On Walnut Ridge

the fruits of july

July means blackberries!   This photo is of Apache blackberries, a domestic variety that I planted along the fence around the garden.  Along our driveway are several wild blackberry brambles, and I’ll take the taste of those little gems over these big, fat domestic berries any day. The domestic berries are like Las Vegas strippers: plumped up, sexy, and easy to get.  Picking the wild ones involves a bit of preparation. The other day I suited up to pick wild berries- no skin exposed- tons of Deet- and my gardening gloves on.   I filled up my basket and then took off my picking clothes before ambling out to the garden to pick these easy guys! No thorns, no chiggers, and huge juicy berries.  The domestic berries are so easy to grow, I don’t understand why every yard doesn’t sport a few canes.

Apache is a nice domestic blackberry that just needs some good amended soil, a bit of sunshine and consistent watering for the first year to establish its root system. Plant the canes three feet apart along a fence line or string up a support with some posts and wire.They make a great privacy screen in the summer! The canes that grow in the first year are primocanes, and won’t produce fruit. Prune them to around four feet tall. The second season, they will become floricanes, and will be producing berries. After fruiting is over and the canes die, cut those first year canes out, and tie up the new canes, which will become the fruit producers the following year. If you want to grow blackberries, or raspberries, check out your local Farmer’s Co-op next year for good plants at reasonable prices.

Here is one day’s raspberry harvest from only 5 plants!

  Raspberries!

Here is  the reason I gain weight in the summer while everyone else is wasting away in the heat; Aunt Ina’s Quick Cobbler.  It’s just too easy. Pick the berries, make the cobbler, pig out. The recipe is in the Swan Family Cookbook, which was complied by one of my industrious cousins. You can’t buy it, unfortunately. So  you won’t get to see the photo of me at four years old with my finger stuck  up my nose that precedes the section on Salads. Too bad, right?

Here is Aunt Ina’s recipe;

1 stick of butter

1 C. sugar

1 C. self-rising flour

3/4 C. milk

2-3 cups fresh fruit   ( if using peaches or apples, steam the fruit first to soften it)

Melt the butter in a deep dish. Mix the sugar, flour and milk together in a separate bowl, then pour the mixture over the melted butter. Put the fruit on the top and bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until the top becomes slightly browned and the cobbler is firm.

“Reuse, Refurbish, Recycle”. It’s a trendy slogan, and it’s something I find rewarding.  Tim and I were going through boxes in the attic yesterday. We were hauling the Christmas decorations back to their storage spot until next year and got distracted. We found a box of knick-knacks he had collected from his parents’ house after they died; little porcelain bells, a mother of pearl encrusted pill-box,  red glass salt and pepper shakers, and some carved wooden animals. With a bit of polish, the salt and pepper shakers were usable, and the wooden animals made  a great addition to the cows and horses and sheep in the grandchildren’s collection of farm animals.

Sometimes I cook with the principle of recycling in mind. Perhaps it is laziness, or the fact that I hardly ever throw food away, but I sort of enjoy going through the refrigerator and seeing if I can make something delicious out of the bits and pieces of past meals. Sort of like making stone soup. I’d been in the garden earlier in the day and collected a basket of kale and lettuces and spinach.  The lettuces and spinach would make a salad, and I wanted to use the kale in something warm.

I opened the refrigerator and began looking through the bins. The first find was encouraging. A half used package of bacon!

The smell of bacon frying is the solitary reason I will never understand vegans. I think of vegans in the same category as priests and nuns who pledge to give up sex forever as a religious practice. No sex? No bacon? Come on, life is too short for those kinds of sacrifices.  I suppose there are some people who actually don’t like bacon, but then again, that is sort of diagnostic, don’t you think?

If you want to make stone soup, begin with some kind of savory fat or meat.  If bacon, fry 4 pieces of bacon very crisp and drain off most of the drippings. If you are a nerd like me, you pour it into the little round aluminum canister like your grandmother used to collect bacon grease. It even helpfully has the word GREASE pressed into the side in case you get confused. Your stuffy foody friends will cringe at the sight of it, but grandma knew a thing or two about flavor. The rest of you can pour your grease into something non plastic and throw it out later, but why? Crumble the bacon into a large soup pot.

I had an abundance of shallots this year so I chopped a handful along with  2 cloves of garlic and a few pieces of celery I found in the crisper. Onions would work just as well. Chop them fairly fine and then saute them in the drippings until they are soft. Put the garlic and onions/shallots and celery in the pot with the bacon.

Since I had a big bunch of kale, I cut out the ribs and chopped it before wilting it in a skillet with some olive oil. I then put the wilted kale in the soup pot. Cabbage or spinach would also work nicely.

I found some  red fingerling  potatoes and a few carrots in the fridge.  I chopped them up and put them in a small covered saucepan to boil until they were on the soft side.  Then I put the potatoes and carrots and the water they were cooking in all into the soup pot with the other vegetables and bacon.

Now you can go a bit crazy here and create your own version of stone soup. What’s in the fridge? I found a cup of white gravy left from last week. I also found some roasted root vegetables and some white beans.  I put them all in the soup.  Then I took 2 quart jars of tomatoes I canned this summer and poured them into the pot, along with 2 cups of chicken broth. Then I sprinkled on some dried thyme and few sprigs of rosemary, a bit or salt and a grind or two of pepper.

So the basics are the following; a savory fat or bit of leftover meat,  an assortment of vegetables, some broth and seasonings. Be sure you have enough liquid that the soup can cook down a bit and not get too thick. Let it sit on the stove and simmer on low for a couple of hours.  Make yourself a cocktail and relax while your soup simmers. It will smell heavenly and whomever you live with will think you a culinary goddess.

The Intentional Eater’s Dilemma

I was listening to an interview with Micheal Pollan on NPR last weekend. He was doing Michael Feldman’s show, What Do You Know?, and was talking about the new addition of his book Food Rules. Micheal Pollan is smart, inspiring and convincing about food.  In the Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan established himself as the Pied Piper of intentional eaters by tracing the industrial food production system from source to table.

On my kitchen counter sits Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver’s book about her family’s year long experience of living in the Kentucky countryside and eating only what they could grow or buy close to home. Kingsolver’s book convinced me of the virtues , and the pleasures, of being a locavore. 

In the same week as the Pollan interview,  I downloaded an article by Andrew Weil on the Anti-inflammatory diet, hoping to use my food choices as a way to diminish the symptoms of lupus that have been wreaking havoc on my body the past few months.  If I eliminate the foods that are on Weil’s list of no-no’s, and I eliminate foods that are non-organically grown, and I eliminate foods that were grown far away and shipped to my area, burning fossil fuels and contributing to the decimation of the ozone layer, what is left for me to eat?  Especially in the winter, and darn it, it is winter now. The only things in the garden are the winter greens. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to have them. I eat them raw. I chop them into soups. I make dips, omelets, and casseroles with them. But what about my craving for an orange? Or a fresh carrot?

Being a locavore in Zone 6b is no fun in the winter. But if I hop on down to the nearest grocery and buy an organic orange that was picked a couple of weeks ago and came to me by way of California and an 18 wheeler, I feel as if I am doing something immoral.  If I only eat what I can buy or grow in my hometown, I am resigned to the frozen or canned or dried fruits and veggies stacked in my pantry or on my freezer shelves. I try to be good, I really do. I haven’t had a fresh green bean since August.

But I have a confession to make. I buy limes. I buy them all year long, three or four at a time. Granted, I am growing a lime tree, I have good intentions. If I live another 20 years and manage to keep this tree alive, perhaps one day I will quit my guilty habit of buying fresh limes. Could Barbara Kingsolver and her family live on that farm the rest of their lives, eating only what they could make or purchase within a few miles? I wonder. Would her children grow up smuggling fresh fruit into the house under their raincoats? Would her husband leave her for the first woman who offered him a fresh vine-ripened tomato mid-winter?                     .

This food choice thing is one area where I believe in moderation. Michael Pollan talks about flexatarians- people who are mainly vegetarian but eat meat on occasion. I like that word. I’m a flexatarian. Mostly, I eat organic food that I grow in my own yard, and meat that some man in my family has shot and slaughtered. But now and then I go to Subway and get a turkey sandwich and a bag of chips. Sometimes I buy beef jerky and pretzels at the gas station and chase them with a Diet Coke. And we already know about my lime habit.  None of us has to eat perfectly to make an impact on the environment. If all of us would eat a little more organic, and a little more local, and a little less meat, the planet, and our bodies, would be a lot better off.