.

Without any knowledge of chemistry, I know this food and this drink settle my stomach. They stimulate the sour and tart parts of my palate. They give me a little power zing, like a big dose of vitamin C or a shot of wheat grass. They put me in touch with foods my ancestors ate, and what people in other parts of the world eat. I always have a jar of something unusual to offer when I go to get-togethers. The colors please me, and make my meals more varied and nicer to look at. And I'm able to keep food from the summer crunchy and tasty and fresh for winter, when cold and dark threaten to make me lay down on the floor.

I crunched my way through some fermented okra this morning hours before the sun was up, and even though it was nine degrees or some ridiculous number, I relived summer just a little bit. I was thinking this and smiling: okra flowers are so delicate and pretty, and the pods themselves so phallic and silly, like an over-excited dog. I pictured where I was when I picked that okra, the big leaves of the plant, and remembered how the sun felt on my shoulders.

If you like other people preparing your food, that's cool. But if you like to experiment yourself (or are trying to get yourself off the floor), let's get started! Begin with sauerkraut or mixed veggies, or something that excites you, like good kimchi. Chop up your produce, salt it, squeeze it with your hands to get its juices flowing, and put something heavy on top of it so that it doesn't float. Check back in a day to be sure the brine (salty liquid), is covering all of the food. If not, add some salt water (1 to 5 ratio) until covered. Let this sit.* Taste it often, so you know exactly what's going on. Depending on how warm your kitchen is, you'll be tasting ripe delicious flavors in a matter of days.

Once you have your preferred fermentation times figured out, you can leave the food alone for longer periods, and the "bloom" that floats on the top of the brine becomes easier to remove, since it's one solid sheet. When your taste tests please you, refrigerate the food, or put it somewhere cool to slow things down, like a root cellar.

You are the master of your own fermentations.

Wild Fermentation is still far and away my favorite book (that's at all relevant to wintergreens), but people have been asking for other book recommendations. To that end, I'm setting up a Library Thing bookshelf. We've only just begun, but will work on building it up. Please let us know your favorites!

*This process is slightly different for kimchi, so read the book!

In Response

To the NYTimes article The 11 Best Foods You Aren't Eating: Yes we are!
The eleven "healthiest foods on earth" were listed as follows:

1. beets
   
2. cabbage
   
3. swiss chard
   
4. cinnamon
   
5. pomegranate juice
   
6. dried plums
   
7. pumpkin seeds
   
8. sardines
   
9. turmeric
   
10. frozen blueberries
    
11. canned pumpkin

I'd rather eat whole pomegranates than buy the juice that doesn't even taste like the fruit it came from, but, alas, they grow in the Sonoran desert! Instead of sardines, there's flax, which can be grown locally and has no risk of heavy metals.

As for the rest, wintergreens has got you covered.

Distribution - December 13, 2009

This distribution is full of sweets for the holidaze!

• apples: super crisp Ida Reds and sweet Mutsus from Fishkill Farms
  
• pickled beets, grown at Huguenot Street Farm
  
• carrots, carrots, and more carrots, from Huguenot Street Farm
  
• pear honey, pears grown at Glorie Farms
  
• frozen sweet red peppers, from Madura Farm
  
• potatoes from Huguenot Street Farm
  
• spinach from Madura Farm

Fishkill Farms' apples are not organic. They are not no spray, rather LOW spray, using integrated pest management. What that means is that they exhaust all other options before spraying. They spray less than commercial orchards, and with caution. And they're working toward becoming organic. In the meantime, wash these apples! (We did get some organic ones this year, too, ugly-beautiful things that were also hit by hail. We'll be making those into sauce...)

Beets are known as a great source of iron, but they're also filled with folic acid (for you pregnant ladies) and have tumor fighting properties. Because these are fermented, they're also great for your belly. You can drink the juice alone as a probiotic tonic. Don't be scared of that florescent color, it tastes great. This recipe is mostly just beets, water, and sea salt, but there's a touch of cider vinegar, agave syrup, mustard powder, and white pepper. The beets have not been canned, so please refrigerate.

I don't know if any of that stuff about carrots being great for your eyesight is real, but I do know that carrots are one the all-time best snacks in the world. Back when I didn't eat anything real at all (high school!), I still remember being impressed by my friend who always had carrots in his back pocket, ready for a snack. I still get angry about bags of "baby carrots" in the store, which are really just large carrots cut down and rounded, because apparently we're too lazy to bite and chew. This is what a real baby carrot looks like:

Pear honey isn't really honey, but is very pear-y. Read all about it here.

Use frozen red peppers any way you use fresh. Of course, I eat red peppers raw and whole like apples, and I wouldn't do that with frozen ones. But they can be used in anything you're cooking: soups, crock pot meals (veggie chili!), stir fries, on pizza, or, if you're fancy, roasted and made into a pretty and flavorful puree to grace the top of other dishes. These peppers give your food a shot of color and sweetness, but also some winter vitamin C.

Potatoes and spinach aren't sweet, but are good for you. Eat well and with color, and we'll see you after the holidays!

Salted Plums

I grew up next to the Mexican border, sucking saladitos that I bought for a nickel from a box next to the register at the corner store. Better than candy, these salted dried plums made your face and neck pucker, were useful for bets and challenges, and made pop fiz like crazy when you dropped them in the can. I haven't had a saladito in years, but my hankering is satisfied by the Japanese version, umeboshi plums. (You can taste ume in wintergreens' plum vinegar radishes.)

My friend Youko serves ume dishes at her New Paltz eatery, Gomen-Kudasai, and sent this info my about beloved salty snack:

The Japanese are masters when it comes to fermentation and pickling. The ume plum is no exception. When the plum is picked it is fermented in a very specific amount of salt that promotes only an important beneficial bacteria: lactic acid bacteria. These bacteria run the show and prevent harmful bacteria from entering the plum. This probiotic quality of umeboshi, in combination with its other healing properties, provides one of coolest examples of holistic eating.

Umeboshi vs. Conventional Antibiotics

Conventional antibiotics are nutorious for 2 things: gastrointestinal upset, and easy bleeding & bruising. Both of these are rooted in the fact that conventional antibiotics are often (but not always) broad-spectrum antibiotics, meaning: they kill the beneficial bacteria in your gut too! Without friendly gut bacteria, your gut cannot digest food efficiently. Moreover, gut bacteria are primarily responsible for vitamin K production, which is responsible for blood coagulation and keeps our bleeding in check.

There are times when only a presrciption antibiotics should be recommended. However, umeboshi is better used as an antibiotic tonic. A tonic is something which helps the overall functioning of a system over a longer period of time, rather than doing something very specific in a short period of time. Umeboshi is also, like ginger, a gastrointestinal tonic.

So unlike conventional antibiotics, umeboshi works as an effective long term pathogen antibacterial, but at the same time protects (rather than destroys) your gastrointestinal health.

Another random use: ume apparently works as a hangover cure. Though I haven't tested the theory, friend-of-wintergreens Eva said our fermented pickles make for an excellent hangover recovery. If you've overindulged, indulge in a pickle, or drop an ume plum or saladito in your morning seltzer!If you missed the link the first time, Just Hungry illustrates how to make your own umeboshi.

Revolution Bread

"It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it."
—James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, 1962

A James Baldwin book wasn't a place I expected to find a quote about the U.S.'s wrecked food systems, but there it is, right in the middle of race and religion and violence and sex. Baldwin, of course, was also referring to our wider lack of basic sustenance, beyond food, specifically in Harlem in the Fifties and Sixties. Harlem still has a shortage of nutritious food.

It is interesting for me to think about how long we've been losing our connection to real food. On some podcast I listened to lately, Michael Pollan was talking about the commercialization of prepared food in the Fifties. When cake mix was first marketed, it didn't go over well because people felt that just adding water was cheating. Cake mixes continued to be sold, of course, but producers backed up a step, and made it so that a cook has to break an egg to use the mix, and therefore feel like they're doing some food preparation. Now that's better! We've made an effort!

I also heard about a diet recently where the guidelines were simple: eat [and drink] nothing out of a box, bottle, or package. Prepare your own food and drink.

Revolutionary idea.

12 Days of Ignorant Bliss

I wasn't interested in canning at all. I discover that I'm really kinda into it, and bam, twelve days later I learn that the canning jars available to me are toxic. Yup, there's BPA in the lids. I'd admired those beautiful German jars with glass lids, but found that they were pricey, and I'd have to get them shipped. (Turns out you can get them from Illinois, which is a tad closer than Germany.)

Though I sometimes like being forced to use a better product (obviously glass lids are better for food), I'm still trying to dig up all my Sigg bottles to trade in by Halloween, since they, too have BPA in the liners. Ug, as if we don't absorb poison enough without this!

Danger! Health Food!

I'd been hearing about kale chips a lot, but hadn't had them. I love kale, and potato chips, well, I have to talk myself out of salt 'n' vinegar potato chips every time I go into a grocery or gas station. To feed my yen, I thought I'd give these "healthy chips" a whirl.

Are they delicious? Yes. Do they make a satisfying crunch? Yes. Are they bad news for me? Yes.

They're so good that, if you're anything like me, and will keep eating potato chips way past the "small snack," past the "feeling a little bit sick," and just keep on eating, the same will happen with kale chips. There may be added nutrients in there (especially if you've made them in the dehydrator), but it's too much oil and too much salt and too much crunchy finger food and just too much for the good ol' fashioned chip addict.

If you dare, here's cheezy, baked, vinegar, and dehydrated.

I'll stick with steamed kale, thank you very much.

Thanks to yumsugar for the photo.

Eating the Rainbow

For dinner last night, I had purple broccoli from Huguenot Street Farm. It was my first dalliance with purple broccoli, and it tasted amazing. I love food that is richly colored enough to turn the steaming water black!

Thanks to Tiny Farm Blog for the photo.

Pickle Popsicle

I bumped into this funny item on the internets this morning. Maybe wintergreens should team up with Zora Dora?

Pickle Upper

Meet Eva. She had never had a pickle in her (nearly) eighteen years.* All that changed two weeks ago.

Eva looked sleepy, and I offered her a fermented garlic dill pickle, thinking she could use a vitamin C kick. She explained the lack of pickles in her life thus far, and was tentative with her first few bites. The report was good: it tasted great to her, and unlike anything she'd had before. That pickle started something.

Today, Eva explained that the past couple of weeks have been filled with cravings for things she never had or liked before: olives, dark chocolate, and pickles.** You might call it a tastebud revolution. She wants a version of the wintergreens C.S.A. that is pickles only, every week, all winter long.

Not a terrible idea, Eva. Not bad at all.***

*I had word with her father about this tastebud terrorism.
**Eva's father had a word with her about whether she might be pregnant.
***This would be the easiest C.S.A. on the planet to run, no?
P.S. Meet beekeeper Mike. He thought these particular half sours in this particular jar were too beautiful to eat. I took this picture so that he could look at them forever, and still get to eat them.

Theory Number Two

There are loads of theories as to why "an apple a day keeps the doctor away." Flavonoids, water content, folic acid, vitamin C, beneficial bacteria, potassium, etc., etc.Apple season has recently begun, and I've been doing my "research" by eating one or two huge Jonagolds each day.

Pardon my overshare, here, but I think theory "Number 2" wins. Apples make digestion, and the expelling of waste and toxins easy. All those other benefits are nice, but none of them compare to the awesome pectin and fiber combination that apples offer.If you'd like to do some research of your own, you can pick your own apples right now at Fishkill Farms, or even lease an apple tree for your family or as a gift at Liberty View Farm. Best idea of them all: plant an apple tree near where you live, where you can walk outside and eat an apple right off the tree. Now that's local.

The Basics: Greens in Winter

Many preserved treats make winter survivable for summer fiends like me, but the single most important thing for me is fresh frozen greens.

The second the growing season is over, leafy greens in the store look a little faded, have come from far away, cost too much, and don't taste inspiring. I was a skeptic about putting beautiful fresh veggies into the void world of the freezer, but learned that done right, quick braising and freezing keeps produce colorful and tasty. I not only use frozen packets of kale, choy, mustard greens, vitamin greens, and chard in recipes all winter, I eat them on their own, with a touch of lemon or oil or shoyu. They taste that good, and even retain good texture.

The quick and dirty is that you steam greens just until they're wilted, then submerge them in cold water for the same amount of time they steamed. Drain, separate into usable portions, and freeze. For the Virgos among us, here's a thorough guide.

Spending a few hours in the summer preparing greens is, I believe, what keeps me from turning green in winter. Is this the secret winter lovers have known all along?

Elderberries

Super crime-fighter flu-fighter elderberry coming soon to a C.S.A. near you! (Harvesting today...)

Healthy Farm Management

A friend of mine just learned about the horror that is GMOs, and the government subsidies of this environmental and health disaster. It stands in dramatic contrast to what I just experienced at Huguenot Street Farm.

How do you know that your veganic farm is using healthful farming practices? When you're squatting picking peas, and a big black turtle strolls by and says "hello." Say no to GMO, say yes to local farms (and turtles and frogs and birds!).

Eat Pickles, Be Healthy

Wintergreens is all about preserving local food when it's harvested, for use in the deepest depths of winter. We're currently selling frozen local baby food, pickled local veggies, and stuff like veggie burgers (made from guess what—local veggies) at the farmer's market to raise money for our walk-in freezer.

But somehow it's the pickles that stick for people. Someone with turrets said to me the other day, "You make those funny pickled things, don't you?" Guilty.

But E, The Environmental Magazine is here to tell you why eating pickles is a good thing: probiotics, immune support, etc. etc. Pickle Power!

Springing Sprouts

I'm a Metro North train commuter, and not home during daylight for half of each week. This past week, an awful lot happened in those few days without me seeing it! From when the sun set Monday evening to the sunrise on Friday morning, leaves appeared on the trees, wooded areas became jungles, and there are so many blossoms I'm drunk with giddiness. Plus, my outdoor seedlings appeared! Here are chilies, tomatoes, squashes, basil, dill, and much, much more.

Spring, and spring seedlings, remind us of all the power of plants bursting forth. Sprouts are literally seeds bursting with all the energy they've held through dormancy. Sprouts are one of the most nutritionally packed powerhouse foods. So small, so flavorful, and so good for you.

What's great about sprouts is that you can eat them year 'round. In the dead of winter, I like having them grow in jars on my windowsills not only because they're tasty, but because they remind me that spring will come again.

Here are the most simple instructions on how to sprout beans, seeds, and grains. There are far more uses for sprouts than just salads—you can put them in pretty much anything.

Candy & Cigarettes

When times are hard economically, we turn to sweets and cigarettes for comfort. Neither is good for the pocketbook, and neither is particularly good for our bodies, either.No time like the present to ally with local food growers so that we can all save money, and have some healthful veggies to eat when we're burnt out on candy.
In the meantime, I'll take a candy cigarette.

SAD: The Standard American Diet

A seventy-five pound box of food was dropped on my porch recently. It must have been a food bank distribution, dropped on the wrong porch by accident. It was a lot of food, which is great, of course, for people who are having trouble paying their food bill. However, the great bulk of the food was pasta, sugar (confectioner), and corn starch. There was also baking soda, tea bags, soy sauce, barley, and one can of beans. But more than fifty pounds of pasta and sugar.

I had a boss once who ate what she called "white food" when she was depressed. White bread, egg or tuna salad, cream soup, crackers. Chicken or the egg? Was her diet making her more depressed? Would she have felt better sooner if she'd chosen broccoli and brightly colored fruit?

There are plenty of nutrition studies that show that colorful, fresh food is better for you. But it's true that it many cases, it is also more expensive. That is one reason that buying from local farmers, leaving Whole Foods out of the equation, can both save you money and keep you eating healthier.We'll be doing some shopping trips soon to compare the prices between a bag of food from wintergreens, and a bag of food from local groceries. I'll make you a wager we come out significantly cheaper. (No shipping! Minimal or no packaging!)

I overheard a teen today saying "There's nothing to eat near my house, there are only grocery stores." I think she meant that there aren't any pizza joints or chinese take-outs where she lives. Many people have a similar problem, but different: only grocery stores, no FARMS. Fortunately, in the Hudson Valley, we don't have this problem.

*wintergreens is applying to be able to accept Food Stamps. Everyone should have access to great food, and the health and happiness it can bring.