a few notes and a brief cooking note

First, the notes.

Note 1: I began using a chimney this summer to start my grill. I love it, but I haven't gauged the fires properly yet. Between the chimney and the hardwood charcoal (not briquettes!) that I've been using, I get amazingly hot fires. Too hot, really. I've had a devil of a time figuring out timing and heat, as a result.

Note 2: I need to branch out while at the farmers market. I bring home a nice harvest and prepare it well (usually!), but I don't change up my game nearly enough. I don't buy many new ingredients. I don't challenge myself to stretch my wings beyond some of my tried and true preparations. If all goes well, we will take part in a winter CSA, and I will expand my cooking repertoire.

Now a cooking note:

In midsummer, I found myself with locally raised lamb steaks, corn, and peaches. I'd also snagged a loaf of parmaggiano and red pepper bread. The lamb went in with a chili-, sage-, and rosemary-spiked rub. The peaches were drizzled with a good balsamic. The corn was soaked (in husks) in salt water. The bread was sliced and drizzled with good olive oil. We were using my neighbor's gas grill. The corn went on first. It roasted for close to half an hour on the upper rack with a low convection fire. The fire was brought up and the lamb and peaches went on the grill. The peaches were to the side and the lamb spent 4 minutes on either side. The bread went on for the second half. The ingredients were stacked — bread first, lamb second, peach on top. We pulled an arugula salad with shaved parmaggiano on the side and called it dinner.

The flavors mixed beautifully. The lamb was perfectly medium rare and its juices infused the bread. The sweet and caramel of the balsamic-drizzled peaches countered the chili and spice of the other ingredients. With the salad and the corn, the meal was a damn-near perfect explosion of local, summer flavors.

The Duck

I’d read a slew of different recipes and preparations, and none of them quite struck me. For some reason, smoking the duck seemed like the way to go. I’d been experimenting with smoking in the Weber for over a year now, and this seemed like yet another good test.

Prep started on Sunday night. I rinsed the duck off and patted it dry. In a bowl large enough to accommodate it, I combined sea salt, cracked pepper, and dry green tea leaves. In the cavity I stuffed three lemon halves. Another full lemon was squirted over the duck, and I rubbed the mixture and lemon juice to coat the skin. The bowl was covered and put in the refrigerator over night. I also began a soak of three cups of hickory chips in water and hard cider.

The next evening I fired up the Weber. When the fire was intense and the hardwood was at a searing heat, I added more charcoal (hardwood, not briquets) and then added the drained hickory chips. On the clear half of the grill, I put the drip pan and poured in a quarter bottle of cider vinegar. I put the grill top in place and closed the lid to bring the fire down a notch. (This is the one step I could have let go a little longer to get the heat down to a slower smoke.) After about ten minutes, the duck went on.

I took the liquid left from the duck’s overnight sojourn as a base for the brush sauce. I added about a cup and a half of good red wine, a splash of dijon mustard, a tablespoon of olive oil, more pepper and a couple pinches of sugar. I whisked it together and let stand. Thirty minutes in and at intervals thereafter, I brushed it on the bird.

The skin turned a perfect reddish-brown fairly quickly. At two hours, I decided to pull the duck off. The cavity had a fair amount of liquid in it from the fat and the lemons so I used tongs to pour this off in the drip pan.

The result? Excellent. The skin was perfectly crisped, but the meat was moist and flavorful. The salt, lemon, and tea had combined to balance out the smokiness nicely. Served with cauliflower mashed potatoes and a market salad of arugula, purple cabbage, and radishes, it was a brilliant meal.

There are a few tweaks I’d like to make, but this is definitely one to try again.

Easter omens

PIcked this up from Serious Eats... Someone in Brooklyn bought a dozen eggs from TJ's, hard-boiled them, and opened them to discover this:


For some strange reason, this makes me think of the interestingly shaped, oddly colored eggs I used to buy at the farmer's market in Fayetteville.

Recycling Old Writing — farmer's market edition

This piece was one of a few exercises I gave myself in 2003. It seems appropriate to resurrect as the growing season begins to get its legs...

The redux of bluegrass and acoustic music in recent years has spurred a number of critics to speculate that the popularity represents some deepset need in our post-industrial, suburbanized society to return to natural roots. One might make the same argument about the explosion of farmer’s markets, that our BMW-driving aging yuppies need to assuage their distance from the soil. Certainly they are doing more for the environmental movement, not to mention their consciences, by buying their organic mesclun greens and broccoli rabe from the growers themselves.

Wander through a farmers’ market on Saturday morning and you can’t help but feel like you are a part of a community. Parents bring their children and dogs. Twenty-somethings who only admit to shopping at WalMart as a last resort make plans for dinner later. Empty-nesters run into friends they only see at the market and they catch up on the accomplishments of their children. Eight weeks to eighty years, it’s a scene convivial enough to warm the hardest of businessmen’s hearts.
And the backdrop! At the best markets it couldn’t be more lovely. At the market in Fayetteville, AR—recently mentioned as a top attraction in Southern Living—one can buy basil, sock monkeys, framed photographs, emu oil, seeded plants, tomatoes, goat cheese, bread, lamb, candles, walking sticks, knit hats, squash, you name it—depending on the season. Most of the merchants do their best to present an idyllic display; bok choy is arrayed in a basket rather than simply stacked. Little is left to chance or mere commerce, even the make-up of the market itself. Vendors who sell very little are kept in while others are refused—all in the name of “the right mix,” and a fair share of politics.

A similar mix can be found at most markets, many of which are smaller versions of the original green market in Union Square. There one can buy a week’s worth of groceries for less than you’d spend in D’Agostino’s. Certainly the mix of vendors moves beyond food, but wandering through the market and fighting past the crowds around the first apples or corn, there is little question where the focus is.

The same cannot be said of the Fayetteville market or of the market in Blue Hill, Maine. These markets provide just as many retail options as they do farmers’ produce. Where the market at Union Square began as a way to bring fresh produce into the city, many of the markets one can find elsewhere are developed around two fundamentally flawed notions: first that community can be invented, and second that small-scale agriculture can be saved by weekly exposure.

The first idea grows out of our fundamentally American notion that a community can be created by the simple mixing of the right elements. Build the right houses, add sidewalks and a school and a park and POOF: instant community. Sadly it does not work that way. Fortunately, these markets do help develop a sense of community; neighbors speak to each other and there is a certain amount of interaction between the farmers and the consumers. Unfortunately the connection between the Volvo-driving mother and the farmer is no more organic or long-lasting in most cases than the relationship between that same Volvo-driving mother and the salesperson at the mall. It is as superficial an idea of community as the Upper-East-Sider who believes his adoration of the “O Brother, Where Art Thou” soundtrack gives him some insight into rural Southern life. It’s as if the guilt of environmental segregation, the culpability of not knowing where most of our food comes from can be mitigated by a nice head of broccoli, and oh what about that beatiful watercolor over there. Wouldn’t it be lovely in our bedroom? And while we’re at it, why not have a pastry. It is the mall food court, Eddie Bauer/Sierra Club edition.

My (now ex-)wife is, of course, quick to remind me when I bring up arguments such as this that I have little room to criticize. I grew up far from farm life; to me, agrarian society was a relic of the feudal era. She points to our friendships with many of the growers, bakers, and cheese producers at the market as an example of the holes in this argument. My counter-argument, however, is that my love of these markets grew out of a general appreciation for cooperatives and organic markets, and that the two are interlinked. The women who chirp over the beautiful flowers and golfshirt-wearing men with them would not, by and large, recognize the inside of a coop store. Were the majority of the people I see wandering through the markets to truly bring themselves closer to the farmers and a more integral relationship with the land, I might not regard the markets as a fanciful, idyllic mall. And it is this reaction that draws me to the second problem with the apparent explosion in the number of towns hosting farmers’ markets.

When Willie Nelson began Farm Aid in the nineteen-eighties, a small part of our popular consciousness was focused for a time on the plight of the family farmer. But our cultural attention span is short and I would wager that many people don’t even know there was such an effort. We are hardly taught to wonder why much of our produce arrives in our supermarkets off-season, thousands of miles from where it was produced at a massive, corporate-owned farming complex. And we hardly know what a real tomato looks like any more—witness the pink slab of mush texture that passes for a tomato slice in chain restaurants. It should be a ripe time for farmer’s markets to bring us back to the source of our food, right?

Unfortunately not. It will take a far more substantial movement to combat the need for convenience that drives our society. For every person assuaging his guilt by buying produce at the farmer’s market, there are hundreds who do not know that lettuce does not naturally come as a shrink-wrapped globe. For every farmer who harvests and displays a perfect basket of heritage apples, there are hundreds of thousands of people who do not realize that a Red Delicious is a wax-shiny imitation of its cousins.

Every little bit helps, of course. Still, I have to wonder whether a few markets can actually bring us as a culture closer to the soil. Is it really a real environmentalism, a reaching back to our agrarian roots, or is it merely a guilt-assuaging way to spend a few hours on Saturday morning?

Forest Hill Farmers Market, again

So, this week's haul was a little smaller since Banana will be staying with Banana mére for the week. That said, the purchases included:

• Raspberries, black raspberries, and blackberries (as Chris Vaughn noted, the latter were probably not grown in VA. Bummer.
  
• Green leaf lettuce
  
• Carrots
  
• Baby radishes
  
• Coffee beans
  
• Sunflowers

My apologies to Jesse at Faith Farms for not getting any of the ribs she pulled out of the cooler for us. I had a moment when I realized, wisely, that we wouldn't be able to use any new meat for almost a month.

catching up on the weekend

Richmond hit record high temperatures this weekend, and at least one of my market finds was among the casualties of the heat. Strawberries at the end of their growing cycles just can't handle any length of time in the ninety-plus degree heat my berries were subjected to. By the time I got them into the refrigerator, the majority of the quart had begun to rot. Thankfully, they were the only casualties. The rest of the market finds included:

• pac choi
  
• arugula
  
• summer squash
  
• small cucumbers — very spicy!
  
• baby carrots — tender and flavorful, a revelation in such a common item; the grower who produced these also grew some remarkable micro-greens
  
• basil
  
• green garlic — lent an unusual spice to a batch of pesto
  
• eggs
  
• goat cheese
  
• sirloin tip steak
  
• flowers — to make up for the bouquet I neglected to get Banana a week ago at her dance recital
  

Saturday Market-ing

The Forest Hill Market keeps growing. Each week new craft and food vendors are popping up. There's even a woman who clips dogs' nails. The farm produce has also continued to expand as more vegetables come into season. We're starting to see squash and cucumbers. Carrots are available, but sparse. Asparagus, broccoli and strawberries are still showing up. The greens continue to be phenomenal, with wide varieties of lettuce, chards, kales, and various spicy greens. We were down one meat vendor this week, but they aren't the one I usually buy from.

That said, this week's haul:

• broccoli
  
• strawberries
  
• asparagus
  
• two kinds of lettuce
  
• Tuscan kale
  
• English peas
  
• pork chops
  
• chorizo
  
• ribs
  
• strawberry jam (on a taste, possibly the best I've ever had, and well worth the $6.50 for a large jar)
  

Dinner tonight is probably at a restaurant because of the ballet performance, but tomorrow, we will be slow-cooking the ribs on the grill. They should perfectly accompany one of the Villa Appalachia wines I have. There also promises to be grilled zucchini and something made with an awesome green garlic head. I plan to pore over Alice Waters The Art of Simple Food for more ideas.

But back to the market for a moment. What also continues to impress me are the numbers of people flocking to the market. They grow and get a little more diverse each week. Clearly, Richmond needed (and continues to need) this kind of organic (not necessarily referring to food) sense of community.

Forest Hill Farmers Market

Two new growers markets opened in Richmond this weekend: The Lakeside Market (which I will investigate on Wednesday, its other day) and the Forest Hill Farmers Market. The latter is being run by the same folks who launched the Byrd House Market in Oregon Hill last year. They are pulling in some excellent growers—Victory and Amy's Farms, among others—and excellent meat producers.

Perhaps the most notable aspect thing I was was the community involvement. This was the first day of a market that had received some publicity, but had hardly been plastered everywhere. Still, the place was packed before nine-thirty, and some of the vendors had begun to run out of the stocks they'd brought. As the guy at Amy's told me, "Who knew it'd be this big? I guess we'll have to bring more next time. Selling out by nine-thirty is just crazy." Crazy indeed, until you factor in how desperate many people in Richmond have been for the opening of an honest-to-god Saturday morning farmers market.

Frankly, there's no substitute for the sense of community you feel at such markets. Whether you're in Leyden or Fayetteville or New York or—now—Richmond, the connection to community and food source is irreplaceable. You run into neighbors and co-workers; you develop relationships with the people who produce your food; you make a moral decision that connects you directly to the soil and air within your region. After all, I would far rather pay a little more to purchase my meat from the people who actually raised the animals than to pay a supermarket for meat that came—even in the case of the low organic varieties—from some generic farm a few thousand miles away. I'd rather pay the same for carrots or lettuce that were raised a few dozen miles away rather than a few thousand.

As much as we live in and cannot truly escape a consumerist society, making decisions like choosing local production and connections mitigates some of the evils of the market by channeling our dollars into the local economy and small business grounded in nearby soil rather than the silk-lined purses of the agribusinesses.*




* My fear about the success of markets here is that the agribusiness lobby is very, very strong in Virginia. I do not trust that the corporations won't make an effort to co-opt or—at the very least—hinder the markets and locavore movement here.

Blue Hill Farmers Market

We started coming to this market in 2003, the summer we spent up here, and got to know some of the farmers. It's a small crew of local, exclusively organic farmers and the obligatory artisans. The produce is of a generally excellent quality--though it's still just greens season here--and more reasonably priced than at the markets in Richmond--$3 for a bag of mesclun instead of $5. It is still early in the season, however, so we only picked up mesclun, spinach, and chevre.

One of these days I'll have to be more adventuresome and buy things like beets and turnip greens.