Vinoteca, Wine and Food in the Half-Frozen North (Creek)

I don’t remember exactly when I first read Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone, but I think I was in my very early twenties (if that). The volume, a paperback with a worn cover and thin pages that had the musty smell particular to old books, had belonged to my mother and she had faint memories of it, but nothing solid.  There are a lot of layers to the story, but a good summary might go something like this: Pietro Spina, a member of the Socialist party, returns to Mussolini’s Italy after years of politically forced exile.  Taken ill, he is sent to a remote mountain village in Abruzzi to recover, posing as a priest named Don Paolo. There, his political ideologies come face-to-face with the brutal life of the peasants and Spina, an intellectual man, realizes that rhetoric and words are not enough.

http://blog.timesunion.com/vinoteca/bread-and-wine/4924/

Food, Ales and Friendship

Anna Bowers, my unofficial goddaughter and dear friend, writes two blogs, one for TimesUnion and another for herself.  The TimesUnion Blog she does in large part for the benefit of the Bowers family’s cafe/wine bar, barVino, in the Adirondacks town of North Creek, NY, but we’re also partial to beers, various Dogfish Head concoctions from the brewery in Rehoboth. Below is one evening with food, ale, and long-time friends.

My friend Kevin and I just finished hosting our fourth “off-hours” dinner party this past Monday. Kevin is one of the chefs at the restaurant, barVino, that I own with my father and brother – as well as being someone I’ve known since we were both teenagers. It’s strange and lovely to not only suddenly be adults with someone who has been a part of your life since adolescence, but to also run a business with them.

Read more:

http://vinogirl79.tumblr.com/post/13908633745/good-for-what-ales-you

http://blog.timesunion.com/vinoteca/bread-and-wine/4924/#comments

 

Chestertown Middle School Wins Special Consideration

Chestertown Middle School Gardeners

Sabine Harvey, Master Gardener coordinator and gardener extraordinaire, submitted the Chestertown Middle School Grow It Eat It garden she spearheaded with the kids this year to Mother Earth News’s Fabulous Food Garden contest. The garden, among about 100 (if memory serves)  submitted to the contest, was grown behind the school, and provided not only some terrific meals for the budding veggie gardeners, but fresh vegetables for the Kent County Food Pantry. While it didn’t actually win, it can darned close and impressed the judges so much they created a second prize: they’ve become runner-up and the garden is garnering $100. Well done Sabine and all the young gardeners!

Read more:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/grow-it/fabulous-food-garden-contest-winners-zb0z1112zrog.aspx

http://www.chestertownspy.com/sabine-harvey-master-gardener/

Slow Money: Like Buy Local But Invested

“Slow Money” is the name for a movement started by socially conscious investing pioneer and author,

Woody Tasch, author of Slow Money

Woody Tasch. …Slow Money is dedicated to connecting investors to their local economies by marshaling financial resources to invest in small food enterprises and local food systems.

Tasch’s vision for Slow Money, now not just a concept but also a non-profit organization, seeks nothing less than a complete overhaul of the way we think about and spend our money, channeling much more of it into producing healthy local food, strengthening local communities instead of multinational corporations, and restoring our flagging economy in the process. Instead of venture capital bankrolling far flung high tech start-ups, Tasch hopes to see “nurture capital” funding local merchants and producers who, in turn, plug half of their profits back into their communities, ensuring one small local virtuous circle that values soil fertility, carrying capacity, a sense of place, care of the commons, diversity, nonviolence, and cultural, ecological and economic health as much as financial return. Tasch hopes to get there by persuading a million Americans to invest at least one percent of their assets in local food systems by 2020.

 To read more:

http://www.emagazine.com/earth-talk/what-is-slow-money/

Slow Money (Chelsea Green Publishing $21.95)

http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/inquiries_into_the_nature_of_slow_money:hardcover

A Little Something for the Holidays

It’s just not Christmas until I hear the Hallelujah chorus by Georg Frideric Handel. The chorus, Handel’s musical tribute to the Messiah, was performed for the first time at Easter, 1742, not Christmas.

Georg Frideric Handel 1749. b.1685 d.1759

No matter. It’s a moving reminder of what the Christian portion of this holiday season is actually meant to be about. Seeing it in unlikely places — malls and food courts, where we’re urged to spend spend spend to make ourselves and our families happy and to boost the consumer economy — is both a timely and poignant reminder of the spiritual food and the sustenance of faith that we all crave.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp_RHnQ-jgU

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M3y2YD6Qy4

Leftover Days That Follow

While I love the meal of Turkey Day – mash, gravy stuffing, what’s not to love? – I actually like the days that follow more.  The meal itself, fairly hidebound in tradition, offers limited scope for creativity, but the day after, you can have at it with abandon. It’s like the difference between a formal ball and a hoedown.

The possibilities with leftover turkey are almost endless:  hot curried turkey salad, cold turkey salad with scallions, apples, toasted walnuts and celery, turkey croquettes with mornay sauce, plain old turkey sandwiches with a big slathering of garlic mayo on rye bread with sliced sweet onion and a beer (Dogfish Head Raison D’Etre), turkey and mushroom crepes with thyme, sautéed shallots and smoked gouda sauce, turkey wraps with lettuce, scallion, avocado and chipotle sauce, turkey tetrazinni, turkey pot pie and turkey soup.

This year, I must confess, that my turkey, stuffed and roasted (of COURSE with the stuffing inside the bird, we did it for years and no one has died of it yet!) wasn’t that great.  I don’t know whether it was the bird, which was free-range, organic, local and fresh, hitting all the foodie hot buttons, simply wasn’t flavorful. OR, whether I simply didn’t do enough to help it along. My sister-in-law’s turkey ( see previous post) was superb, flavorful, crisp-skinned, moist and absolutely delicious, was brined and fretted-over, so maybe I need to do some brining and more fretting for the next bird.

My sister-in-law, who flies out tomorrow, was handing over leftovers like door prizes as we walked out the door last night. Matt got the turkey carcass and gravy. With that, he will make one heck-of-a-stock. Which should always be the first order of culinary business the day after Thanksgiving.

To make stock, take whatever remains of the truly useable meat off the bone and throw the carcass into a big stockpot with every odd little bit of meat, skin, bone and fond (the gorgeously flavorful bits stuck to the bottom of the roasting pan that you get out with a little boiling water and wooden scraper) including the wing tips, and some leftover gravy.  Throw in carrots, celery, onion, a leek if you’ve got it, parsley, thyme, a sage leaf and plenty of water. Simmer it for a couple of aromatic hours on the back of the stove. (Want to sell your house? Have a pot of stock simmering when potential buyers arrive. Who can resist a house that already smells like home?).

Then, once the stock is going, assess. How much meat is left and in what configuration? Plenty of thin slices?  Perfect for turkey reubens, wraps, turkey sandwiches with cranberry chutney on whole grain bread, turkey-and-bacon club sandwiches, turkey and wild rice salad with nuts and dried apricots lightly doused with orange-and-mustard vinaigrette.

Little bits of wing meat, the oysters off the back and maybe some streamers of thigh in the bottom of the pan?  Turkey hash with finely chopped sautéed potatoes, sweet peppers and onion, maybe a little cayenne and a fried egg on top. Or curried turkey ragout with sautéed onion, celery, carrot, potato with peas added at the last minute, seasoned with curry and Worcestershire. For wonderfully retro croquettes, chop turkey very fine, grate some onion, and wrap it in a stiff béchamel made with a little milk and turkey broth. Shape them into patties or the classic little anthill-shaped mounds, roll them in bread or cracker crumbs and fry in a little oil. Dress them up with mornay sauce (thin béchamel/broth with grated gruyere and maybe a splash of white wine). Or use virtually the same beginnings and turn it into a turkey soufflé.

If there are bigger pieces, something that can be cut into chunks, it’s turkey salad of some kind – hot and curried with French’s Fried Onion Rings, almonds, water chestnuts and yogurt/mayo dressing, or cold salad with toasted nuts, parsley, apples, grapes and scallions dressed with balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

But my favorite, I think, is turkey pot pie. I do a fairly classic version, adding flavor not by adding tons of salt but by cooking the vegetables in rich turkey stock seasoned with celery tops, thyme and tarragon. After straining out the barely-tender veggies, I thicken the vegetable-and-herb-infused broth slightly to make the sauce. I usually buy the crust, since I can’t make one any better than Pillsbury.

Yet even with a store-bought crust, there’s something distinctly comforting about pot pie.  It catapults me back to childhood, to a time when it felt like the world was filled with attainable riches. A good life could be had in exchange for effort and an appreciation of the simple pleasures.

Served on a Friday evening by the fire, turkey pot pie is the reassuringly low-key end to a fraught week. Brought to a candlelit table, its crust the golden color of a beach at dusk, the juices just starting to rise up and drip tantalizingly down the side, and banked by a good sauvignon blanc, it’s downright elegant.

Turkey Pot Pie

1 pie crust

1 cup cooked turkey, cubed

¾ cup carrots, sliced

¾ cup onions, chopped

¾ cup potatoes, cubed

1 cup frozen peas

¼ tsp dried tarragon

¼ tsp dried or fresh thyme

1 ½ cups rich turkey stock

4 tblsp corn starch dissolved in 4 tblsp cool water

salt and pepper to taste

Cook the carrots, potatoes and onions in the turkey stock gently until barely fork tender. Dip out the vegetables and put into a casserole or soufflé dish along with the frozen peas and the cubed turkey. Lightly salt and pepper the veggies and meat. Taste the stock for seasoning. Put thyme and tarragon in the stock and bring to the boil. Dissolve the cornstarch in the cool water, and whisk into the boiling stock. It should thicken and turn clear in a matter of a moment. Once it’s thick and clear not cloudy, pour over the vegetables and meat. Top with a crust. Put a few slits in the crust. (As one of the characters in the John Wayne movie, The Cowboys, said: Cut three slits in the top –two to let out the steam and one more because your mama said so).  Bake at 375F for 35 minutes or until the crust is browned and completely done.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Turkey-Potpie-with-Cheddar-Biscuit-Crust-240566

http://www.hellmanns.us/promotions/therealfoodproject/recipe_collection.aspx?Category=SandwichesWraps

http://www.hellmanns.us/promotions/therealfoodproject/recipe_detail.aspx?recipeid=11641&version=1

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/michael-chiarello/next-day-turkey-soup-recipe/index.html

Giving Thanks on Turkey Day

Imagined meeting of Pilgrims and Samoset

Complaining about the cooking to be done for Thanksgiving has gotten to be something of a national pastime; more and more blogs and advice columns offer commiseration larded with helpful hints on ways to circumvent what they consider the ‘worst’ of it. And indeed, if I had a family who sprawled on the sofa while I, who work too, did all the heavy lifting, I’d be supremely pissed (as in: majorly annoyed, not overly-lubricated, though if unhelpful couch potatoes were what I was facing, I’d probably be that too!). But I’m not. My family cooks. All of us, in our own kitchens and together in a single milling throng on the actual day. Additionally, I’m married to a Provider, a forager in field and stream, who ran out at 0-dark-hundred this morning with his enthusiasm and his shotgun and came home with dinner.

Additionally, I grow and then put up a large portion of our vegetables and some fruits — a labor of love, but a labor nonetheless.  It makes me mindful of the luxury we have in the country at this country at this point in history.

I stand in a kitchen that has heat, running water, an embarrassingly well-stocked frig, and a stove and oven that turn on and off at will, and reflect, with a combination of awe and humility, on those who sat down with what must have been enormous gratitude at whatever makeshift communal board for the first Thanksgiving to share a meal that they had foraged, grown, snared, shot and prepared. It was a labor of love, but also an act of survival in a tenuous time.

Wild American Turkey

The contrast between then and now is sharp — when we think of it. Which is the key. Gratitude is conscious, knowledge of what we have contrasted with what could be.  I understand that not everyone likes to or wants to cook. But for that one meal each year, the one that should take us back not only to the food that was on that makeshift communal table, but what the food cost the Pilgrims and Indians in skill, energy, patience, determination and hard work to put there, together, in the face of an always uncertain future, there should be no complaints.