Squash and Bulgur Patties

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  Here's a holiday recipe that I like very much. I made these patties and served them with collard greens sauteed in olive oil with garlic, shallots, and salt. Simple, simple. This recipe makes 6 servings.

4 cups peeled, cubed butternut squash

1 1/2 cups water

1 cup medium bulgur

1 tablespoon olive oil

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 shallots, minced

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh rosemary

2/3 teaspoon salt, or more to taste

1/2 cup crumbed feta cheese (optional)

2 tablespoons bread crumbs

Steam the squash for 20-30 minutes, until it's soft enough to mash.

Meanwhile, boil the water and boil it over the bulgur in a bowl.

Heat the olive oil in a medium-size skillet. Add the shallots, onions, herbs, and salt. Cook for about 5 minutes, until the onions are soft and transluscent.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. When the squash is ready, mash it well, then mix it with the other ingredients. Let the mixture cool in the refrigerator for about an hour to firm it up a bit.

Shape the mixture into patties with your hands. Coat each patty with bread crumbs. Arrange the patties on a baking sheet, and bake them for about 20 minutes.

Wholesaling

My first business, many years ago, was a wholesale company. I would make prepared lunch food and deliver it to grocery stores, coops, and university cafeterias. At its peak, my business serviced 50 or 60 stores in the Seattle area. But the product had a short shelf life and, I suppose, a limited appeal, and most stores accepted it as a guaranteed sale, in other words, we credited them for anything that didn't sell by its pull date.

My second business--a meal delivery service--was, in many ways, an answer to many of the things that didn't work about the first business. I figured that, if I was going to make a lot of small deliveries, I might as well deal directly with the actual customers, and charge retail. That was a much happier business; I sold it about 5 years ago, and my current business is even happier.

This year, as we headed into the off season, I started looking for every possible way to generate more business. I want to provide more work for my staff, and I'm getting too old to keep saving money over the summer and then spending it all over the winter. (When I expressed this to my mother she responded, "That's called maturity.")

So I started thinking about wholesaling again, but I didn't want to get into the old routine of spending several days a week driving all over town doing deliveries. My shop is right near Madison Market, which is the current incarnation of the old Central Coop, one of my favorite accounts back in the day. I got to thinking that, rather than producing as much as I could of a limited number of items, I'd like to try a different model, and produce a range of items exclusively for one store. I want to build relationships with the staff and the customers, learn what they need, and produce it.

I'm starting with seitan, a "meat substitute" made from wheat gluten. At the risk of being immodest, I make the best seitan around-much better than the chewy, overpriced items that most natural foods stores carry. We made a sandwich with seitan at my little restaurant; people tell me regularly that it's the thing they missed most when we closed.

So I'm wholesaling seitan to Madison Market now. When I brought samples, the buyer practically accepted it on the spot. We're not selling a ton of it, but I'm going to give it time, do demos, and nurture the venture.

Staff Meeting

At the end of the market season I had a staff meeting. It's been many years since I had a staff meeting, but it felt like the thing to do. The agenda was simple: I wanted to discuss what we'd done well this past summer, and what we could do better.

I enjoyed hearing their feedback. I'm not sure I learned much that I didn't already know, but I felt that it was good for them to be heard. I think I'll do it more often now, like maybe once a year.

Dialogue

I received an email a few days ago from someone who had bought my book "The Accidental Vegan," and was deeply disturbed that my introduction focused on the dietary and environmental reasons for choosing a vegan diet, but didn't mention anything about animal rights.

My first thought was that I shouldn't even engage because it probably wouldn't be productive; my second thought was that if I couldn't at least make an effort to dialogue then I'm not who I want to think I am. So I sent a polite email explaining that my book is targeted towards people who know they should eat more plant-based foods but are ambivalent about making the change and, while I believe factory farming is horrific and should be outlawed, I do think it's possible to raise animals for meat without being cruel to them. She politely responded that there's no possible justification for murdering an animal simply to justify a taste for a particular food. Here's a link to the review she posted on Amazon.

The experience has gotten me thinking about why I don't think it's wrong to eat animals, provided they haven't been badly treaten in the process (and I am fully aware of the argument that killing animals for food, any way it's done, constitutes treating the animal badly.) I do think that meat eating has played a fundamental role in our history and culture. I know that war has played a fundamental role in our history and culture as well, but my gut tells me that war is wrong while my gut doesn't tell me the same thing about eating meat (no pun intended.)

Although vegetarian activists point to the length of our intestines-- similar to that of herbivores--as evidence that we haven't evolved to eat meat, there have been periods in our evolutionary history when an increase in our meat consumption corresponded with profound developments in our brains and our cultures. Homo habilis, who walked the earth roughly two million years ago, was the first of our ancestors to eat meat on a regular basis--mostly small animals and scavenged carcasses--and this change in diet corresponded to the first significant increase in the size of our brains. I wouldn't venture a cause and effect relationship, but I'm intrigued by the correlation. Then, about fifty thousand years ago, humans developed the skills and technologies to begin hunting large mammals, and this development led to the earliest sophisticated art, clothing, and constructed shelter.

I understand that some people think that killing animals for food represents a lack of respect for life, but I feel that a real respect for life involves seeing life as it really is, and embracing it anyway. Death is part of life. One day last year I was walking down the street when I saw a vegan friend of mine walking towards me. She gestured for me to be quiet, and pointed to a spot right near us where a crow was dismantling a smaller bird. When I reached her she whispered, "He just took out the eyes!" I was blown away by the fact that, as a vegan, she was still awed and fascinated by the sight of this animal being killed for food, and I told her so.

Here's a link to a terrific post by Bob at Stonybrook Farm, in which he poignantly, sensitively describes taking one of his favorite lambs to the slaughterhouse.

The woman who sent me the email will never convince me that all meat eating is murder, just as I will never convince her that it's possible for a farmer to care about their animals and still kill them for meat. But, at the very least, it's important for us to be civil to each other.

Dialogue anyone?

Back in Ballard

This past Sunday I started working the Ballard Farmers' Market again, after doing the Mercer Island Market all summer. Mercer Island is a great little market, but there's no market like Ballard.

I've been vending in Ballard even before it was even located in Ballard. The market started in Fremont, as a row of farmers at the Sunday market there. But the Fremont market outgrew its space, and in 2001 the farmers moved west, where they started off in a bank parking lot on the site that is now the Ballard library. Late in 2002 we moved to our current hom on Ballard Avenue.

Ballard was this town's original year-round farmers' market, and none of the other year-round markets even come close to it in sales and vitality, in fact, Ballard in the winter is still better than almost any other market in the middle of the summer.

It's good to be back.