The Yale Farm is known for our d’Avignon radishes, our hand-mixed salad greens, and out Sungold tomatoes, but just last week I learned of a very different crop at the farm that is at its peak harvest. Dotted all over the berm under our horsechestnut tree are tiny, delicate saffron crocuses! (To give a sense of scale, the flowers are no more than four inches tall.)

Armed with a pair of pliers, the harvest began. Saffron comes from the stigmas of the eponymous crocus, and should ideally be harvested on the first day that the flower blooms. There are three threads to the stigma, each no more than an inch and a half long, that are delicately plucked out of the flower and laid out to dry.

Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world — we grow it at the farm just for kicks, but its ideal hot and dry conditions, plus the labor intensive hand-picking that it requires, means that most of the saffron in the world is grown in Iran, Spain, and India.

What makes saffron so special? In its dried form, saffron is an essential ingredient in Italian, Middle Eastern, and South Asian cuisine. It has this amazing aroma, rich and somehow simultaneously sweet and bitter. Saffron often crushed and dissolved in water or wine to best impart the golden color it gives to any food it’s added to. Paella gets its color from saffron; many risottos use it, too. But I grew up using saffron in the Iranian food prepared by my mother and grandmother.

Iranians use saffron in everything — as a garnish, a rice platter is topped with about a quarter-cup of rice that is orange from soaking in it. Chicken in Iranain dishes is never flesh-toned but always a golden yellow from saffron. Iranain ice cream is characterized by red flecks of saffron and clots of frozen cream. The list goes on. After the jump is my mother’s recipe for sholeh zard, a traditional Iranian rice pudding whose name translates to “yellow soup.” Flavored with saffron and garnished with cinnamon, it’s perfect for cold fall days served either warm or cold.

Sholeh Zard

• 2/3 cup Basmati rice
• 2 cups water
• 3-4 tablespoons butter
• 1-1 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 tablespoons rosewater
• large pinch saffron
• silvered almonds (optional)

Rinse the rice and place in medium-sized pot. Add water and butter and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally so that the rice does not stay whole. Smash with the back of a fork if necessary, and add more water if needed.

Once the rice is cooked, add sugar (taste as you add the sugar in stages so it is not too sweet). Cook some more until sugar melts and the rice pudding thickens. Stir in rosewater.

Add the crushed saffron to the pudding. (You may rub the saffron mixed with a tablespoon of sugar with the back of a spoon so it is crushed well.) Add a handful of slivered almonds. Simmer for a while. Note: you may adjust the pudding by adding water or boiling on higher heat if necessary to acquire the desired thickness.

Put the pudding in serving dishes and decorate with cinnamon to create an interesting pattern on it. If desired, cut a stencil from paper to print a pattern on its surface. Can be served warm or chilled.

One of the best dishes I have ever had was pumpkin ravioli from Cucina di Pesce, in New York City’s East Village. The pasta was the perfect thickness. It was elastic without being rubbery and ideally sized to wrap around the medallion of harvest-fresh pumpkin filling, whose abundance made it as hearty as cheese ravioli. The sauce was good, I think; something that traditionally complements pumpkin ravioli, like a light cream-based sauce. I actually don’t quite remember what it was, but it was only because my teeth, tongue, and mind chewed the ravioli together, focusing on its texture and the bright, sweet flavor of its pumpkin innards. The pretty cream (at least I’m quite sure it was a cream sauce) was a bit like the bride and groom on top of a wedding cake: necessary decoration with an undeniable contextual presence, but ultimately not part of the food party on my plate.

Two weekends ago, my residential college held its annual Harvest Festival, replete with delicious fall foods: apple cider, chai tea, pumpkin pie, apple pie, kettle corn, and caramel apples. My heart raced at the sight of twenty or thirty pumpkins in the dining hall, my mouth started watering, and my mind wandered back to that plate of pumpkin ravioli, that moment of tasty bliss I enjoyed at a dinner with seven of my closest friends. And that’s when I knew. I could have that ravioli again. I could recreate it, and invite my friends over for dinner, and have the best deja vu ever. I planned the ingredients for the filling. I scoured the internet for tips on how to make the best ravioli shells. After a brief shopping trip, I was ready. How did it go? Read more after the jump!

I turned my “spunky” Pandora station up on high, pulled the recipe up for pasta dough on my computer, and set to work. I grabbed a sheet pan, since my college kitchen is a little want for table space, and dumped my measured mound of flour onto it. Then, as advised by several sources and videos that claimed the authentic way to make pasta dough was to make a volcano out of the pasta mound and crack the eggs right into the center of it, beat the eggs with extra virgin olive oil and salt, and then slowly incorporate the sides of the flour mound into it, I did precisely that. But unlike the chef whose nice, slow, expert gestures of swirling the eggy center caught and incorporated pockets of flour into the liquid mixture at a gradual pace, I grew impatient. And when you’re not an expert at something, or even when you are an expert at a recipe, impatience is your enemy. It leads to rash decisions. After I had swirled about half the flour into it, I thought that I could just start incorporating larger amounts of it faster, and I accidentally broke one side of the volcano of flour so that the thick, liquid egg and flour mixture began to flow out of the broken dam. Welcome to Franken-pasta disaster number one.

Covered in flecks of flour and a good deal of amateur chef’s despair, I almost gave up. But, I had friends who I promised I would feed, and a stupid sense of resolve that tends to take over whenever I’m faced with a difficult situation. And so I attempted to sweet-talk my gestating pasta-mound, “No, stop that, come back! Please? Okay, I’ll rebuild the flour wall, as long as you just stop running…okay, that’s not working, how about I just throw all of the flour into the center and mix you together, that ok?” Of course, talking to it resulted in nothing more than a verbalization of plan B. I threw it all in, and began to think of it as just any other dough. Once I managed to gather it into a ball, my kneader’s intuition kicked in, and I stretched and rolled it like nobody’s business. I set it aside and let it rest before I attempted to conquer the next big step.

It’s no secret that rolling out ravioli dough is part talent, part Italian grandmother’s expertise. Most chefs and home cooks today who make pasta use a handy dandy pasta maker or cranker. You crank the dough through a press, adjust the lever of the contraption to a thinner setting, and pass it through again and again, until it’s thin enough that you can almost see through it.

Yep. thin enough that you can almost see through it, because once it hits the boiling water, it’ll thicken. Unarmed with a pasta making machine, unschooled in the art of making pasta, and completely untalented in bicep department, I was the unarmed greenhorn, too stubborn to give in to making ravioli with wonton wrappers because I had neither the right equipment nor any experience at all.

And so, I did the only thing I could. I borrowed a rolling pin, sucked in my breath, spread some flour out onto the table and exhaled. Then, the rolling pin, driven by the brute force of my puny arms, met with the dough. I rolled and rolled; the pin rotated endlessly like tires on a cross-country drive. I felt like I’d finished a workout and a half by the time the dough was thin enough. But it was worth it. Labor and effort really are evident in good food. At least, that’s what my friends said when they scarfed down the ravioli. I thought they tasted pretty good for a first try as well.

Pumpkin Ravioli with Browned Butter Ginger Sauce (Serves 4-6)

Pasta Dough

3 cups of flour

3 large eggs

½ tsp. salt

1 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

Pumpkin Filling

1 ¼ cups of roasted pumpkin puree (or 1 15 oz. can of pumpkin puree)

½ teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

1 tablespoon chopped ginger

½ tablespoon chopped garlic

¼ cup grated parmesan cheese

¼ cup ricotta cheese

1 egg

Browned Butter Ginger Sauce

1 tbsp. sliced ginger

4 tbsp. butter

1. Mix flour and salt together. Make a well in the center of the pasta and crack the eggs into the center. This is pasta, old school.
2. Beat the eggs in the center and gradually fold in the flour with your hands.
3. When the dough starts to come together, knead it for approx 8-12 minutes until it forms smooth ball. Let it rest for 30 minutes to an hour.
4. While the dough is resting, combine the ingredients for the pumpkin filling together in a bowl.
5. Pasta maker (or rolling pin time). Roll out the dough, preferably into a large rectangle until it is thin enough that you can see your fingers through it. Lightly flour it as you’re rolling it out to keep it from sticking.
6. Beat the egg to make an egg wash that will help the pasta stick to itself.
7. Take a teaspoon and lay down the filling on one half of the pasta sheet in an array. Brush the egg wash in the spaces on that half of the pasta and fold the top over. Push the dough down between the pumpkin hills to ensure that the pasta is sticking.
8. Take a pizza cutter or a cup or ravioli cutter and cut the ravioli into squares (or other shapes).
9. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add the ravioli about 7-10 at a time. Fresh pasta should only take about 3-4 minutes to cook. Set aside finished ravioli in a strainer.
10. Brown the butter in a saucepan and add the sliced ginger. When the ginger browns, turn the heat off and coat the ravioli in the browned butter. Serve.

by Anastatia Curley

This new column by YSFP alumna Anastatia Curley considers sustainable food for the broke, the lazy, and the non-cook.

In my (admittedly unscientific) system of soup-classification, potato-leek qualifies as fancy soup. Soups like lentil, split pea, or black bean are workhorse soups, the sturdy, scruffy, hardworking-young-man-from-the-provinces kind of soup, but potato-leek soup is his city cousin, well-clad and well-coiffed. Perhaps this is not how you think about soup. But just imagine a spoonful of potato-leek soup for a moment: it’s creamy, almost silky on the tongue, and its flavor subtly melds potatoes, leeks, and cream. Any recipe that uses leeks, the fancy version of onions, oozes sophistication, as far as I am concerned.

Okay, maybe I haven’t convinced you, but you should still make this soup. Because not only will it make you look like a sophisticated cook (seriously, leeks) but it’s shockingly cheap. I calculated how much it cost to make and then did it again because I couldn’t believe my own conclusion. Potatoes at my local farmers’ market were $2.00/pound, and leeks $1.00/bunch. Even with allowances for butter and milk, or bizarre potato markups, soup for at least four can be had for $5.00. Which (hopefully) leaves you a few dollars for a loaf of bread and some salad greens, or some sausages. This would be excellent with sausages.

And now that I’ve got your attention, click “more” for the recipe:

Potato-Leek Soup

Adapted from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

About 1.5 pounds boiling potatoes (don’t use baking potatoes, they’re too starchy)

• 2 large leeks, or 4 small ones, white parts only
• 2 tbps butter
• salt
• pepper
• milk or cream

1. Chop the leeks. If yours are sandy, put them in colander in a bowl of cold water, and soak them while you prepare the potatoes, then lift them out of the bowl, leaving the sand in the bottom.
2. Quarter the potatoes and then slice them as thinly as your knife skills will allow.
3. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over low heat, then add the potatoes and the leeks. Cover the pan and cook for about 10 minutes. Make sure the heat is very low while you do this; you don’t want the potatoes on the bottom of the pan to burn.
4. Add about 5 cups of water to the pan and a tablespoon of salt, then bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for 35 minutes or so, until the potatoes are fully cooked. Push a few against the sides of the pan to break them up and give the soup body.
5. If you want a blended soup (this is the sexy potato-leek soup of my imagination) then use an immersion blender, regular blender, food processor, or food mill to blend the soup now. If you don’t, the soup will still be luscious, but will be both more chunky and more brothy.
6. Taste for salt and add more if need be. Add milk or cream to thin the soup and give it richness, and black pepper as you like.

Move over, Food Network. Today we look to some Yalies who play with their food, and want us to play with it, too. Blogging isn’t just for diary-keeping or news reporting: these three use their blogs to document their everyday cooking and eating.

• Yum Yum Yale – http://yumyumyale.blogspot.com/
  Love to cook, but on the meal plan? Yum Yum Yale is about taking what the dining hall serves for dinner and running with it. From autumnal smoothies, to brunch burritos, to smooshed-together creations from the Sunday sundae bar, each recipe comes with an ingredient list and video. Here’s one for what YYY calls “Le Purkey Sandviche,” featuring Will Moritz ‘12 as narrator:
  
• Tung in Cheek – http://tungincheek.wordpress.com/
  If the first few recipes on this website look familiar, it’s because it belongs to fellow YSFP blogger Margaret Tung! Her photography is great, and her recipes range from dining hall creations to off-campus full-on kitchen affairs. Each recipe comes with a story — don’t miss out. You can also read essays and articles she’s written for classes and newspapers at Yale.
• Needs More Salt – http://needsmoresalt.tumblr.com/
  Full disclosure: this is my website! When I realized that my best friend and I cook 99% of our meals together from scratch but often don’t use a recipe, I wanted a way to document what we made. I’m a visual thinker and my iPhone has convenient camera-and-internet capibilities, so Needs More Salt (something you’ll hear me say a lot in the kitchen) was born. I link to recipes from around the web, and write out basic ingredients when I end up improvising. You’ll quickly learn just how much we love kimchi, and already I’m figuring out so much about lighting and food display.

The lesson we learn from all three of these blogs is that cooking doesn’t need to be big-budget or intimidating: even making a sandwich requires a recipe, no matter how basic. So next time you’re in a dining hall, use your imagination! Be sure to share with us what you make.

This week on Organic Nation.tv, a video of the Yale Farm including an interview with YSFP director Melina Shannon-DiPietro and shots of friends working on the Farm! A picture can speak a thousand words, but that’s nothing compared to a shot of Tuscan kale swaying gently in the wind.

Read the article and watch the video here or click to watch it below:

On The Atlantic’s Food Channel this week, YSFP Director Melina Shannon-DiPietro on Yale Dining’s newest employee: Ian Pocock, forager. No, he won’t be roaming the forests and living off the land — the forager’s job is to match local farms with Yale’s dining halls to make eating sustainably become an  economically and organizationally sustainable choice, too.

Go read the post – Melina cites Yale’s all-local salsa as a great example of where sustainable choices go right. Ian is a friend, and a regular volunteer at the Yale Farm: we wish him all the best.

The weather was cold and I was a little bit underdressed in shorts, but I went to the farm on Friday, anyway. I arrived as the harvest for market on Saturday was winding down: the lettuce was being bagged and the radishes were being bunched. I headed out with a friend to harvest swiss chard (only the larger outer leaves — the plants we picked from were the same ones I’d planted months before in August, and last until the weather gets too cold), and root fennel.

After that we whacked the life out of the tansy on the lower terrace’s berms. They’d reached over six feet tall and were falling all over the beds of leaf lettuce. Other work included prepping beds in the south hoop house and getting ready to put doors on the north hoop house to keep the warmth in and the wind out in this winter.

The funnest task was picking saffron out of the tiny crocus bulbs on the berm near the horse chestnut tree. Look out for a post on Monday all about saffron!

After all this work it was dark: sunset comes earlier now. We hung lights around the pavilion, providing just enough light for the welcome pizza that warmed our cold hands. A good workday!

Last semester, when I was supposed to be studying for my finals and writing my final papers, I found myself devouring a copy of the Omnivore’s Dilemma instead. During my summer in New York, I vowed to live as “wholesomely” as I could on my stipend. I bought free range chicken. I went to the Grand Army Plaza farmer’s market and bought greens, berries, apples, and yogurt. When I was craving snacks and desserts, I either made them using organic whole wheat flours with locally grown summer squashes, organic fair-trade chocolate (since, unfortunately, cocoa beans can hardly be local to these parts), etc. I tried. And, to be honest, living my life that way made me feel really good about myself. But it was hard to stick to. The Waffle and Dinges truck on 7th Ave. called to me every time I left the house. I couldn’t live in Brooklyn and not give in to a chewy bagel baked with the kneading of generations of Brooklyn’s Jewish artisans every bite. What was the most difficult part about living this way? I started to realize that there were so many foods I loved that my newly informed mind was “morally” opposed to eating. And my wallet started wincing every time I needed groceries.

I found eggs to have one of the greatest disparities in price between the “eco-friendly” version and the typical grocery store, industrial farm-produced cartons. One half-dozen of free-range eggs, sold by farmers who let their chickens graze and run free in a grassy pasture, at least for some period of their lives, cost me six bucks. Back in my world as a student, cage-free organic eggs, which are the closest to food godliness at Shaw’s, cost me about $3.60.

What does it mean to be cage-free? According to Pete and Gerry’s website, one of the most visible companies that sells cage-free organic eggs, their hens are fed organic grain from birth and live in spacious barn space, free to lay their eggs wherever they may like inside a large barn. There are several third party certifications that you might find on egg cartons, which aren’t approved or officially recognized by the USDA, but if you’re curious enough, you can look them up online. “Certified Humane” is one example of those labels/organizations. The free-range eggs aforementioned mean that the hens who hatched them literally run around (heads on) and spend a good period of time outside pecking for worms.

What does it mean to be cage-free? According to Pete and Gerry’s website, one of the most visible companies that sells cage-free organic eggs, their hens are fed organic grain from birth and live in spacious barn space, free to lay their eggs wherever they may like. There are several third party certifications that you might find on egg cartons, which aren’t approved or officially recognized by the USDA, but if you’re curious enough, you can look them up online. “Certified Humane” is one example of those labels/organizations.

All of this egg talk made me think of a bill that was passed in early September which allows New Haven residents to keep up to six hens in their backyards. Whether this surge in the desire to have one’s own collection of hens chirping in the backyard is a consequence of the economic downturn or a growing interest in sustainable and local foods in New Haven, the fact remains that this bill means the Yale Farm can actually get a chicken coop!

At the Harvest Festival this past weekend, which the Yale Sustainable Food Project hosted at the Yale Farm, I met a woman who lamented that in the county over, they weren’t allowed to build chicken coops in their backyards. Growing up in the SoCal suburbs, I never thought that urban backyard chicken coops would develop this kind of Beanie Baby following, to the point where significant numbers of homeowners would demand their right to keep these birds, their molted feathers, and their chicken poo all in the convenience of their yard. Of course, there is the obvious plus side: eggs that you’ve tended from lay to stomach. The right to good food. This recipe for black bean dark-chocolate cake, inspired by this one here, incorporates sustainable and local ingredients in the best way I could manage. It is surprisingly intense, moist, and a whole lot of cocoa. Recipe after the jump.

Ingredients

1 15 oz. can unseasoned black beans (organic)

1 3.5 oz container of Greek Yogurt (Stonyfield Organic)

6 tablespoons Organic and Fair Trade baking cocoa

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

4 cage-free, organically fed eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

3/4 cup sugar

1 locally grown pear for garnish (in season!)

1. Preheat oven to 325 F. Rinse the beans and puree them with the vanilla extract in a blender. If the mixture stalls, add a little bit of water to help it along.

2. In a bowl, mix together cocoa powder, baking soda, and baking powder. In a separate bowl, beat eggs, sugar, and yogurt together.

3. Add the bean puree to the egg, sugar, and yogurt mixture until well-mixed.

4. Gently mix in the cocoa powder, baking soda, and baking powder.

5. Grease a 9-inch cake pan (PAM or butter, your choice) and pour the batter in. Bake for 40-50 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about oatmeal for my Natural Nibbles column. I talked about my obsession with oatmeal, how often I find myself thinking about it or thinking about eating it; I even wrote one of my final semester papers on it. I wrote about how I find comfort in each warm, gooey bite, and how the heat and creaminess from the oatmeal spread from my stomach to my blue limbs that would scream for warmth if they weren’t so lifeless and lazy from the cold.

What I didn’t stress last time is that oatmeal is a kitchen chameleon. It can be anything you want it to be. Oatmeal is like one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, which have been on my mind lately, as I’m going through the senior job search and thinking about what I want to do, where I want to live, what stores I want in my neighborhood, whether or not my future land”person” will let me grow vegetables on or around my apartment building, what it will mean if I eat mashed potatoes for dinner, etc. You know what I mean. Oatmeal is so basic that it can become the dream of whimsy.

You can start with a can of whole rolled oats and end up with plain oatmeal. You could be in a chocolate frenzy and end up with oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. You could have a craving for crunchy, buttery, honeyed granola. You could rice for oatmeal and eat it with your stir-fry. You might start out with cinnamon and sugar on hand and realize that what you actually want is maple oatmeal with bacon mixed into it. Mmmm that last one sounds good. For those of you who, like me, are in a “festive fall” mood, your tastebuds might crave apples and cinnamon, or, tired of the traditional flavor, might decide to branch out the tiniest of bits and make this pumpkin spice oatmeal.

The bright orange hue of the oatmeal is so reminiscent of the changing colors on the leaves and, of course, pumpkin flesh. Note: no pumpkins were cruelly harmed during the making of this oatmeal. While one of the most pleasing aspects of this oatmeal comes from its sheer aesthetic beauty, the best part of this recipe is that it tastes just like pumpkin pie. And you’ll still fit into your jeans after you eat it. Recipe after the jump.

Recipe (serves four-6)

1 1/2 cups of pumpkin mashed or pureed (one can of pumpkin would work here too)

2 cups rolled oats

1/2 cup light brown sugar

3 cups of water

1 cup of plain soymilk

1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp pumpkin pie spice

toasted walnuts and raisins (optional)

1. In a pot, bring water to a boil. Add oats and milk and bring to a boil, stirring frequently.

2. Once mixture has come to a boil, add pumpkin and spices. Lower heat to medium and let the oatmeal cook until your desired consistency.

3. Add toasted walnuts and raisins, if you like.

Today, a farm vegetable that is nearing its end – the difficult but delicious tomato.

This wasn’t the best season for tomatoes. Late blight came early, causing many organic farmers to lose their tomato and potato crops entirely. Many other farmers had to make the choice between letting their cash crop go, and trying to combat late blight with expensive copper treatments. Late blight spores travel on clothing and in the wind, making all the more difficult to avoid.

At the farm, we avoided late blight by limiting how many people were allowed in our tomato hoop house, and completely prohibiting work on tomatoes and potatoes on the same day by the same person. We were very lucky and avoided the disease! And here’s one of our Sungolds to prove it:

Tomato plants die with the first frost, so we’ll be clearing out the hoop house soon in preparation for the winter greens we’ll grow there. This photo is no match for the resplendent green canopy it was this summer, when late blight fears kept us from entering the hoop house to prune the plants:

The tomato’s time is over, but come back tomorrow for a plant that will reach maturity, instead of dying, with the first frost. See you then!