Thanks for Nothing

This is late late notice, as I'm licking the remains of pumpkin pie off my plate, my brain addled from ginger curry shrimp, sweet potatoes, yams, green beans, rice, and polenta with salsa (we had Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday so we could have it with some family friends, so today is just standard mom's vacation-time cookin'), but... I wanted to tell you all about an awesome pickling experience you could have tomorrow early evening with master microbial herder Eric Smilie. Eric will be leading a workshop in which he will teach you the alchemical craft of transforming your everyday cabbage into the magically tangy, luminescent topping known as sauerkraut. More information on the materials you will need to bring is on his blog Awesome Pickle, from which I nicked these photos. You can also just ask for a taste and a cup of tea or bring something to barter with him for a whole jar of his superior kraut.


Above is a photo from a workshop he led recently at the earthy forest-sprite neo-folk wonderland known as Gravel & Gold (I was actually walking home as he was setting up for it and popped in to say hi). More photos to make you sad you weren't there but that will motivate you to be at the next one are at the G&G blog.

The event tomorrow is part of the Buy Nothing Day festivities at the Non*Mart art show at Y2K Gallery in San Francisco's Richmond District. There will also be seed & book swapping, as if sauerkraut alone weren't enticing enough. It's from 4-6pm, 251 Balboa at 4th Ave. (combine it with a trip to the deeply satisfying Green Apple Books! Oops, but don't buy nuffin' or at least don't let on that you did). So instead of participating in the apocalyptic-sounding Black Friday, where crazed masses overcharge their credit cards for things on sale they don't really want and come home feeling empty inside and so, so alone, "unshop, unspend, and unwind" as the Buy Nothing motto goes, and feel grateful for all the amazing things that buying nothing gets you to actually do and make.

Vanessa Dualib's Playful Produce

It's that time of year when all the little potatoes come out to play, so get your craft box out and your googly eyes ready. This incredibly charming creature is called Potatosaurus Dulcis and will gladly munch up all that extra parsley you don't know what to do with. I discovered prints of him and his descendant (or ancestor?) Potatoctopus (below), along with other delightful produce pals at the Greenpoint Food Market while I was in Brooklyn last month. These cartoonish creatures sprang from the mind, fingers, and camera of Brazilian artist Vanessa Dualib, who has assembled a book of slightly psychotic yet endearing characters, like radish mice, baby carrot figures, fruit fish, and a mischievous fellow named Eggbert.


In addition to the book, Playing With Food and its main website, Vanessa also has a flickr photo gallery and tumblr blog, for those who have strong Internet interface preferences or just prefer their website names to confuse people by deleting vowels from commonly known words.

Here is Pepe the Pepper flanked by his less embarrassed and perplexed companions. He moved from his native Mexico to Avery Island, Louisiana to work for the Tabasco Co. and married a hot jalapeña, according to Vanessa.

Not only is Ms. Dualib a fellow weird food fetishist and Brazilian (I have a long-standing relationship with the country and its cultural production, though I swear to you by my Freud reader and Havaiana flip-flops that I do not belong in the dubious ranks of Brazil fetishists), but she also shares my soft spot for children's stories, which earns her a permanent place in my vegetable heart. Here, a carrot version of Le Petit Prince:



And... she made an eye-popping fruit 'n' veggie Where the Wild Things Are tableau that was featured on We Love You So, a web collage of art, music, and inspiration by people who worked on the Spike Jonze film version.


They also interviewed her on the site if you want to know more. Now, if only she would cross paths with Wes Anderson and make some Fantastic Mr. Fox-inspired dioramas. How excited I am to see that movie!

Buttercup Squash in Winter Beanie

The weather has grown colder, and even our vegetable friends need some extra warmth. That's why this buttercup squash grows its own fitted light-green "beanie," as original weird vegetable goddess Elizabeth Schneider calls it in her indispensable Uncommon Fruits & Vegetables: A Common Sense Guide, originally published in 1986 with the super extended title that continues: From Arugula to Yuca: An Encyclopedic Cookbook of America's New Produce, With Over 400 Easy-to-Follow Recipes. She writes, "this turban-shaped squash with its distinctive pale 'beanie' has long been esteemed by many growers as the ideal winter squash..." Our intrepid guide never really says what makes this squash "ideal" (or her guide "common sense" for that matter). This shiny green fellow I picked up during a rare visit to the produce mecca that is Berkeley Bowl seemed pretty ideal, and I half expected to find a baby dread tendril peeking out from under its jaunty cap.

The buttercup is in the Cucurbita maxima family, which means it shares a resemblance to hubbard, turban, and kabocha squashes, the most dramatic group of the winter squashes, in my opinion, for their larger size and swirling color combinations.

Although I love the hearty orange comfort of roasted winter squash, spooned directly from the steaming rind, mixed into pasta, or puréed into a soup, I don't often buy the larger ones because they seem to take too much effort and planning. I hesitate to overload my shopping bag with these heavyweights because I'm usually biking or taking public transit home (I like to pretend I don't have a car), then I get nervous about how my knife will slip and take off a finger while I'm struggling to hack open this thing that suddenly looks disconcertingly like a human head, and after that I'll have to scoop out the seeds and guts and then, depending on what ultimate form I would like to serve the squash in, try again not to draw my own blood while awkwardly peeling the outer skin, then perhaps cut the orange meat into smaller pieces and then--whew!--heat the oven that I forgot to preheat and wait forever for the slices to soften, and then do yet more fixing up before serving.

But! Inspired by the optimistically unhinged grin of the Elmo pumpkin I carved with my sister, I've decided to quit all this exaggerated whining and tackle the world of winter squash with gusto! And a sharp knife.

Ms. Schneider prepared me for the worst kind of squash resistance to being halved: "If you want to cut up the buttercup, a heavy cleaver or giant knife usually does the job." Then she gives the contingency plan, which involves pounding--okay, gently hammering--on the blade where it joins the knife handle with a wooden mallet or rolling pin. Excited by the cartoonish potential of this scene, I eagerly got my rolling pin out, ready to beat that buttercup into comic submission (boing! oof! stars). But it parted surprisingly meekly before my not-yet-sharpened blade, and the large seeds were easy to scoop out.



I had decided to make a squash and sage risotto based on a recipe from my Chez Panisse Vegetables book, so I sliced the pieces up and peeled the rind off with a paring knife. I also added in some pieces of red kuri squash that Erin had left over from an elaborate dinner involving several kinds of home-brewed beer and food pairings that was orchestrated in part by this pickle master friend, whose chocolatey porter she cooked a squash mole to accompany.


The red kuri has a red-orange peel and is slightly harder and less sweet than the buttercup, say my taste buds. The buttercup was unexpectedly tender for being a C. maxima and reminded me of acorn squash.

The exact risotto that I made is probably unreproducible since I had the sudden inspiration to substitute the chicken broth with a cardamom-ginger-anise-spiced Vietnamese pho broth base and add shreds of ox tail meat that I slow cooked in the broth for four hours and then reheated as I ate pho for breakfast, lunch, and dinner over the course of two days while I was recovering from what I'm self-diagnosing as swine flu in a minor key. It's also my mom's pho [pronounced "fuh" like "fun" without the "n"] recipe, so you really can't reproduce it unless I release the information to the Internet winds.

But here I shall give you a version of Alice Waters's risotto:

SAGE & BUTTERNUT SQUASH RISOTTO
(I used buttercup and red kuri; acorn would also be nice)

1 medium squash (1 lb)
24 sage leaves (really, you don't have to count them, just use the force)
Salt 'n' pepa
7-8 cups of chicken stock (or pho broth!)
1 medium onion
5 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 cups Arborio rice
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup grated parmigiano reggiano cheese

I also included this one monster chanterelle mushroom that cost $5 at Bi-Rite and must have drawn a glistening tear from the eye of the forager who unearthed it:

Evil monkey peeler approved of the frivolous purchase.

Now, onto the instructions:

Carefully peel and clean the squash and dice it into small cubes (I'm still stuck in remedial-level peeling, as you can see from the tinges of green still stuck on my cubes.)


Put the diced squash in a heavy-bottomed pot and cook with a few whole leaves of sage, salt, and 1 cup of the stock. Cook until tender, but not too soft, about 5 to 10 minutes. Meanwhile, chop 6 sage leaves fine and cut the onion into small dice [yes, Waters writes "small dice." I guess that's an official chef's term.] I also took this moment to slice up that glorious mushroom into small sliver [that's my own term].

Heat the rest of the chicken broth and hold at a low simmer. In another heavy-bottomed saucepan, heat 3 tablespoons of the butter, add the chopped sage (mmm, it's gonna start smelling gooood), and cook for about a minute; add the onion and cook over medium heat until it's see-through (I'm doing that undergraduate plagiarism trick where you switch out a few key words, like "see-through" for "translucent"). Turn up the heat (aw yeah) and pour in the white whine (sookie sookie, now). When the rice absorbs the wine, add enough stock to cover the rice, stir it up, little darlin', and reduce the heat.


Keep the rice at a gentle simmer and continue to add more stock, a ladle or two at a time, letting each addition be absorbed by the rice. At this time, you should feel free to pour yourself a glass of the white wine while your guests hover in the kitchen and wait for the food to be ready because they got there on time and why are you behind. While the rice is cooking, sauté the remaining sage leaves in butter until crisp. (I did not do this because I was busy drinking wine and talking about movies with the people in the kitchen and forgot, but I'm sure it would have been awesome.)

After 15 minutes, the rice will be nearly cooked. Stir in the cooked squash, the rest of the butter (I left this out), and the cheese--I also added those chanterelle slivers and the shredded slow-cooked ox tail meat. Continue cooking for about 5 minutes or until all that extra stuff is warmed up and mixed in. Adjust the seasoning or add more broth as needed. Serve in warm bowls and microplane some more Parmesan cheese on top and add those crispy sage bits. So delicious and warm on a chilly night!

I fed five people with this recipe (along with crispy roasted brussels sprouts and a potato dish that Erin made), plus made at least three bento box meals of it in the days following.

Cute Vegetables

At certain moments in my life I bless my luck for having been born a woman, and for having a face that people seem to suspect of little sinister intent. This often happens while I am peering through a chain link fence at school children or taking digital photos of strangers' toddlers dressed up for Halloween at the park (the fat giraffes and miniature musclebound Spidey at my nieces' twins play group Halloween party two weeks ago were irresistible). No, no, these aren't moments of maternal feeling or gloating over the fact that I have the ability to grow tiny humans inside my body. I just love watching children be funny and cute with each other and I know indulging that impulse would be the source of a much greater amount of public suspicion if I were a man with a large beard or twitchy eye.


The British Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had a sweet face and was much bolder with children than I ever am if this story I came across while reading American poet Elizabeth Bishop's collected letters is to be believed. In the postscript of a letter to Robert Lowell, who apparently wasn't so fond of these little monsters, she writes:

P.S. I really feel you should struggle against your feeling about children, but I suppose it's better than drooling over them like Swinburne. But I've always loved the stories about Shelley going around Oxford peering into baby carriages, and how he once said to a woman carrying a baby, "Madame, can your baby tell us anything of pre-existence?"

I haven't quite worked out what they say about pre-existence, but these vegetable posters decorated by the charmed little fingers of students at Cesar Chavez Elementary School, which I often pass during my neighborhood strolls, tell us much about the incredible plasticity of children's minds as applied to the world of edible gardens. In the cornucopian utopia to the left, a giant carrot befriends a tiny tree whose roots are occupied with sucking up an upside down hachiya persimmon, which in turn seems to be in love with the happy-faced apple beneath it, if the heart shape that unites them is any indication. And I find myself quite taken with the mythical blue vegetable (blue hubbard squash?) that appears in the poster to the left, as well as the blue strawberry with yellow spikes in the "Garden Munchies!" tableau up top.

Let's give a hearty huzzah! to programs like the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance and the Chez Panisse Foundation's Edible Schoolyard for creating garden classrooms where city children can experience the thrill of pulling a carrot from the ground (POP!), learn why we shouldn't squash worms or ladybugs, and totally freak out about the fact that the food they put in their mouths comes from the dirt (AH! DIRT!! GROSS! SNAILS!).



Mr. Chavez looks pretty happy about the loving labor that goes into these crops.

Pumpkin Dance

Really, you should go out tonight. Finding a costume is not that complicated. Just find a black shirt and leggings, grab someone's front porch jack-o-lantern to strap onto your face, et voila! Halloween! Someone will throw candy your way, I promise.

This Omaha news station knows how to start a partay. I'm fascinated by how clearly enunciated all the dance moves are and also by the curious androgyny of the dancer--big ham fists (note the wedding ring), broad shoulders, yet such delicate legs, and the lumpish hint of chicken hormone breasts.

I owe this incredible treasure to the Internet foraging skills of the musically, linguistically, comedically gifted Kerry McLaughlin, who contributes to many blogs and produces episodes for the TV arm of XLR8R magazine.

Elmo's Butchered Pumpkin Face

Last week I left New York to face its impending winter alone and escaped to the perma-summer of Los Angeles on the weekend for a friend's wedding and to visit my sister's family. While driving through Echo Park on our way to hike in the hills near the Griffith Observatory and ogle the Hollywood sign, then pick up some really expensive coffee beans that a roast-obsessed San Francisco friend requested I bring him from Intelligentsia in Silver Lake, my friend John--a passionate meat lover--asked if there was any vegetable equivalent for butchering.

I think of the butcher as someone who handles and dresses dead animals and who acts as a skilled intermediary between cooks and their meat because the task of division and preparation is labor-intensive, often unpleasant, and takes some amount of training and talent to perform. But I couldn't think of any vegetable whose parts are parceled out to be sold in quite as elaborate a way as pigs or cows. A "vegetable butcher"-themed Google search turned up Bloody Butcher corn, perhaps the most frightening heirloom variety name I have yet encountered, as well as this delightfully creepy children's illustration by Michael Lauritano:


What we do to pumpkins and other large winter squash, especially in the weeks leading up to Halloween, seems to come closest to what might be called vegetable butchering. Many of us remain amateur carvers, though, hacking into these forbidding vegetable surfaces with much trepidation and trial and error, and more often for recreation and decoration than to eat them.

In our efforts to be festive, we take sharp knives and carefully cut into their rotund exoskeletons, revealing their tangled mass of innards.

Then we reach our hands in and swirl them around to remove the goopy guts.


Some additional knifework or spoon action clears the last of the seeds and spaghetti entrails.



Then the less knife-sure of us take a Sharpie to the pumpkin face in order to better carve out a creaturely visage. My twin nieces, whom I nicknamed Pumpkin and Peanut for their relative shapes and sizes when they were first born, are in love with Sesame Street's Elmo, like most American two-and-a-half year olds who watch TV, so my sister and I decided to attempt an orange homage to this little red giggle monster. I drew a test Elmo on our newspaper scrap and plotted a carving strategy but deferred to my sister for the actual drawing on the pumpkin.

"Don't worry, I've drawn Elmo sooooo many times."



Round and round, in and out the knife goes. Pull out the mouthpiece!

Wipe away that pumpkin slobber!

For Elmo's clown honk nose, I had the brilliant inspiration to scrape it down to the yellow layer with a grapefruit spoon, though it failed to show up in the dark later. If you say he looks like Grover, I will smash your head like a gourd.



Put his party hat on.

"Elmo likes palm trees!"

"Elmo likes the dark if there's a candle burning inside his head!"

It is true, this charming Elmo is no match for the fine art produced at my friends Andy and Aron's pumpkin carving party last year, where people were using awls and homemade stencils to stab out intricate formations like Sarah Palin's face. But that's why this is a post about butchering vegetables.

Cheeky Greens & Green Radish

We always seem to find a reason to stay right as we’re about to say goodbye. This little blogging kale was beginning to feel a bit droopy after several weeks of poking around produce in New York and finding herself unable to find a single bunch of farmers’ market dark leafy greens worth taking home to her kitchen, mainly because they were either outrageously overpriced or pathetically wilted. I imagined I’d developed a vegetable vitamin deficiency and wondered if I really had the resolve to be a true locavore outside the Bay Area (though I can’t ever fully subscribe to a strict Barbara Kingsolver regimen of eating only locally grown foods, a policy that strikes me as xenophobic and dogmatic at its most extreme even if I do agree with the general point).

And now on the eve of returning to the West Coast, I have found what I was looking for: Evolutionary Organics. Back in August, at the Union Square Greenmarket I had encountered some awesome sensual carrots and other bizarre beauties at Windfall Farms, but their prices were unsustainable for my weekly veggie needs. This month, I had mostly been languishing in bed on Saturdays and rolling out at the last minute to the McCarren Park farmers’ market between Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn to pick out the least sad turnips and potatoes, so to be fair, I haven’t really been working extra hard to seek out the best produce around town.

Then last Wednesday, I found myself wandering aimlessly through New York’s Union Square and was suddenly attracted by signs of dark green life shining happily in the cold sunshine at the Evolutionary Organics stand. All the rows of assorted greens for $4/lb recalled my treasured Heirloom Organics leafies back home at the Ferry Plaza market (Windfall’s comparable greens are $3 per 1/4 -lb, or an outrageous $12/lb).

I took a sampling home and laid out the greens to admire each piece in my collection like I used to do with Halloween candy after a hard night’s work of running up front steps and breathlessly shouting “Trick or treat!!” The assortment pictured above includes, clockwise from top left: toraziroh (a Japanese mustard green), bok choy (though they call it “pak choi”), mizuna (the spiky ones, another Japanese mustard green), tat soi (the little chardy looking leaves), purple pak choi, a token vitamin green leaf, purple mizuna, and sunflower sprouts. I'm hoping I identified everything correctly, though I may have mixed up the toraziroh and vitamin green...(confirmations or objections welcome in the comments section). All are tasty, good sauteed or raw, and nothing too bitter.

The farm stand’s signage consisted of hand-written cheeky notes, and some were painted in rainbow colors. When my joy broke out into an involuntary smile that landed on the girl working there, she smiled back (turns out she was from Santa Cruz, original home of happy produce).

The sign for the purple pak choi began: “that’s right, I said it. It is pak choi/bok choy and it is PURPLE.” The note identifying the vitamin greens explained, “a literal translation from its Japanese name--I don’t think it has more vitamins than other greens. It is very tasty any way you choose to use it.” I told Evolutionary’s farmer and sign author Kira Kinny (Blondy Kinny, according to her email handle) that she had pretty much just written my blog for me and she said, “Yeah, we’ve got a lot of weird vegetables here” in a reassuringly no-nonsense sort of way and kept unloading boxes without pausing to gush over the literariness or entertainment value of vegetable descriptions.

Not only did she have watermelon radishes, there were also green meat radishes, which I had never encountered before (pre-sliced radish pictured up top). Kira’s sign introduces them: “Neato! They are green inside!” I found the green radish friendly-spicy, as opposed to the heated aggression of both black and watermelon radishes, and less perky in flavor than little pink French breakfast radishes, like its sharp edges have been washed out a bit, if that makes any sense.

My bounty came together in an elaborate sandwich consisting of rye bread from The Garden market down the street, hummus, green radish, whatever greens I could fold up and layer on, yellow wax beans, sun sprouts, and a raw cow’s milk cheese.



I also ooh’ed at the greens from Keith’s Farm a few stands down and picked up some of their famous humongous garlic--written up in the NY Times. But that sudden rising in my heart when I found Evolutionary Organics made me realize that half of my vegetable love is for the actual produce but just as important is the general mojo of the farm and its workers, an energy that manifests itself in everything from their smiles to getting kind of loony and arts ‘n’ crafty over what they grow, which I can’t help but feel does have a way of ultimately improving the quality of the produce.

Evolutionary doesn't have a website, but is at Union Square on Wednesdays and Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza Saturday market. This article gives good sense of what farmer Kira Kinny is about. Her husband runs Conuco Farm, which I haven't had a chance to encounter, but whose blog I linked to for their toraziroh description. I'm sure there are more great farms scattered around New York's farmers' markets (and yes a post on Ms. Greenhorn Severine's smithereen farm is a-comin' soon!) but I just haven't quite gotten my bearings out here as well as I have on my home turf in San Francisco.

That day I also picked up a bunch of kale to make a caldo verde soup, and on the subway home whisper-chanted to myself, “Happy kale, happy kale, happy kale,” until it began to sound like “Abigail, Abigail, Abigail.” So now whenever I meet someone named Abigail, I’ll think of the Happy Kale I found in New York.