fauren

Vote for a Victory Garden at the White House!

Change.org (not to be confused with president-elect Obama's official website, Change.gov) is hosting a competition called Ideas for Change in America, which was "created in response to Barack Obama's call for increased citizen involvement in government." Anyone who registers with the website gets 10 votes to cast on projects spanning categories from Social Entrepreneurship to Peace in the Middle East. The 10 project ideas receiving the most votes will be presented to president-elect Obama on January 16 at a National Press Club event in DC.

Earlier this week, Michael Pollan sent Chris Stevens' post at Liveable Future to his mailing list, encouraging readers to vote for Victory Gardens 2.0. I would like to do the same. Understandably, an organic Victory Garden at the White House may not be the most pressing issue even for the strongest agricultural policy advocates right now, given what else is happening in the world at the moment, but luckily you get 9 more votes to address your other concerns, too.

Register with Change.org
See the other Ideas for Change in America
TheWhoFarm
Eat the View

A 50-Year Farm Bill

Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry have contributed a short but eloquent op-ed to Sunday's New York Times about the dangers of industrial agriculture and our need for what they call "a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles":

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities... We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

After the passing of a mediocre 2008 Farm Bill and President-elect Obama's appointment of Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture – which upset (or at least disappointed) many folks advocating for large-scale sustainable agricultural practices in the States – it's as important as ever that these voices are being heard. Here's hoping some more change is on the horizon.

New York Times: A 50-Year Farm Bill

Acorn Squash with Wheatberry and Cremini Mushroom Stuffing

Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal (buy)

Ha! Remember me? This fall was an eventful one. A new niece, a new job, travel, what have you. Not that I'm making excuses, but... I'm totally making excuses.

So here we are. 2008 is drawing to a close, and I'm sitting in my breakfast room here in Brooklyn, watching the snow blowing around outside and listening to sad bastard songs about winter with a cup of lukewarm coffee in hand. I'm on an unprecedented two week vacation, which is thankfully giving me some time to experiment in the kitchen again, and so I've come out of hiding to share a hearty winter recipe I whipped up last night.

Acorn squash is one of my favorite winter vegetables, and this recipe was inspired by one I made from the Joy of Cooking for a winter dinner party last year, for quinoa-stuffed acorn squash. I've already documented my love for cooking with grains, but I thought the quinoa was too delicate to keep up with a veggie like acorn squash, so for this recipe I used wheatberries instead. I wanted to add a bit more heft to the stuffing, too, and the gigantic bin of cremini mushrooms at Fairway served as a delicious inspiration.

Right. Let's try this again.

Deerhoof - Frenzied Handsome, Hello! (buy)

Hi. Remember me, Internets? Once upon a time I made a New Year's resolution to be religious about blog upkeep in 2008, but I have failed miserably in recent months. Let's chalk it up to such wonderfulness as trips home to visit my new niece, beautiful weddings in the Catskills, hours and hours of baseball watching (oh, dear Sox, you battled bravely), birthday celebrating, and so much cooking I couldn't even decide what to blog about.

I've spent the last few weeks performing some variation of the Supermarket Sweep at the small Greenmarkets in my neighborhood, squeezing the last goodness from them before they disappear at Thanksgiving for the subsequent six months. My CSA share also ends at the end of this month, and I know I will really miss it. Our refrigerator has been filled to brimming with lettuce, chard, kale, mizuna, spinach, carrots, beets, eggplants, radishes, potatoes, tomatoes, bok choy, herbs, kholrabi, celeriac, squash, broccoli... you get the picture.

I don't anticipate the dreary winter months with much enthusiasm food-wise, but at the same time I kind of relish the challenge of rising early on a Saturday, bundling up, and walking to Grand Army Plaza (our only year-round Greenmarket in these parts) to hunt for exciting and unknown items among those root vegetables and squashes and such that seem to define local winter eating.

Until then, I have some summery recipes that might feel late in coming now that New York City is hovering close to its first frost, but some things are just so good that it feels wrong to wait another eight months before posting them.

Adieu to a beautiful summer.

(Dan and I scarfing some soft serve. Coney Island, August. Photo by Ryan McManus.)

Runaway Summer! and Fava Bean Spread with Bitter Greens

Modest Mouse - Summer (buy)

Oh, friends!

Summer always seems to do this. Before you know it, three weeks have passed and suddenly you're staring down the business end of Labor Day weekend before you feel like you've gotten to enjoy all the sunshine and warm days.

Luckily in between the weddings and birthdays and concerts and travel, I have actually managed to do some cooking. I just haven't had the wherewithal to sit down at my trusty computer and share it with all of you. That is going to change over the next few days as I play catch-up. In the meantime, enjoy this recipe for a delicious fava bean spread with bitter greens -- likely intended to be an hors d'oeuvre at your next dinner party but also a yummy addition to your beach picnic.

Quinoa Salad with Spring Onions, Tomato, and Feta

Of Montreal - Know Your Onion! (Shins cover)

The term "spring onion" is often used interchangeably with "green onion" and "scallion," but actually, none of these are the same thing. Steve Albert over at Harvest to Table offers a helpful breakdown of the three, explaining that each refers to a different stage of onion growth and offers its own flavor and use. You might hear spring onions referred to as salad onions, since they have a similar bite to mature onions but are usually mild enough to eat raw, in salads or otherwise.

Spring onions surfaced at my Greenmarket last week, and since I had never cooked with them before I thought I'd give them a try. I wasn't sure what I would do with them at first, but when I decided last night that my mint needed some serious pruning -- mint is a notoriously vigorous plant -- its clippings ended up being my inspiration for a salad.

Cold grain salads are one of my favorite things to make during the summer. Grains are a heartier (and usually healthier) substitute for pastas, and are just as amenable to any number of ingredients. I had some quinoa in my pantry cupboard, so I decided to combine my mint and onions with it and a few other ingredients for a simple, summery dinner.

Cherry Almond Chocolate Chunk Ice Cream

Spoon - You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb (buy)

As seems to be the case with a lot of completely delicious foods, I came late to cherries. Maybe I had a bad maraschino experience somewhere in there (I maintain that those are not cherries), but for years I swore off the fruit entirely. My mother thought I was crazy, and now that I also know how wonderful the cherry is, I think I must have been crazy too.

Cherries dole out a lot of tough love, though. They're sweet and juicy and completely addictive, but of course if you eat too many of them... well. It ain't pretty. So when I walked by my Wednesday Greenmarket last week and saw that it was brimming with pints of cherries, I thought I was in some serious trouble.

Then it occurred to me. There is a way to eat all these cherries with some restraint: surround them with heavy cream and sugar and chocolate, and you'll feel a little guiltier about shoveling them all into your face in one afternoon. Maybe.

Celebrating Our Independence with Gran Dan's Bar-B-Que Sauce

A.A. Bondy - American Hearts (buy)
Estelle featuring Kanye West - American Boy (buy)

First, a happy belated 4th of July to you all. I hope yours was filled with friends, food, and fireworks. And freedom! Can't forget the freedom.

It rained for the third or fourth year running here in New York, but not before some friends and I got in a solid 7 or so hours of beer drinking and barbecuing at my friend Eric's house (home of the garden, not to mention two grills). Somewhere over the last two summers, it seems we all reached an implicit understanding that each barbecue would have to be better than the last, which means that the food keeps getting better and more elaborate. I couldn't tell you the last time someone dared show up with hot dogs. Or actually, I can, but it involves getting scalded by a core of molten cheese that exploded forth from the cheddar dog belonging to a woman sitting next to me, and I'd really rather not relive the details.

Anyway, this year's 4th of July feast included grilled jalapeños with cheese and grilled tortillas, mesquite smoked baby back ribs; elotes with cotija, chilli, and lime juice; a garden salad with Japanese turnips (I figured out what to do with them), fennel, red onion, and orange-almond dressing; roasted Chioggia beets and lemon thyme; grilled skewers of zucchini, golden zucchini, and summer squash; and what is definitely the best barbecued chicken I have ever eaten.

Dan's mom emailed him a copy of his Gran Dan's barbecue sauce recipe a couple weeks ago, and he had been itching to give it a try ever since. I couldn't wait, either. Growing up in New England, we didn't have much of a barbecue culture -- grilling, sure, but not barbecue -- and I'm still in the process of learning the intricacies. Vinegar, mustard, or tomato base; smoking or grilling; wood, coal, or gas. I had no idea it was so complex.

This particular barbecue sauce is straight from Dan's home base in Raleigh, NC, where vinegary barbecue reigns supreme.

Mark Bittman's Picnic Picks

And speaking of picnics, today's Times has an amazingly comprehensive list of simple picnic foods from the Minimalist himself, Mark Bittman. Just in time for the long weekend!

New York Times: 101 20-Minute Dishes for Inspired Picnics (may require login)

Garlic Scape Deviled Eggs

Daniel Johnston - Devil Town (buy)

I refused to eat hard boiled eggs when I was a kid. Every Easter egg hunt ended with me emptying my basket out on the living room coffee table, separating its eggs into piles of hard boiled and chocolate varieties, and leaving the non-foil-wrapped ones for dead. Needless to say, I wasn't a fan of the egg salad that inevitably surfaced in our fridge after the festivities were over, either.

This all changed when my mom made deviled eggs for my dad's 60th birthday party a few years back. The recipe was a pesto variation, loaded with fresh basil and pine nuts. Turns out, they were also highly addictive. Since then, my opinion of hard boiled eggs has completely reversed; last summer I probably made three or four big batches of egg salad over the course of a couple months. And I ate it ALL.

About two weeks ago, I started craving deviled eggs like nobody's business. Maybe because they're one of the world's perfect picnic foods, or because that hard-boiled egg white is so cooling on the tongue on a hot day, but they just seem to perfectly encapsulate summer to me. So I set out on a mission to make some this past weekend.

What's more, we got another bunch of beautiful garlic scape in this week's CSA share, so they became my not-so-secret ingredient.

Scapes are spicy and pungent when raw, packing a similar initial punch to raw mature garlic, but the flavor is subtler and subsides quickly enough that it doesn't overwhelm the senses. This is not to say you won't experience a little garlic breath, but I guarantee it's of a much gentler variety. And well worth it.

These eggs start with Ruth Reichl's recommended method of hard boiling eggs, found in the latest edition of The Gourmet Cookbook and -- aside from peeling the eggs, perhaps -- are incredibly easy to make.