Salade Nicoise & Pan Bagnat, Photographed

Here is a brief, pictorial follow-up to last week's post on Salade Nicoise and its sandwich kin, the Pan Bagnat:

Adults and children alike found something farm-fresh and delicious in this meal.

And indeed, Pan Bagnat may be the ultimate sandwich. See below for recipes!

Sharing good food with love. This is at the heart of the human experience. 

Summer Veggies, in Sun and Snow

The chilly nights of late have me recalling the frozen months of the year. I’m also remembering how happy I am in the winter when I have frozen vegetables and fruits on hand to provide a taste of summer through those cold winter months. We are lucky to have a chest freezer, and enjoy keeping it stocked up with good farm food. To have good-quality frozen food, there are three main things you need to do:

1)    Pack the food so it won’t be oxidized: use the freezer-quality (thicker) plastic bags, or freezer containers. Pack containers with just enough headspace for expansion during freezing, or squeeze out the air from bags.

2)    Don’t try to freeze too much at once, and make sure the food is chilled prior to placing it in the freezer. The idea is to freeze the food quickly.

3)    Some produce can go right into freezer bags, but some keeps better if cooked or blanched. You can freeze cored, sliced, peppers without blanching. If I’m freezing tomatoes, I like to oven-roast or grill them first, or cook them down into sauce. Some foods hold up better if you blanch them prior to freezing. These include vegetables such as green beans, peas, asparagus, and corn. These vegetables have enzymes that convert sugars to starch (among other things), and blanching prior to freezing stops this process.

Here are some details on blanching vegetables: http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/freeze/blanching.html

Have you found the Romano (flat) green beans? They're delicious.

To take green beans as an example, I personally like to blanch them right after picking. I bring a big pot of water to a rolling boil; I put the beans into a colander that fits nicely into the pot and blanch small quantities of beans at a time. The idea is to work in batches small enough that the water will come back to a boil in less than a minute. After 3 minutes of boiling, I remove the colander, rinse the beans under cool water, and then spread them out on a kitchen towel to cool quickly. They are then ready-to-go for cold or warm bean salads, or to freeze for the winter. To reduce the wasteful feeling of boiling a large pot of water for one use only, I try to be organized enough to blanch the beans, and then use the boiling water to cook up some pasta.

But back to Summer eating. In summer, what’s our favorite way to eat green beans? Well, at least once each summer, we enjoy a beautifully composed Salade Nicoise. It feels fancy. It showcases green beans, and so many other fabulous farm foods: new potatoes, crisp lettuce, juicy tomatoes, and sunshiny eggs. Serve with warm French bread and some nice cheese for a beautiful dinner on a warm night.

Leftovers make excellent picnic food in the form of Pan Bagnat. You can slice a loaf of French bread lengthwise and crisp it up in the oven for a few minutes. In the morning, scoop out or press down some of the bread innards to make bread ‘boats,’ and then fill the bread with Salade Nicoise. Close up the sandwich, wrap in aluminum foil, and enjoy a great lunch. Sundays at Moosewood reports that: “Everywhere along the coast of France, a ‘pique-nique sur mer” is a popular family outing. Pan Bagnat, which means, literally, ‘bathed bread,’ is almost always taken along with the bathing suits.” One evening, our family fell out of our chairs laughing, because I was convinced that I’d read that the French traditionally sit on their ‘Pan Bagnat’ in order to meld the flavors in the sandwich. Incredulous, Jeremy looked up the recipe in Sundays at Moosewood and found nothing of the sort. My excellent brain had manufactured the entire anecdote, but thus was born the phrase . . . “butt panini.” Maybe this illuminates why we are well-suited to parent boys.

But wait! I just found this in the venerable NY Times. I am vindicated!

Whether or not you sit on the leftovers, here’s our method for Salade Nicoise. This version of the classic French summer dish comes from my hybridization of recipes from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant (The Moosewood Collective, Simon & Schuster, 1990) and The Way to Cook (Julia Child, Knopf, 2011):

First, prepare a lovely vinaigrette. Combine in a jar and shake vigorously to combine:

1/4 cup vinegar (cider, wine or herbed; or use fresh-squeezed lemon juice)

1/2 cup olive oil

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 garlic clove, pressed

salt and freshly ground pepper

2 tablespoons minced fresh dill, parsley or basil

You’ll also need:

1 pint new potatoes, cut into large bite-size pieces

1 1/2 pounds green beans (or a mix of yellow and green), trimmed

3-4 tomatoes, cut into small wedges

1 head lettuce

6 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and halved lengthwise

2 cans good canned tuna

1/2 cup Nicoise-type olives

3 tablespoons capers

Sprigs of dill, parsley or basil

Bring a large pot of salted water to a rolling boil. Cook the potatoes until tender (sometimes I successfully hard-boil the eggs at the same time – but use your favorite hard-boiling technique). When tender, remove the potatoes with a slotted spoon. Once the potatoes have drained, toss them gently with some of the vinaigrette.

When the water returns to a boil, blanch the green beans for 4 minutes, and then refresh them under cold water.

Take a few moments to compose the salad: line a roomy platter or large salad bowl with lettuce leaves. Toss the beans with some of the vinaigrette. Place the dressed potatoes in the center of the platter or bowl; mound beans at strategic intervals, interspersing them with tomatoes and mounds of tuna. Ring the salad with the eggs. Spoon the vinaigrette over all; scatter on the olives, capers and herbs. Serve as soon as possible, at room temperature.

Wishing you a magical summer picnic at the beach, or a sunset dinner at home. For all of us at Simple Gifts Farm - Audrey

A Personal Review of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"

[Note from Audrey: I wrote this essay in 2008. I look back with gratitude that our boys are now so big and read their own books past bedtime, but also with some wistfulness. . . Barbara Kingsolver remains one of my writer-heroes. Find out more about the book here]

Interest in locally grown food has been growing steadily among people interested in good health, good taste, good soil, reducing their ecological footprint and enhancing their local economy – so much so, that best-selling authors are dedicating entire works to their exploration of the consequences of their sustenance’s provenance. Somehow the work we do has become trendy. We look at our ragged T-shirts, callused hands, and variously dented automobiles, and shrug. But isn’t that part of the beauty? Here is a trend with content: real health, good soil, carrots and lettuce, the essence of earthiness. 

Over the winter, in snatches of time between seed catalogs, packing lunch boxes, playing “Go Fish” again, and grouting tile, we read some of the fantastic and inspiring books that document this trend. Okay, it took more than this winter. Reading time is a premium luxury at this moment (thankfully I got in more than my share of reading time as a kid!). But that just adds to the endorsement, as I vastly prefer the escapist fling of fiction to any non-fiction writing, however brilliant, and I by default do not finish any book that isn’t good enough to keep me up past bedtime. 

To me, the best of the bunch is “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver (with Steven Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, Harper Collins, 2007). I stayed up past bedtime reading this one, for sure. I recognize that some of my enthusiasm was fueled by my long-time adoration of this author (tousling with Jeremy over whose turn it was to read “Pigs in Heaven”, giving a somewhat dog-eared copy of “The Poisonwood Bible” to Jeremy’s parents while they were volunteer teaching for a year in Ethiopia) . . . with her gracious, funny and insightful writing. This book is very personal – as eating necessarily is – and coming from a writer I admire so well, I found this really interesting. Also, I have a lot in common with Kingsolver (though sadly, not the skill at writing!): we’re both moms, biologists, try to transform anxiety about the future of the world into joyful action, and have the same attitude toward cooking and eating. So in a way for me, it was like reading an alternative reality of my life, written really really well. 

Those rather large personal biases stated, this is a book that I believe should appeal to and be a good read for many. Barbara Kingsolver has a big heart, and I believe will embrace and inspire many. The book documents a year in which her family embarks on a project to eat only what they can grow or purchase locally. This type of project is catching on, but it is a joy to read her version. Discussion of the big issues (energy imbalance of current food systems, the American obesity epidemic, the ethics of eating) flows naturally from and among the joyous and engaging recounting of the family’s local year. She gets on the soapbox just enough to prickle your conscience a healthy bit. Kingsolver’s husband, Steven Hopp (an environmental studies professor) provides succinct sidebars on many big problems in agriculture and food systems. I initially read these with trepidation, expecting dreary finger-wagging, but instead found these little essays honest, well-stated arguments, and always with hope of a better way. Camille (their teenage daughter) contributes delightful, youthful notes and recipes. This gives me courage to keep cheerfully offering fresh vegetables to our young sons, who are usually skeptical but are enthusiastic when they give the veggies a chance. For example, when Jeremy pulled up some overmature salad turnips for Timmy to feed the calves – the calves turned up their little bovine noses, but Timmy took a look and started munching both root and leaf. He prefers raw vegetables, whole, and procured himself from crisper drawer or field. No lathe-shaped baby carrots for this boy. 

One great aspect of this book is that it shows how everyday, economical meals can be prepared with local foods in season. I have no problem with elegant restaurants and fancy food magazines extolling the virtues of eating local, but those meals are treats and cover about 1% of our dinners. Camille lists weekly dinner menus throughout their season, many of which are simple and pretty quick to prepare. 

Barbara Kingsolver bemoans the lack of an American food culture, as exists in many older and less heterogeneous countries. It seems that, given the decimation of Native American cultures, the melting pot America hasn’t had time yet to meld into something new and cohesive. Beyond McDonalds, I suppose. On the other hand, I’d argue that some distinctive regional food cultures have existed for a long time and others are taking hold, based on eating in season. 

Kingsolver is a great writer, but it is fascinating that food can have such an exciting story. Of course, this is a human story too, the journey of a family and what they learn in a year of eating food from their own backyard and region. However, the climatic final scenes are all about turkeys, and their struggles and triumphs were so moving I found myself tearing up at the end. I am not a natural turkey-lover (I was once locked in a turkey pen on a dark and stormy night, and did not like it), but this was a real drama played out in the domestic sphere, but with humans in the supporting roles rather than the stars. 

For everyone pulling miracles from the Simple Gifts soil,

Audrey

Meet the Crew: Part I. Zan McKenna

Zan McKenna sorts tomatoes at the wash station carousel.

Every year, I particularly enjoy interviewing our farm apprentices. These talented people work amazingly hard to make the farm go, and I want to share my appreciation for them with everyone who enjoys the food we grow. Over the next couple of months, I’ll make visits to harvest fields and wash-stations to talk with our four first-year apprentices. Last Monday, I caught up with Zan McKenna while washing and packing about a million tubs of cucumbers and squash.

Zan grew up in Connecticut, and her family had a huge garden. However, like most of us, she didn’t grow up with farming. For many years, Zan planned to be an actor, and performed in musicals, movies and plays. But Barbara Kingsolver helped turn Zan’s aspirations from acting to farming. When, at 16, Zan read Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” [note: next week, I’ll post my 2008 Down on the Farm review of this fine book] she was impressed by how fascinating and complex growing food is, and began to think this could be her life’s work. Experience at Farm and Wilderness camp as both camper and counselor added to this idea. Farming also matches well her need for physical labor. So, after graduating high school, she began to learn about and work on farms in travels that took her to several countries. Last season, she worked at Riverland Farm just up the road, where she gained more experience and met her fiancé, David. They decided to stay in this area and continue working and learning while they began the search for a farm of their own. Zan applied to work at here at Simple Gifts Farm, especially drawn to our mixed livestock and vegetable operation, and the apprenticeship model in which we have our farm crew members participate in workshops other farms in the region as part of the CRAFT program, and to learn by working on all aspects of the farm.

For example, Zan hadn’t expected to love driving tractor, but she does. In particular, she really likes cultivating. It is a powerful feeling to tend the crops and soil. She also enjoys the animals – one day she burst in to farm lunch, late but exuberant about the birth of a batch of piglets. Indeed, her favorite farm job is chore duty, in which tending the various farm animals is a major part. In contrast to jobs that entail hours in one field, like harvesting, chores also gives her the chance to look over the whole farm and observe how things are going in all the fields.

As for the future, Zan hopes to raise livestock and perennial crops, as she is realizing that vegetables aren’t her particular passion. It’s hard for her to plow in fields so quickly, noting, “I’m just getting used to them and then they go away!” She and her fiancé are looking for land, mainly in northern New England. Their families are supportive of their farm dream, and they would like to get started soon, as they know that it takes many years to establish a farm business.

We’re glad to have Zan’s energy and cheer on the crew, and wish her many grand meals featuring fennel (her favorite vegetable) now, and lasting success in her farming career.

For everyone of Simple Gifts Farm - Audrey

Simple Gifts in the Summertime

Guest essay by Farmer Jeremy’s sister, Marya Plotkin

Farmer Jeremy shows his nephew the tractor

Every year, we look forward to a visit to Uncle Jeremy’s farm. It’s a long journey from our home in Tanzania. Here, my boys learn new things they can do, like picking cherry tomatoes and feeding pigs, and things that are fun but that they weren’t supposed to do, like playing forts with hay bales in the barn (these things they learn from their farm-kid cousins). We get to discuss the merits of blackberries compared to raspberries, instead of comparing mango to passion fruit.

This year, we get to help harvest potatoes and carrots. Jeremy has dug up the row of potatoes with the new tractor (Little John), and five year old Tadzio and I work down the row with the crew, pulling up the potato plant, plucking the potatoes out of the roots and digging around in the dirt to find those left behind. The pink potatoes are delightful to find, like an Easter Egg hunt with all pink eggs. Tadzio insists that all of his potatoes go in one bucket, teaming up with Matt who he has pegged as the winning potato picker. He wants to be on the winning team. As the crew and I finish the potato hunt/harvest, Tadzio’s eyes shine as he dons ear protectors and rides on the tractor over to the carrots. It’s cool to have an Uncle who is a farmer.

The great potato harvest/hunt

Later, with rope around my waist, I spin webs around poles to prop up tomato plants. I think ‘this could be the best day of my vacation.’  The earth breathes dusty heat up at us at the same time that the sun pushes it down on our backs and shoulders, but the dirt kissing my skin over my shoes is warm and silky. Doing farm work is a mineral-scented reminder of who I am, who my family is, and the power of growing food.

My boys are growing up proud to have a farm in their family, full of cousins, aunties and uncles who live the farming life. Once a year, we exhale with a loud sigh, wiggle our toes in the dirt and pull carrots from the earth, admire watermelons and lemon cucumbers and red and orange-stemmed chard. We meet the people who support Simple Gifts Farm at CSA pickup, and always think, ‘what nice people.’  Thanks for the farm vacation, Simple Gifts!

The Boom and Bust Lives of Cukes and Zukes

Squash season is on!

We are in the midst of our first squash and cucumber boom of the season, and I had some time to reflect on this earlier in the week while wading through a sea of cucumbers.  Cucumbers, summer squash, winter squash, and melons all belong to the vegetable family called the cucurbits.  Give them enough sun, heat, and moisture, and they will put forth a rampant growth of vines, rapidly expanding and covering the ground with the solar collection devices we call leaves.  The drawback to this rapid growth is that the leaves and stems are relatively flimsy structures.  You can think of a squash stem in contrast to an oak stem, which grows slowly over time, but is built for the long haul.  The cucurbit plants are susceptible to myriad insects and diseases, and once we start picking them (which happens three times a week), they are also prone to being stepped on or broken by a hand searching for harvestable fruit.  All of this adds up to a solid boom-and-bust cycle for these crops, which is, of course, why people came up with pickles as a way of stashing away cukes from the boom times for the bust to come. 

So how do we deal with the booms and busts here at Simple Gifts Farm?  We have a number of strategies which all boil down to different ways of helping the plants get a boost in the race between rampant growth on one hand and the various forces of death that will inevitably win in the end.  We hope to get a bunch of fruits before that end comes.  The first way is through succession planting—we plant once in our unheated hoophouse and then three times for the cucumbers and squash in the field (once for melons and winter squash, since they take more time to mature).  We are thus planting every three to four weeks, planning on having a new planting coming in when the inevitable crash occurs.  We also try to give the plants plenty of fertility, with the idea that more of that early rampant growth will translate into higher yields before the bust.  This year we are applying some liquid fertilizers, both sprayed on the crops and through the drip irrigation.  We also have a multi-pronged strategy for dealing with cucumber beetles.  The earliest plantings are covered with row cover fabric, which exclude the little buggers and also make a warmer environment for the tropical cucurbits.  After the plants start flowering, the pollinators need to get in, so we remove the row covers and sometimes apply a coating of white clay called kaolin that makes the beetles feel like they’ve landed on the wrong plant.  The kaolin clogs up the sprayer, and needs to be reapplied to any new growth, and then is hard to wash off of the squash when we pick it, so at a certain point we decide that the plants are big enough to outgrow whatever damage the beetles might cause.  As a last resort, we do have an organic insecticide we can apply, which we usually do only when we the plants are little and we can give them a jump by easing up on the pressure from the bugs.

We hope you enjoy the summer squash, zucchini and cucumbers that embody the ephemeral abundance of life during our sweet summers. We encourage you to try pickling up some cucumbers, or try the summer squash relish and garlicky squash that are our featured recipes this week.

For all of us at Simple Gifts Farm -- Farmer Jeremy

On the Shores of Simple Gifts Farm

Part I. Glacial Geology of the Farm (first printed July 20, 2010)

Lake Hitchcock spanned much of the current Connecticut Valley.

Farmers don’t have much time to go to the beach (unless it’s biking to Puffer’s Pond!) during the summer, but we know that life is a beach at Simple Gifts Farm. In fact, the farm really is along the shore – that is, if you were to transport back in time about 15,000-12,000 years ago. Back then, the last ice age was ending, and the glaciers were in retreat. The Connecticut Valley formed the basin of the brilliantly blue Glacial Lake Hitchcock. At its maximum, this lake stretched from the dam at Rocky Hill, Connecticut, all the way north to St. Johnsbury, Vermont (find out more here). The water level fluctuated, but it appears that the farm progresses into the lake from the shore from east to west. The west end of the farm by North Pleasant Street has finer-textured soils, including some clays. The field visible from Pine Street is closer to the shoreline, and the soils have a gravelly to sandy texture. Our house, or perhaps the woods behind our house, is on a one-time beach, delta or sandbar. Indeed, when we had the foundation dug for our house in 2006, our kids were smitten with the sandbox-quality sand in the hole. As you continue east down Pine Street its intersection with Sand Hill Road (there’s a reason for that name!), you’ll be traveling by a river outlet with a delta formation. The current Mill River is what remains of this once-larger stream and delta. This includes the Town sand/gravel pit just east of the farm.

We are inland (east) from the world-famous Hadley silt loams, formed from fine-textured lake bottom deposits and more recent river deposits. Those soils are amazingly rich and fertile. The soils of our farm are dominated by Hinckley loamy sand. These are more coarse-textured than the Hadley loam, and a major challenge is that these sandy-gravelly soils do not hold nutrients or water well. These soils are fine for agriculture when they overlay level ground, as they do here, but we have to work hard to supply the crops with sufficient fertility. Rain percolates quickly through the coarse soil, and we need to constantly correct soil fertility with targeted applications that the crops can take up quickly before they wash down through the soil profile. In addition to strengthening long-term nutrient holding capacity by building organic matter via pasture rotations and incorporating cover crops and compost, we add organic nutrients into our drip irrigation, and apply foliar sprays. On the plus side, the rapidly drying soil allows us to prepare fields for planting earlier in the season, and we can ride through extremely wet years - like the one we’ve had so far this season - better than a farm with wetter soils. In addition, although it takes more work to continually adjust the fertility balance, it is relatively easier to correct imbalances than on soils that retain everything strongly.

We like our shoreline location, and knowing about the geology of the farm improves both our daily management and our appreciation of this place on earth.

Part II. Shorebirds of the Farm (first printed July 2009)

A killdeer shows its famous broken wing display.

Who jeers at hard-working farmers and thinks living at the farm is just a life at the beach? Killdeer, of course! While the rest of its kin are shorebirds, these inland members of the plover family thrive in farm fields and wide-open areas. Often seen running in starts and stops across the field, or circling overhead, these noisy birds brighten our days. Killdeer (Charaduis vociferous) are named for their loud, repeated call of kill-deeah. Their vocal repertoire also includes a rising dee-ee and low trills. By sight, they can be identified by their handsome black double breastband (chicks have one band) and the white wing stripe that is visible in when the bird is in flight.

Killdeer are ground foragers, mainly eating insects and other invertebrates, along with some seeds. They are also ground nesters, starting off the mating season with a “scraping ceremony” in which one the bird hollows out one or more trial nest sites before choosing the final site. The nest is nothing more than a shallow depression, perhaps with some pebbles added. The buff eggs with blackish-brown markings blend in perfectly with fields, pebbles and gravel. After 22-28 days, the clutch of 4-6 eggs hatch out chicks who hit the ground running – full feathers and open eyes. If you get too close to the nest, the parent may lure you away from them with a classic rendition of the broken wing trick . . . feigning a hurt wing, the bird hobbles just out of your reach until it finally takes flight, cackling “kill-deeah!”

The farm is an ecosystem designed by and for humans, but it includes a whole gang of organisms and processes that transcend our human needs of the place. The killdeer is at home in these human-modified habitats, and is a welcome, wild companion.

For everyone of Simple Gifts Farm - Audrey