Tips
For a delicious, versatile, inexpensive vegetable that has “winter” right in its name, hard-shelled squash gets surprisingly little seasonal respect. Dedicated foodies who can wax eloquent over the respective merits of yellow-eye beans and Jacob’s cattle seldom discuss the much larger differences between, say, the dry-fleshed, nutty-flavored Tetsukabuto and the creamy, well-named Sweet Dumpling.
The sign-squash is a rejected pumpkin. No stem, no sale.
Think I’m exaggerating? Have a squash tasting, using at least 3 varieties and preferably 3 species. That might be delicata (Cucurbita pepo), buttercup (C. maxima ) and butternut (C. moschata), but if you range beyond the supermarket, you can probably put together a more exotic assortment. Either way, you will be amazed, and unless there are a lot of you you will also wind up with quite a bit of extra cooked squash. Terrific! Just freeze it in meal-sized packets and you’ve got a stockpile of nearly-instant great food.
When the basic ingredient is ready to roll, it’s only minutes to warming cream of squash and orange soup, with or without a sprinkle of Aleppo pepper; baked squash under a blanket of crisp crumbs flavored with olive oil and lemon zest; or utterly simple broiled squash, spread in a shallow buttered pan and broiled until the top is dotted with flavorful, caramelized brown spots. This is also tasty with store cheese grated over it at the last minute. Also salsa. Also parsley pesto… you get the drift; if you want it even sweeter, the thing to make is pie.
To Prepare Squash for a Tasting ( or almost anything else): Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Rinse any clinging dirt from the squash and whack off the stem with the back of your heavy knife. Cut squash in half as evenly as possible and scrape out the seeds. Oil the cut surfaces with olive oil and put the squash cut side down on a sheet pan or jellyroll pan. Bake until a thin-bladed knife sides in easily, anywhere from a half hour (Sweet Dumpling) to about an hour and a half ( Marina di Chioggia), depending on the thickness of the squash meat and the variety of squash. Turn it right side up and use a sharp-edged spoon to scrape the squash meat away from the rind.
This did not start out as a project – it was just one of those idle irritations. Bill, who eats granola for breakfast, came home with some that was truly dreadful, up to and including the very strange pink bits of freeze dried raspberry. We will not discuss why he bought it; suffice it to say that even he didn’t want to eat it and of course then we got talking about the old days when you made your own and then the very next Wednesday there was Mark Bittmann in the Times with a recipe for crunchy granola.
Rather than simply following it, I decided to look at some of the competition, always a danger now that we are in the age of Google. When I asked it to find “granola recipe”, it came back with “Results 1 – 10 of about 1,420,000. ”
Uh huh. But when would it stop being granola recipes or literary references to granola recipes and start being the usual outer reaches: strings of words that start with g; science fiction pornography; entries in what looks like Chinese but isn’t.
Plunged in, leaping the longest intervals offered. On page 30, there was a lowcarb granola, a thought too scary to explore further. On page 46, an excerpt suggesting that nuts “should be rinsed in cold tap water to which vitamin C powder has been added”. Page 65 was still recipes, including one for a “vegan fusion ” version called Marley’s Hemp Granola, which I should have looked at, I guess, since what I remember about cooking with hemp is that the results were generally – how shall I put this? – more functional than delicious.
The plan was to stop at page 100 but google’s ” that’s it, nothing after this but repetition” kicked in after only 810 hits, on page 81.
Give or take a few, I think 81 is about the number of granola items sold by my local Stop and Shop. They have granola stocked in 3 places: the health/ organic (pay more here) area; next to the whole nutmeats and rice cracker snacks at the end of the produce aisle; and of course in cereal, which had the smallest number of granolas but the largest number of granola bars: 60 running feet of shelf space. Not wishing to piss away the time required I didn’t count varieties, but did notice that many were chocolate covered and one contained m&m’s. The one with the m&m’s was not, by the way, on a low shelf where small children would be enticed by it.
I could go on, and probably will, since there is a food-historical black hole between J.H. Kellogg’s Granola, which sold by the ton in the 1880s , and the tidal rise of the 1960’s product that made “crunchy” an adjective applicable to human beings.
For today, I will only say it’s surprising, once you start tasting alertly, how many variables there are, that plenty of salt certainly helps, and that so far the Corsican special is my favorite but Bill prefers good old Honey Nut.
GOOD OLD HONEY NUT GRANOLA
1 cup whole almonds
1 cup pecans, whole or in large pieces
6 cups old fashioned rolled oats
1/3 cup sunflower seeds
¼ cup toasted wheat germ
½ cup mild honey
3 tablespoons walnut oil (or peanut oil, if there’s no walnut already in the fridge)
2 teaspoons vanilla
½ teaspoon salt
1. Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Spread almonds and pecans in separate pie tins and toast until a broken nut is very pale gold; about 12 minutes for pecans, 15 or longer for almonds. When nuts are done, reduce heat to 300.
2. Spread oats and sunflower seeds on a large jellyroll pan and parch in the 300 degree oven, stirring occasionally, for about 15 minutes. Oats should crisp while scarcely coloring.
3. Turn oat mixture into a large bowl and stir in the wheat germ. Combine honey, oil, salt and vanilla, heat just long enough to liquefy/thin honey, give it stir and pour it in. Stir until all dry matter is coated, then add nuts and stir again ditto.
4. Turn the whole works out onto the oat pan, spread to the edges and return to oven. At 5 to 8 minute intervals, use a flat pancake turner to lift the brown edges into the middle and spread the paler material. Keep it up until the granola is a rich dark gold and a cooled nugget is properly crunchy, anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes, depending on pan, oven and sugar content of honey.
5. Store airtight. If you want raisins or other dried fruit , the time to add it is right before eating. There’s no reason to pre-mix something you want to keep moist with something you want to keep crisp unless you’re going camping.
Variation: The Corsican Special, aka Double Chestnut
(which was originally known as Italian recipe fanatic – there’s no way you’d have these ingredients handy unless you were really into it)
5 cups rolled oats
¼ cup sunflower seeds
3 tablespoons chestnut flour
2 tablespoons wheat germ
scant half-cup chestnut honey
3 tablespoons grapeseed oil
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla
scant ½ teaspoon salt
1 ½ cups coarsely chopped pecans
1. Heat oven to 300 degrees and toast oats and seeds as in 2., above.
2. In a large bowl, mix oats and seeds with flour and wheat germ, then add remaining ingredients as in 3, above.
3. Very slowly toast the living bejeeziz out of it, lowering the heat if it starts browning before the first half hour is past. It’ll be done in 40 minutes to an hour.
Our bright lights chard is still going strong in the cold room, and last time I went shopping the commercial stuff looked pretty good ( for a change), so if you have become tired of cabbage, consider
Rainbow Slaw
Every measurement in this so-called recipe is “about,” “to taste,” “use what you’ve got,” ” fiddle,” because all three of the vegetables vary enormously in sweetness and flavor-strength. Plus it would be a shame not to enjoy it just because you were almost out of celery and didn’t realize it until a half-hour before dinner.
For 6 servings
Toss 1 ½ cups each julienned celery, fennel, and rainbow chard stems with a dressing of
¼ cup rice vinegar
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 teaspoon sugar
½ teaspoon salt
let it sit about 5 minutes, then taste and adjust.
At this point, you’ll have a very light, clear-flavored salad that goes well with almost everything, especially winter’s rich brown braises and stews. To jazz it up, add finely-minced jalapeno and coarsely-chopped cilantro. Shreds of Peking duck from the Chinese grocery are a nice addition, if you happen to have it ( either the duck or the grocery) handy.
On Sally Spillane’s freewheeling Garden Show our topic was (mostly) the joys of winter garden reading , and in the course of the proceedings I mentioned several favorite publications.
Then when we hit the usual frantic time crunch at the end I promised to list the access info. here , so:
The Flower and Herb Exchange yearbook
The Garden Conservancy open days directory
Pomona, quarterly journal of the North American Fruit Explorers
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
The Pepper Gal – seeds
Select Seeds-Antique Flowers – seeds and plants
Totally Tomatoes – seeds, not plants
At Seed Savers, it’s 5 Color Silverbeet. At Johnny’s, which got an AAS award for it in 1998, it’s Bright Lights. At our place, it’s just rainbow chard, a must-plant delight: easy to grow, easy to cook, beautiful all summer long and long into the fall.
Bill insists it’s sweeter after frost; I think he’s simply confusing it with cole crops like kale and collards, which are sweeter, because temperatures below 40 destroy sulfur compounds. Sweetened or not, rainbow is slightly less frost hardy than regular chard, so we dug it up when temperatures started going way down – way back in early November there actually were a couple of nights when it hit the mid-teens.
The plants were set upright in a big pot lined with a thick plastic bag, with no more dirt than what was left clinging to the substantial roots. The pot was stored in an unheated enclosed porch , aka our well-lit walk-in. Every once in a while, I pour some water over the bases, but not very much.
chard plant, out of pot for photographic purposes
We have been harvesting regularly, breaking off leaves as needed as though the plants were still in the ground. When all have been eaten, we’ll compost the stumps. They could be replanted in mid-spring, if we wanted to save seed, but we’re not that dedicated. (Colors cross, so the pros grow each one in isolation and mix the seeds at packaging. )
Some say the different colors taste different, a lot to assert given that the colors include pink, red, purple, magenta, orange, yellow, white, white with pink stripes and some extremely zingy mixtures of pink and tangerine. All I can say is that none of them are as good as plain old white-stemmed Lucullus. But gorgeousness counts, even if the colors don’t stand up all that well when cooked.
Cooking Swiss Chard
is sort of like cooking chickens and turkeys – it helps to remember that cooking the thing whole is likely to be unkind to one part. Instead of light and dark meat, chard has stems (petioles) and leaves.
Chard Stems appear almost celerylike, very sturdy and crisp when raw. But at least when the chard is freshly harvested, they get tender quickly and tend to end up unpleasantly flabby if cooked for more than a few minutes. Most recipes say the stems are tougher than the leaves and should be cooked longer, but when we cook the chard from the garden we add the chopped stems near the end, shortly before the leaves have cooked through.
In Europe , stems are as highly prized as the leaves and those from varieties like Blonde de Lyon and Monstruoso are frequently cooked solo. Standard advice is to cook them like asparagus , which I take to mean “like asparagus the old-fashioned way: briefly blanched, thoroughly drained, then finished with a rich sauce such as browned butter or hollandaise.” You’d think boiling would be ill-advised with something so watery, but in my experience it works as well or better than steaming and stir-frying.
The alternative, especially when you want to preserve the bright colors of Rainbow types, is not to cook the stems at all. Just slice thinly crosswise (longitudinal julienne can be stringy) and sprinkle over hot cooked greens, toss into salad or add to a slaw of fennel and celery.
Not much needs saying about the Chard Leaves, except that they’re delicious prepared any way you’d prepare spinach and most of the ways you’d prepare stronger greens like kale and broccoli raab. Also nice stuffed and stewed, just sub pairs of them for the single cabbage leaves in your favorite stuffed cabbage recipe.
Christmas day: Breakfast consumed, presents opened, the tree not twinkling ( we’ve given it a bye this year) and Baby, it’s warm outside – time for a cookie-redemptive walk.
Never mind the cliches about perpetual November, our bit of the mid-Hudson Valley is eerily like March. At the suet feeder, the usual crew of woodpeckers ( downy, hairy and 
red-bellied, one of the worlds more misleadingly named birds, photographed here by Edward Russell)
has a visitor, a Carolina wren.
The wren is not mind-bendingly out of place – our 1980 Peterson field guide says “fluctuating in north; cut back by severe winters” – but personally myself I get a chill when I see Carolina in New York on Christmas day.
The forsythia at the top of the hill has been blooming for the last month, so the flowers are no longer a surprise, and neither is the clump of blewits that came up 2 weeks ago in the oak leaves by the roadway. They’re multiply frost-walloped but still hanging on, only slightly the worse for wear.
The weeds never were surprising; cold-resistance is one way biennials like wild phlox, garlic mustard and verbascum get such a jump on everything else. But we’ve seldom seen so much greater celandine , Chelidonium majus, even though, being a poppy , it’s perfectly happy to wax fat for next year in low light and cold-but-not-frozen soil.
The deeply scalloped greens were lovely, and a reminder of how close some weeds are to relatives on the approved list. This one looks a lot like our native woodland poppy, Stylophorum diphyllum, a rarer plant with larger flowers and less aggressive habits.
It’s easy to tell them apart when they’re blooming – C. majus has small, pale yellow flowers; S. diphyllum has good sized, deep gold ones – or when you see seed pods (C. majus = long skinny sticking up; S. diphyllum = sort of football-shaped, drooping ) but at this time of year the best way to know what you’re seeing is to simply assume the worst, especially if the plant is by the roadside or in some other highly disturbed ground.
Greater Celadine is a present from the New England colonists, who brought it as a medicinal herb, primarily for digestive complaints and to cure skin diseases. A brief google suggests the medical theory is hair-of-doggish; the bright orange sap of C. majus is very irritating to the skin and extracts of the plant have been implicated in liver disorders. It’s also supposed to help with sneezing, which I can testify it causes bouts of if you break the stem while pulling it up.
Greater celandine. The sap is as orange as the roots
I’ve spent years evangelizing, insisting that the fruitcake-resistant have never eaten the real thing, and given that “real thing” means “good candied fruit,” an item that pretty much must be home made if not purchased from purveyors like Fauchon ($60.00 per pound, not including shipping), I’m reasonably sure that’s true.
But perhaps you are saying, “no, no, for years home bakers and first-class commercial makers like good ol’ Alice Perron up there in Vermont at Bienfait have simply omitted the candied part. They just mix classic, no-fakery batter with lots and lots of succulent dried fruit and generous quantities of fresh nuts and …
Well, okay. It’s good. But it still lacks a certain chewy, aromatic, sweet but not too sweet component, a component that’s easy to make by defining “candied fruit” as “candied citrus peel”: lemon, orange, and grapefruit , each delicious in a slightly different way.
There’s a detailed step by step recipe here and about 8 zillion more floating around on the web ( see below for cautionary notes), but the bottom line is that candying peel is no more difficult than cooking pasta – and no more expensive, either, since the peels come free with the fruit.
After reading this introduction, you may be expecting a fruitcake recipe. But then who’d eat it besides you? Better to make the always popular
Universal Suit Yourself Fruit and Nut Bars
Everything that’s good about fruitcake but not so damned much of it, all on a buttery, crumbly crust that cuts the opulent sweetness.
Crust:
1 ¾ cup all purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/3 cup sugar
pinch salt
½ cup butter, plus more for the pan
1 lightly beaten egg
Topping:
2 ½ cups fruit, cut in @ 1/3 inch dice. Any combination of : raisins; currants; prunes; dates; dried apricots, pineapple, figs, or cherries; candied ginger and candied citrus peel.
½ cup rum or brandy
2 eggs
1/3 cup each white and dark brown sugar
2 tablespoons flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon each cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg
2 ½ cups lightly toasted whole nutmeats. Any combination of: almonds, walnuts, pecans , hazelnuts, pistachios, pine nuts and macadamias. Cashews and peanuts overwhelm all else, so either eschew them or rename the bars.
1. Mix the topping fruits and alcohol in a small bowl, cover tightly and set aside in a warm place until all the liquid is absorbed, overnight, more or less.
2. Heat the oven to 350 (325 for a glass pan) and thickly butter a 9x13x2 inch baking pan.
3. Put crust dry ingredients in a shallow bowl and mix thoroughly with a wire whisk. Cut or pinch in the butter until you have coarse meal, then make a well in the center and add the egg.
4. Pinch in the egg – or stir with a fork – just until the mixture is clumpy and holds together when pressed (resist the impulse to keep squeezing). Dump it into the pan, gently spread it around, then press it into an even layer on the bottom. Bake until pale gold, 12 to 15 minutes.
5. While the crust is baking, beat the topping eggs until frothy, then beat in everything else except the fruit and nuts. Stir them in last.
6. When the crust is ready, recombine the topping and spread it evenly, being careful not to cheat the corners. Return to the oven and bake until set and browned on top, about 30 to 35 minutes. Let cool completely before cutting in small – @ 1.5 inch – squares.
Yield: about 30 squares, depending on your cutting and on the true measurements of your pan ( “9×13” is precise on the page, but it means quite different things to different pan-manufacturers).
Judging a candied peel recipe:
* It’s probably wise to choose organic citrus; just don’t assume – as I did for years – that certified organic citrus is innocent of wax.
* The thick white pith is essential. Recipes that tell you to remove it are actually recipes for candied zest.
* Bitterness varies, which should be noted/allowed for.
* not all recipes stress the necessity of having the peel completely tender before adding sugar, but if it isn’t tender before you add sugar it will be tough for all time.
Taking apart the windows and giving them a thorough washing is classically a part of “Spring Cleaning” – a classification that makes sense if you’re the sort who takes down the storms each spring and puts them up in fall.
But if you are not that sort, an easy negative for some of us, window cleaning tends to slide until
a) every crumb of light is precious, and
b) every crumb of light that comes in, comes in at just the ideal low angle for showing off the difference between translucent and transparent.
Nothing will ever make it fun, but on the basis of our recent tour of the kitchen fenestration , here are a few things that make it easier:
* Cloudy days : the cleaning agent doesn’t dry out as quickly and it’s easier to see which side the streaks are on.
* Distilled water: doesn’t matter if you’re using bottled window cleaner (or – deduct many, many green points – one of the alas very efficient petrochemical sprays), but if you belong to the old fashioned vinegar or ammonia in water school, using hard water will make the job harder because hard water leaves spots.
* lint is the enemy, which is why old manytimeswashed diapers or t-shirts make ideal rags. Just be sure to give them a double rinse and dry without addititives; laundry soaps and fluffing agents leave residues that streak windows. Only downside is that you need a lot – can’t get things clean using dirty rags. That’s why
*crumpled newspaper really is the easiest and least expensive wiping medium. Rumors about ink notwithstanding, it’s the cheap low-fiber (lint-free) paper that makes it so effective. Yes, the ink comes off. Big deal. It comes off of you, too. Wear thin rubber or latex gloves if you have manicure issues.
* You think you have gotten the corners. You have not gotten the corners.
Thanksgiving daécor from the vegetable garden: Gigante di Romagna cardoon, Bright Lights chard and Redbor kale.
It’s tough to grow artichokes if you don’t have a Mediterranean climate; either the growing season is too short ( Maine) or the summer is too hot (New York, and increasingly Maine, too, but that’s another story). In any case, the best you can usually do is about 6 artichokes per 5×4 foot plant; and while of course they are your own, they aren’t so splendidly wonderful they justify the space.
But cardoons, well cardoons seem possible. You don’t have to get as far as flowerbuds and because you’re eating the leaf ribs, big fat ribs from leaves that can be 3 feet long and more, yield is not a problem. Only catch is that you have to blanch them before harvest to keep them from being bitter.
Or at least that’s what all the growing instructions say. But in my experience – years and years of experience because some people are pigheaded about giving up on exotic comestibles – it doesn’t work. The standard blanching technique, unchanged for centuries ( loosely bind the leaves into a bundle, then exclude light with a wrapping of straw) makes the silver leaves even paler. But it does nothing else noteworthy, even when pressed past the suggested 2 or 3 weeks into 4 and even 5, the outer limit before rot sets in.
You do get a suggestion of artichoke, in that everything you eat afterwards tastes sweet and faintly metallic, but about the cardoons themselves suffice it to say that gall isn’t usually stringy.
Next year ( once more unto the breech), we’ll try a different variety: maybe “Large Smooth” instead of “Gigante di Romagna,” our current plants of which are now 3 years old.
We’ll probably leave the few oldsters around too, assuming they do come back again. Cardoons are beautiful, terrific bouquet material all summer long and especially welcome at season’s end, when they are among the last plants standing.
Last spring, we decided to go for — if not broke at least financially depleted – and plant the 700 hundred more bulbs required to fill the bare patches in the crocus carpet.
Essential to mark where they were needed. Didn’t want to make a map (lazy, mostly). Already knew big nails anchoring little bows of surveyor tape wouldn’t work because I tried it years ago. The tape disappeared into the grass, as planned, and then disappeared.
So THIS time I stuck the big nails through the centers of metal washers roughly the size of silver dollars. No way those big shiny disks were going to get lost…
You can perhaps guess the next part. It’s early November, no time to lose. Bill mows the grass and fallen leaves, using the bagger so no debris will obscure the view. I peer down. Nada. I rake , gently. Rien. I get down on my knees and claw with my fingertips, covering an area I KNOW must have at least one washer in it. Gone.
So we went next door and borrowed our neighbor’s metal detector and the moral of this little story is a giant reinforcement of the new(er) understanding of soil improvement: spread compost right at the surface, don’t dig it in deeply; it’s headed down fast enough as it is. The washers were buried almost an inch in just one season and the only thing that rises is rocks.
Bill finding the crocus planting spots and marking them with stakes.
