Nettle Soup Allergy Relief

I'm not usually prone to allergies, but I hear they can hit you at any time, and apparently yesterday was the day.

I've been buying stinging nettles from Foraged and Found Edibles at the Ballard and U District markets: they're an early glimpse of spring and while I wouldn't quite say I like the way the taste, my body feels like it needs them. Typically I make nettle pesto by steaming the greens until they're soft and the heat neutralizes their sting, and then I whiz them in the food processor with some goat cheese. That's it. I spread the pesto on crackers or toss it with pasta. Then I add honey to the steaming liquid and enjoy some nettle tea.

When the allergies struck yesterday I wanted something more heavy duty, something that would allow me to eat the entire half-pound bag in a single sitting and set my system back on track. I decided to make a soup, but the larder was mostly bare and the only ingredient that seemed suitable for a nettle soup was a half cup of miso.

I steamed the greens in a big pot, in about a quart of water, and then I removed the nettles, pureed them until they were silky, and whisked the miso into the steaming liquid remaining in the pot. Then I mixed the pureed nettles back into the miso broth. That's it. Two ingredients.

The soup was tasty and rich, and I ate it all. I found myself trying to think of other ingredients that would have enhanced this flavor, but it just didn't need anything else.

I'm also happy to report that this morning I woke up feeling considerably better.

This Summer

In a way it's hard to believe that summer is almost over, especially here in Seattle where it only got going in earnest a few weeks ago. I turned 50 this summer, and I started feeling tired right afterwards. I think I mostly just gave myself permission to feel tired, after more than 20 years of pushing myself through the long days and small, everyday crises involved in running a small business on a shoestring.

So I've been pushing myself less this summer, working to define my role in the business. I do the purchasing, because it involves keeping track of so many details and prices. I keep an eye on the big picture, and I figure out ways to communicate big picture insights to the crew. I try to keep them motivated, challenged and engaged. And I crank out quesadillas during the busiest times: special events, the Ballard Market, and the dinner rush at Columbia City.

Because of the terrible weather earlier this summer, the farmers' markets got a slow start this year. There was hardly anything except greens available until nearly July. We didn't really see chiles or corn until nearly the middle of August. There were plenty of cold, damp and dreary market days, when produce wouldn't have sold even if it was available. Things have picked up for the farmers the past few weeks, but for much of the summer they largely seemed stressed and broke.

As a prepared food vendor, I've actually benefited in some way from their struggles. Spring tends to be the busiest time of year for my business, at least when the weather cooperates. Folks are excited that the markets are starting up, but there isn't that much to buy so they buy dinner. Once the heirloom tomatoes and the flats of berries show up, customers have a lot less money leftover for discretionary purchases like prepared food.

I'm thrilled that my business has done well this summer, but I'm also fully aware that farmers' markets are about farmers, and something is very wrong when the farmers are struggling and the quesadilla vendor is thriving. I try to give back every way I can, by buying ingredients from my market neighbors and prioritizing their needs when they're hungry.

I also like to think that maybe the farmers benefitted in a roundabout way from my spring sales: customers who came to the market early in the season and didn't find much produce to buy may have enjoyed the dinner they bought at one of the prepared food stands and felt like the excursion wasn't a total loss, so they kept up the habit of coming to the market until the selection became more bountiful.

Turnips and Rutabagas (Oh my!)

What's the difference between a turnip and a rutabaga? It's a question that has stumped folks for generations. They're both fleshy winter root vegetables, and they're often used together. I picked the particular specimens in the above picture to highlight the difference, but it's not always so obvious. (By the way, the one on the left is a turnip and the one on the right is a rutabaga.)

I'll start with the obvious. Rutabagas have thicker skins. You want to peel them more often than turnips, although you can get away with not peeling them, especially if they're on the small side. Rutabagas tend to be sweeter and turnips can be a bit bitter, although sometimes you find turnips that are every bit as sweet as rutabagas. Turnips have white flesh that gets almost translucent when you cook them, while rutabaga flesh is yellower. Turnips are ancient vegetables, while rutabagas were first bred as recently as the 18th century by crossing turnips and cabbages. So turnips and rutabagas are cousins.

The sweet, hairy Gilfeather turnip was bred by a native of southern Vermont who zealously trimmed the roots off his creations before he sold them so nobody else could propagate them. The variety has made it into Slow Food's venerable Ark of Taste, and the town of Wardsboro Vermont holds a Gilfeather Turnip Festival each year. As with most agricultural varieties, somebody else eventually managed to get their hands on some seeds, and now you find Gilfeathers everywhere from New York's Green Markets to Seattle farmers' markets. Only they're called "Gilfeather rutabagas" everywhere except in their home state.

I love the word "rutabaga." Sometimes I cook them at the markets just so that I can say it over and over when people ask what's in the veggie mix.

Layering Alliums

If I had to describe my approach to winter cooking in 2 words, they would be "layering alliums." The allium family consists of onions, garlic, leeks, shallots, chives, and their many cousins. They're abundant this time of year, partly because they're root vegetables which store their goodness safely underground, and also because they tend to have relatively long shelf lives so you can pick them in the fall and keep them for many months. I've only recently finished off an impressive stash of shallots that I got from Local Roots Farm in October, and a big bag of garlic from Summer Run Farm that I acquired at around the same time.

If you use three of four different kinds of alliums together in a dish, you often don't even need any additional seasoning. They give a comforting depth to anything you make. For example, heat some olive oil and add chopped garlic, leeks, and shallots, along with some salt and pepper. When the shallots are transluscent and the leeks start to wilt, add a chopped bunch of greens, anything from one of the wonderful varieties of kale available this time of year to mustard greens or collard greens. Cook on medium heat until the greens wilt and grow tender: anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the greens and your personal preference as far as doneness. A bit of balsamic vinegar adds an extra dimension, but it's not entirely necessary.

Frozen Greens

Last weekend there were no greens for us to buy at the farmers' market because the weather had been so cold. I assumed that meant there would be none for a while because we'd have to wait for the next growing cycle, but that wasn't the case. There were plenty of greens available this past weekend.

It turns out that if you pick greens while they're frozen they turn stringy and slimy, but if you wait for them to thaw without harvesting them, they'll be fine. Last year there were no greens after the long, hard frost in December, but this year the frost didn't last as long so the greens survived.

This is good news. I'll be enjoying the greens in my garden for another while, as well.

Cooking Radishes

Several years ago, overwhelmed by the number of radishes showing up in my CSA box, I did a bit of research into whether or not you could cook them. I'd never seen a cooked radish, and I was accumulating more of them than I could happily eat as part of my--almost daily--salad.

I browsed through several cookbooks but no recipes called for cooking them, so I continued to eat them raw. I suppose I could have just gone ahead and tried, but I didn't.

Several weeks ago my employees started bring them back to the kitchen from the markets: some of the farmers who we buy from were offering them, and the price was right. So we cut them up and cooked them, and we found them both tasty and colorful. We've been using them ever since, and I've done some subsequent research and learned that cooking them isn't nearly as strange as I had once believed.

I strongly believe that, if the sustainable food movement is going to really make a difference in the way we source food and use the resources that go into producing food, we've got to challenge preconceptions about all kinds of things, from what we discard to where we shop. This experience with the radishes gave me the opportunity to discard a different kind of preconception: one that dictated that there was only one acceptable way to eat radishes.

Rutabagas

This week I used rutabagas in my grilled vegetable mix for the first time. I'm not quite sure why I avoided them in the past except that they seemed a bit rough. But last weekend Nash's Farm was sold out of almost everything else by the time I got there, so I decided to give this underappreciated root a try.

I was delighted with them. They cooked up really nicely on the grill, and had a texture like potatoes but a sweeter taste. Apparently they gained a reputation as a famine food in Europe during World War II, when there was little else to eat. I suppose I came to them in a similar way--due to lack of alternatives--but I'll certainly be using them more in the future.

Kale

Most years kale is the winter standby, the faithful green that keeps on giving long after the others are gone. But this year has been far from typical. We stopped seeing abundant kale around the end of December, although Anselmos's has managed to consistently keep it on their table, and Stoney Plains has had some small bunches.

But the past few weeks more farmers have been bringing it to the market, and it feels like a whiff of spring rather than a pillar of winter.

A Glimmer of Spring

1. Although the weather is still unseasonably cold, we're beginning to see some hopeful signs at the market. The flower vendors are returning. There's some salad mix available, and nettles and fiddlehead ferns. Farmers are starting to sell gardening starts, and eggs are considerably more abundant than they were a month ago.

Beet Diversity

One of my favorite things about the mix of veggies I cook in the depth of winter is the spectacular color of the beets. I'm not just talking about the red ones: the gold ones are also vibrant, and the pink concentric circles in the Chiogga beets never cease to amaze me.

They all taste more or less the same, but the range of colors certainly adds visual appeal. And, unlike the red ones, the other varieties don't bleed onto everything around them.

Brussels Sprouts!

I was never force fed Brussels sprouts as a child so I didn't have any first hand negative associations with them. But some of our widespread cultural prejudice must have rubbed off on me because I found myself one day last winter challenging myself to learn to like them.

I was successful without too much effort. They're wonderful tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper, and roasted for 20-30 minutes. I've also been simply cutting them up and tossing them in without whatever other vegetables I'm cooking.

I'd seen them at markets and in the grocery store sold on stems as "Brussels sprout trees," but I only recently learned that the tree part is actually the center of the plant, with big leaves growing around the sprouts. I tasted a leaf, and it tasted a lot like collard greens.

Very Sweet Carrots

The folks at Stoney Plains Farm were particularly excited this weekend about some very sweet carrots that they had available. I asked what made them so sweet, thinking that it had to do with the time of year, or a particular phase in the plant's life cycle. It turned out it did have to do with the time of year, but not in the way that I thought: it's a variety of carrot that matures during this time of year that just happens to be very, very sweet.

We tend to think of carrots--and most other fruits and vegetables--as fairly uniform, unless there are very obvious differences in shape, size, or color. But there are actually countless varieties of all kinds of produce, adapted to different microclimates, types of soil, and times of year--like varieties of carrots that are especially sweet in the fall.

How to Pick a Delicata

Although I was very excited to see the earliest delicatas of the season, the first few that I ate were disappointing: dry and mealy instead of of creamy and sweet. So I asked a farmer friend how to tell if a delicata is ready. She said that some farmers pick them too early because customers (like myself) are so eager to have them.

To tell if a delicata is ripe without cutting it open, look for plenty of contrast between the green stripes and the yellow flesh. There should also be some orange around the rough spot where the squash sat on the ground.

The underripe delicatas worked fine when I peeled them, cut them up, and cooked them with a bunch of other veggies, but my favorite thing to do with delicatas is simply to cut them open, scoop out the seeds, rub them with olive oil, sprinkle them with salt and pepper, and roast them for about half an hour, until they're tender. (Make sure there's some water in the pan, so they don't dry out.) It's simple, and it's exquisite as long as the squash is ripe and ready.

New Fruit

Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year (so technically I shouldn't even be blogging, but we each negotiate our own relationship with the ancient traditions.)

I learned yesterday that it is traditional to eat a "new fruit" on Rosh Hashanah. The person who told me this said that one should eat a fruit that one has never eaten before, but as I investigated further I learned that actually one should eat a fruit that one hasn't tasted in a long time. One source said that this ritual can be "an excuse for scouting out the 'exotic fruit' section of the supermarket, while another said that it was traditional to eat a seasonal fruit that one has not yet tasted this season.

Because this tradition evolved before the existence of supermarkets (let alone their exotic fruit sections), the second explanation made more sense to me. I'm always excited to find links to agricultural traditions, and Rosh Hashanah does take place during harvest time. This also got me thinking about the significance of having a calendar that starts during harvest, rather than during planting season, but I'm hardly qualified to start exploring that fascinating question.

Every source I checked agreed that the "new fruit" tradition evolved as a way to justify the traditional use of a particular blessing, usually reserved for new things, on the second day of a holiday that had been expanded to a second day. Still, I find it rich and suggestive, and I'm going to go find some local plums, because I haven't eaten a plum in a while.

Tomatillos

Tomatillos have been showing up at local market stands the past few weeks. They're not unripe tomatoes, but rather cousins of tomatoes with a papery outer skin. They make a wonderful salsa, but it takes some patience because you have to peel the papery outer skin off of each tomatillo.

Once you've peeled them, you preheat your oven to about 4oo. You'll also want to use some mild chiles (anaheims or poblanos) and some hot ones, if you like it hot. Rub the tomatillos and the chiles with enough olive oil to coat them, then roast them for 45 minutes to an hour, until their droopy but not crunchy.

When they're cool enough to handle, take the stems off the chiles, and puree the roasted tomatoes and roasted chiles along with some cilantro, red wine vinegar, and salt.

It's great stuff, but I only make it once a year, because of the painstaking labor of peeling the skins off the tomatillos. Most of the year I use canned tomatillos for the salsa at my booth and at my store. It's very tasty, but once you taste the real thing, it's hard to go back.

Fennel Phase

Lately I've been using fennel in just about everything. Sometimes I find myself just ripping off stalks and eating it.

The other day I hit on an especially delightful flavor combination. I'm not including a recipe because I wasn't entirely happy with the texture-- I used too much of the fennel stalk and it ended up being way too fibrous--but I was certainly blown away by the flavor.

I roasted some fennel with some garlic and some cherry tomatoes after tossing them with a little bit of olive oil and salt. Then I squeezed the pulp out of the garlic and pureed it with the tomatoes and fennel, adding some parsley, balsamic vinegar and salt.

I ate it with pasta and I enjoyed it, but I don't think that's necessarily the best way to use it. Let's just call it a work in progress, one that's exciting enough that I felt compelled to share it, even in this form.

The Cutest Potatoes I've Ever Seen

Last weekend Alvarez Farms was selling the cutest potatoes I've ever seen. As you can see from the picture, they're about half the size of a cherry but twice the size of a pea.

Cooks enjoy these potatoes much more than farmers do: they're labor intensive to harvest, but it's fun to cook the tiny self-contained units. I've just been tossing a couple into whatever mixed vegetable dish I happen to be preparing.

Ode to Corn

We've been hearing quite a bit lately about the evils of corn, which is implicated in rampant monoculture, tasteless processed food, and an epidemic of diabetes. It's easy to lose track of the fact that corn has so thoroughly worked its way into our lives and our economy because it is arguably the most prolific and versatile plant on the planet.

Corn plays a role in creation myths from all parts of the Americas, and the iconography of quite a few indigenous Central American cultures depict gods with ears of corn incorporated into their figures.

The original inhabitants of the Americas learned that mixing ground corn with an alkaline substance like ash or ground limestone greatly enhanced its nutritional value. When Europeans began cultivating and relying on maize, they failed to make use of this ancient information. Instead they mostly just ground it, much as they'd traditionally done with wheat flour. In Italy this resulted in widespread suffering from pellagra, a nutritional deficiency disease, among the poorer people who subsisted mainly on polenta. But the disease was largely unknown in the Americas for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived, because of the process of nixtmailzation, or mixing corn with an alkaline substance like corn or limestone.

It's ironic that the indigenous Americans processed corn using methods that improved it, while contemporary industry processes it in ways that robs it of its amazing vitality and destroys our bodies and our land.

Purslane

The past few years a number of local farmers have begun growing purslane, a leafy green, succulent vegetable. Purslane has been cultivated since ancient times and has historically been a part of European kitchen gardens, but until relatively recently it was mostly considered a weed in the United States.

There has been a growing interest in it lately largely because it contains omega 3 fatty acids, an essential nutrient that's far more common in cold water fish than in leafy greens. The leaves are kind of spongy, and they have a lemony tang.

Last summer I'd regularly pick up a small bag of purslane from Local Roots Farm on Fridays at the Madrona Farmers Market. I'd always think I was going to cook something with it or use it in a salad, but I'd just end up tearing off leaves and snacking on them all the way home, without even thinking about what I was doing.

Sounds like something my body needs.

Chiles!

I spotted the season's first chiles at the Queen Anne Farmers' Market yesterday. These are Anaheims, and I hear there will be jalapenos next week.

For me chiles are the sign that high summer has arrived. Their season starts slowly, with a couple of varieties, and by mid-September Alvarez Farms will have dozens of shapes and sizes in a whole spectrum of colors.

We tend to think of chiles mainly as vehicles for heat, but they have plenty of flavor besides their spiciness. I like my food hot, but it only takes a few hot chiles to make a dish super spicy, so I like to use a range of mild ones along with the hot for added flavor.

The Aztecs refrained from eating chiles on religious fast days, just as medieval Europeans avoided meat on certain days of the year. They were that important.