(The first in a regular column about food in the news at Yale and around the world.)
E. Coli has been all over the news this week, with horrifying and sad stories from both the New York Times and the Washington Post. What can we do as consumers? The USDA will be slow to change, but writing letters to your Senators can help — as can Mark Bittman’s advice to grind your own meat.
Hand in hand with food awareness and food safety is food preparation, and unfortunately this week we learned that a bastion of cooking quality will be ceasing publication — Gourmet magazine will end this November. Known for its beautiful photography, excellent recipes, and extensive travel writing, it will be difficult to replace. I have my favorite food blogs (Tastespotting, anyone?) but a magazine full of recipes in your hand each month is something apart.
In Europe, farmers’ unrest at falling milk prices resulted in protests outside the E.U. headquarters in Brussels yesterday — the photo alone is worth the look.
Finally, we learned this week that you aren’t only what you eat, but how you eat it. Kids who eat with their parents several times a week are less likely to drink while underage, while kids who eat too much candy were found to be more likely to turn to crime over a four-decade study. Something to think about as we move towards Halloween!
I can’t deny it: mashed potatoes are one of my most favorite foods — they’re so versatile! For example, a couple of weekends ago, a friend and I visited the Wooster Square farmer’s market. She was doing a piece on farmer’s markets in New Haven for a new campus food magazine, the Yale Epicurean. I was there because I couldn’t think of a better activity than to be around other people who appreciate fresh, local produce early in the morning. As she interviewed Daniel, the farm manager at the Yale Farm, he offered to give us free veggies if we agreed to make them into a dish for the Food & Film Festival potluck happening that evening. Never the person to turn down such a deal, I agreed and my friend and I set up a time to cook that afternoon. We decided to make mashed potatoes and kale chips, and took some poblano peppers with us to see if we might make a more flavorful experiment from our potatoes.
Earlier in the week I’d read quite a few recipes for jalapeno cornbread, and I wondered if mashed potatoes, another hallowed hallmark of Southern cuisine, might be spiced up as well. We decided to roast the peppers before cutting them up and mashing them in with the potatoes; I wanted that smokiness of the roast to penetrate the flavors of the dish. Unfortunately, I can’t say that the two poblanos we used were really enough to peek through the creaminess of the potatoes. I think we could have used more, or maybe picked a spicier pepper to add the kick that I wanted. Nevertheless, the mashed potatoes tasted great! Thick, creamy, smooth, and delicious. We even found a little bit of truffle oil in my friend’s pantry, and I dashed a couple drops in out of flavor lust. Find our recipe after the jump, but feel free to make your own tweaks and be sure to let us know how your version turns out!
(In the next two weeks we’ll be joined some new regular columnists. Here Margaret Tung ‘10 debuts “Natural Nibbles,” a biweekly column about the best of the natural, local, and organic food worlds. Note: the views expressed here are those of the student only and not of YSFP.)
I’m obsessed with oatmeal. I love it to death; its warm, gooey consistency is comforting and soothing–perfect for chilly days or on tough days when all I need is a break. I happened upon my favorite brand of oatmeal, Nature’s Path, this summer when I was at my friend’s lake house in Connecticut. After half a day’s worth of work, I met up with my friend and we got on the train to our break from NYC. I’d been exhausted from hanging out the night before and having to get up early for work, but decided to stay up and watch Twilight. If Robert Pattinson weren’t so sexy I totally would have fallen asleep within the first five seconds. Not because I wasn’t secretly entertained by the movie, but because I was just so tired.
I woke up for an early start, since we were going to go kayaking on Lake Waramaug (whose name I could never remember. I constantly called it Whatchamacalla); it was the first time I’d ever kayaked and I was totally excited. When I woke up in the morning, I went downstairs to get breakfast and found that my friend’s mom had bought us a variety box of Nature’s Path Oatmeal for my breakfast pleasure. There’s something totally different about this oatmeal, even though it’s instant. Some flavors have toasted oats in them, and all of the ingredients are natural and organic. It tastes wholesome, but it also feels good to eat it–the oatmeal is heartier than that flaky Quaker Oats stuff, and the flavoring of it is just right. I absolutely love it. I might obsessively love it. I may or may not have also bought a bulk order of variety boxes of Nature’s Path oatmeal from Amazon.com.
Buy it, eat it, love it. And if you don’t (though not likely), at least give it to me!
(Today, Laura picks worms off of tomatoes and thinks about beauty.)
Sometimes the ugliest biology is also the most beautiful. On Tuesday we spent part of the workday in the hoop house, harvesting tomatoes and suckering the plants. And of course, wherever there are tomatoes, you’re going to find tomato hornworms. Tomato hornworms (Manduca quinquemaculata) are plump green caterpillars, about two inches in length, that feed on solanaceous plants such as tomatoes, potatoes, and eggplants. Difficult to spot among leafy green plants, they can best be found by looking for their droppings on a leaf and then checking the stems and leaves above. Earlier in the season, we picked hornworms off tomato plants by hand, but on Tuesday we saw that someone else had been doing the work for us. The hornworms we spotted were covered in small white cocoons produced by parasitoid wasp larvae (Cotesia congregatus) after eating their way through the hapless hornworm’s body.
Pretty to look at? No way. Useful? Absolutely.
A lot of the work we did on Tuesday was pretty. We harvested lovely, plump winter squash and used the four row seeder to sow precise rows of D’Avignon radishes. But being on the farm also teaches us to find things beautiful even when they’re far from pretty: organic matter decomposing in the compost, worms, mulch, and even a tomato hornworm with a back full of wasp’s pupae. Hope to see you all on Friday, when we’ll be harvesting for market!
This weekend marks the YSFP’S Festival of Food and Film, with screenings of Julie and Julia, Babette’s Feast, cooking demonstrations, panel discussions, and more. To get ready to watch Julie and Julia, I thought I would prepare a few of Julia Child’s recipes myself. You see, while I can walk into a kitchen and improvise a meal, often a quite good meal, in about thirty minutes, I have less experience than I’d like with following recipes to the letter — to say nothing of recipes with such gravitas as Julia’s.
Embarrassingly, neither the Yale library nor any of my friends owned a copy of her seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but persistent Googling yielded three of Julia’s recipes reprinted on various food blogs: Tomatoes Provençale, a potato galette, and peach clafouti.
I started at farmer’s market on Saturday morning, buying tomatoes, peaches, and parsley from local Connecticut farms. The purple potatoes and shallots came from the Yale farm.
I started with the tomatoes, mixing together breadcrumbs (I’m sorry Julia — I used packaged instead of making my own out of day-old bread!) with chopped shallots and parsley, salt and pepper, and Herbes de Provence.
Meanwhile, I let the peaches macerate in sugar, lime juice, and chopped ginger — wait, what? That doesn’t sound very Julia Child-like. I realized that the clafouti recipe I’d chosen was a reimagination of her original and not the cream-and-egg heavy version itself, but I decided to press on. Dessert is dessert, after all.
Gutting the tomatoes was surprisingly messy, though I ended up with enough tomato insides to make a great salsa later this week. Then it was a matter of filling the tomatoes with the breadcrumbs, drizzling olive oil over the entire operation, and letting it brown in the oven. (The extra breadcrumbs will be sautéed with garlic and stirred into pasta for a quick lunch this week.) The tomatoes went in with the clafouti — the recipe called for a simple batter of flour, sugar, and milk to be poured over the mounded peaches in the pan.
With those things in the oven, it was time to make the galette. I’m a poor college student and not a French chef — I don’t own a mandoline! I cut the potatoes, brilliant blue ones that I harvested myself at the farm, into pieces as small as I could stand and that I thought qualified as the “matchsticks” that the recipe called for:
Here was my second mistake. I shaped the potato pieces into a cake in the pan and drizzled them with endless melted butter, but the pieces just weren’t small enough to form into a cake. I pressed and pressed with a spatula, but the idea of turning the cake out to flip it, much less flipping it fearlessly in the pan like Julia would undoubtedly do, was impossible. My galette was a failure…but could I really be that unhappy with crispy, tender diced potatoes sauteed in butter?
I’m no chef and no expert at presentation, but my Julia Child-themed meal was stunning in both color and taste. The idea of eating breadcrumbs as an entree instead of a coating was decadent, and the tomato shell was neither too thick nor too thin. The potatoes didn’t go as planned, but they were delicious, anyway. And dessert! Unauthentic but refreshingly light (unlike Julia’s would have been).
After my recipe adventure, I’m totally looking into obtaining a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking for myself — I won’t be cooking through it like Julie Powell, but I think we could all stand to cook the classic things every once in a while. I can’t wait to watch Julia and Julia and see how she fares!
Thanks to Jarrett Moran for providing photogaphy.
(The first of our farm updates, written by student Farm Managers on our open workdays, here with sophomore Laura Blake.)
Today we used the four-row seeder to sow the week’s salad greens. After passing over the empty beds with the flame-weeder (a Ghostbusters-style backpack propane tank with a long metal pipe that shoots flame from the end) in order to toast any weed seeds beneath the soil’s surface, Brian and Sam took turns wheeling the seeder over the prepped beds. We sowed arugula, three varieties of mustard (golden frill, ruby streaks, and garnet giant), and a green oakleaf lettuce. Check out the lower terrace in a week or so to see the seed leaves coming up.
We then headed up to the middle terrace, shovels and rakes in hand, to prep the beds where potatoes were harvested last Friday. Potatoes grow up to a foots or so beneath the surface, so harvesting them requires deep digging. Friday left us with pounds of blue, white and russet potatoes as well as with three empty
beds that resembled a small-scale model of the alps. So we marked the perimeters of the beds with string, shoveled out the paths, cultivated the soil in the beds, and smoothed over the surface of each bed with a grating rake. The beds look beautiful and are ready to be planted on a coming workday.
The enormous bounty of peas, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, and all the other summer vegetables on the Yale Farm can’t last forever. Winter is inevitable — but one way to prepare is to can summer’s excess in preparation for the cold.
I never realized how easy it was to preserve vegetables, but after bringing home too many sugar snap peas from the farm one day, I decided to try it. Dissolve a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of salt in a cup of vinegar and a cup of water. Stuff all the vegetables — any bean (lightly blanched if they’re a little tough), cucumber, and even radish pods will work — into a mason jar, add some peppercorns and some sliced garlic, and pour in the vinegar mixture. Then you refrigerate and wait as long as you can stand it (at least 24 hours!) before eating.
Another recipe I’ll be trying out soon is YSFP Director Melina Shannon-DiPietro’s tomato confit — no precise measurements needed, just vibrant tomatoes for when winter strikes.
I’ll admit that I devoured my preserved veggies in just a few days, but this Thursday, you can learn how to preserve your own summer bounty in preparation for winter. The cooking workshop will be held in the Silliman College kitchen this Thursday, September 10 at 2:00pm. Email Hannah Burnett to reserve your spot. See you there!
(The school year has started back up, and with it our blog. Look forward to weekly posts about happenings on the farm and at Yale, as well as updates from our farm managers about workdays. For now, a guest post written by a very special member of the Yale Farm.)
As a pizza, I get a lot of respect on the Yale Farm. Students and community members gather ’round after working on the farm every Friday to top me with produce they’ve harvested and cook me in the pizza oven. Humans change their clothes depending on the season, and I’m no different with my toppings! Here are some of the vegetables and herbs I wear throughout the year:
- As spring begins, workers come back to the Yale Farm after a long winter. With them come early plants like asparagus, with its delicate fernlike leaves and tender stalks, great on pizza with just some ricotta and maybe an herb or two (they cook so quickly on top of me in the oven). I love nettles too — it doesn’t sting me because its prickly enzymes dissolve under the oven’s 600-degree heat, but you should wear gloves when harvesting it!
- Leafy greens like chard, arugula, and kale are always a favorite, especially when combined with minced garlic from the previous winter, or fresh garlic when it ripens in the late summer. It’s important to remember to top me with olive oil so the greens don’t burn in the oven (along with my crust).
- Summer squash grow in abundance and last all season. A super fresh topping that I particularly like to wear is squash slices, pesto instead of tomato sauce, and a sprinkling of lemon zest. I love when volunteers get imaginative — we don’t have to stick to tomato sauce and cheese on the farm like my pizza cousins in restaurants!
- Despite all the talk of late blight this season, we have plenty of Sungold tomatoes to cook on me. Sungolds are a super-sweet variety of cherry tomato, and pair perfectly, if I say so myself, with eggplant, with garlic, with basil, with tomatillos, and pretty much anything else that is grown on the farm!
This pizza wants to get to know you — please come out to the farm this Friday, September 4, from 1:00 to 5:00pm to help work on the farm (I hear they grow stuff besides pizza toppings, but what do I know? I’m just dough). At 5:00 you can help make and eat me — see you then!
To all our loyal readers: we are taking a break from posting for the summer. We’ll be back when the school year starts again, so look for us then– in the mean time, enjoy your summers!
By Lee West
In honor of May Day, a word about workers. Specifically, farm laborers. This past Tuesday, one of the nation’s largest food service companies announced that it will boycott Florida tomatoes if growers fail to increase pay and improve conditions for workers. Bon Appetit, the food service company, wants workers to be paid one penny more per pound of tomatoes harvested.
This isn’t the first time Florida tomato growers have suffered from accusations of unfair labor practices. From 2001-2005, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker’s rights group in Florida, organized a boycott of Taco Bell as a way to put pressure on growers to improve conditions; that boycott ended when Taco Bell agreed to pay read more…
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Nozlee Samadzadeh
