bitter, sweet

The lambing season got off to a bitter start yesterday, with two stillborn lambs. Bitterly sad, such a waste of all the energy devoted to creating two such beautiful creatures. Eunice, their mother, was one of our first ewes and so has been with us for a while. Maybe because she is the most robust eater of our flock, and a big girl herself, she can generally be counted on for strapping, healthy lambs. During the Valentine’s Day blizzard a few years ago, several weeks before the lambs were due and while my husband was on the highway chasing a passport renewal for the vacation we were set to leave on in 24 hours, and while the snow was flying too thick to see one’s hands fly up to the sky in defeat, Eunice produced a lamb the size of a small pony. She has a sense of humor, as well as a good appetite.

Birthing is always a tightrope, a “perfectly ordinary miracle,” in the words of one midwife I know. I have done it and I have witnessed it enough times to know that the frightening moment of recognition of the perilous balance between worlds in which mother and baby can hover is not a rare component of the proceedings. Both times I watched my sisters do it, I saw that moment plain as day. “I could give up now," said their eyes, and then they didn’t, and all was well.

Generally if a ewe is walking that knife-edge, the movements and scent of her wobbly baby will bring her around. We couldn’t offer that to Eunice, who clearly knew all was not right. She arched her neck along the ground, and her eyes rolled. I took her head in my hands. I talked to her, and we offered her coin in the currency we know she values: a slick of molasses, a nibble of grain. This tickle of her senses seemed to tip her back over to our side. My husband arranged her so she could stand, and she stood. A bitter day, and a restorative mouthful of sweetness.

We trundled off to a dinner party later that day, not in the best of spirits. It was a lovely group, in a lovely house, and at the end of the meal our hostess left the table for about three minutes and produced a dessert that was perfect. Bitter and sweet, light but with enough richness to satisfy. Restorative.

Here it is:

oranges with caramel and cream

6 or 8 oranges, a mix of blood oranges, navels and maybe a cara cara if they look good

a pint of heavy cream

a dash of vanilla

1 c sugar

¼ c water

Using a very sharp knife, cut the ends from the oranges and set them upright. Cut the peel and pith away from all sides, and lay the oranges on their sides to cut slices a little less than ½ “ thick. Remove any stray seeds from the slices, and arrange them in a dish where they will be no more than two slices deep. If you like, you can sluice them with a splash of wine or other spirits, or leave them plain. Whip the cream and the dash of vanilla to soft peaks.

Now you have done all your prep work, and you can leave all this in the fridge for a few hours if you need to.

An hour or so before you are ready to serve, let the oranges and the cream come out of the fridge and lose some of their chill. In a small, heavy pan, melt the sugar with the water and swirl gently (don’t stir) until you have an amber-colored syrup. Working fast and attentively (sugar burns are doozies), pour the sugar in a thin, circular stream over the oranges. It will sizzle and snap and smell delightful; the sugar will harden on contact with the cool fruit, and you want to try to avoid creating large, tooth-threatening clumps of it. I suppose you could pour the sugar onto a buttered piece of parchment, and crumble this thin sheet over the oranges, but the beauty of this seemed to rest as much in the perfect flavors as the total simplicity of the preparations.

Serve the oranges with a dollop of the cream. Our hostess had a tray of dark chocolate meringues alongside these which was warmly received, but the fruit and cream could easily stand alone. If you are new to the caramelizing trade, don't fret over the sugar pot: hot water will clean it in a snap.

stuck in the weeds

As long as we are digging around in the yard for our dinner, we may as well talk about another mighty weed, the dandelion. If you thought burdock was a powerhouse you could no longer live without, wait until you get a load of dandelion. Although our name from it proceeds from the French ("dents de lion," or lion's teeth, because of its serrated edges), its common French name is "pissenlit," which means, none too politely, "wet the bed." In case you think I am making this up, here is the tag that was on the bunch I just bought at the grocery store:

This is particularly amusing because it turns out that what I bought was in fact chicory, but as the mighty herb witch Susun Weed is careful to explain, they are sister plants and often confused, which is OK because they share many of the same benefits and all of the same guidelines for preparation.

I am not sure we have time to list all the fantastic things that dandelion can do for you. Though you can rest assured you are unlikely to wet your bed in any language, dandelion is a flusher. Like all bitter vegetables, it is a digestive, and a boon to your liver and other organs of sanitation. It is astoundingly high in calcium and the antioxidants A and C. Believe me, this is the proverbial tip of the iceberg, and if you just want to dip a toe in the waters here, try mincing up a few leaves of dandelion greens and adding them to your iceberg or other lettuces, particularly at the start of a meal, in order to make the most of all the digestive benefits.

You can also cook them, preferably in a cast-iron pot, and here again a mixture of dandelion and a milder green like spinach will ease you into the project if you're unsure how much bitter you want on your plate. Dandelion greens, which are long and slender and pointy and sometimes red-stemmed, are widely available in the market here now, as are fatter bunches that look more like spinach, labeled as above, and which might just be chicory. Bitterness varies greatly from bunch to bunch, but be aware the red-stemmed varieties tend to pack more of it.

sweet & sour greens

2 bunches dandelion greens, or a mixture of dandelion and spinach
2-3 carrots, peeled and coarsely diced
1 medium onion, diced
2-3 T olive oil
generous pinch of salt
1 t finely grated fresh ginger root
2t balsamic vinegar
1 t tamari or shoyu

Wash the greens very well (they tend to be sandy); trim and discard the tough ends and coarsely chop the leaves. If you are using spinach as well as dandelion, keep them separate for now as the spinach won't need to be blanched first.

Bring a medium pot of water to boil and salt it well. As the water heats, heat a skillet with the olive oil. Sauté the onion in the oil over low to medium heat. When the water boils and the onions are just beginning to brown, drop in the carrots and cook for about 2 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to pull the carrots from the water and drop them into the pan. Turn the heat up to medium, and continue to sauté; the carrots should lighten and the onions start to brown nicely. Drop the dandelion into the water now, and stir to submerge it all and make sure it wilts. Use the spoon to scoop the greens into the pan with the onions and carrots. Add the spinach, if you are using it; the moisture in the cooked greens should be enough to steam the spinach as you stir. Add the tamari and vinegar, and the grated ginger, and stir and cook a minute or two more until the mixture is well-coated in the slightly thickened sauce. If you did use a cast-iron pan, be sure to remove the cooked greens as soon as they are done.

The blanching water from the greens and carrots will add some dandelion power to the cooking of rice or other foods. I'm just saying. It fits comfortably down the drain, too.

from Russia with love

I have a friend who wants me to read War and Peace. She is one of approximately two people on earth who could persuade me to take this on, and at her urging I have spent some recent hours trying to locate an audio version of this admirable monstrosity so I can devote some of the time I spend driving around like a hamster in a Habitrail to absorbing a portion of the material. Here are some of the highlights of this quest:

• I ordered the book through the library, and when it came it had TWENTY-SIX CDs, and turned out to only be volume two.
• I looked it up on iTunes (there is nothing you can say to me about looking for Tolstoy on iTunes that I have not already said to myself), where one review read simply: “You will die before you finish this book.”
• I found an mp3 version on the web, and feeling victorious, downloaded it to my iPod. This morning in the Habitrail I turned that puppy on, and it appears to have been recorded by an Austrian with a severe speech impediment and the thespian skills of a shoe horn. I think he recorded it in his bathroom.

Bringing this back around to what we are all going to have for dinner, after I listed to the entire first chapter of the Austrian's version, laughing a little harder than I imagine Tolstoy intended me to, I started wondering what to write about today. (This is code for “feeling like I had nothing to say.”) Thinking back over the last few days of eating, my mind settled, with not much certainty, on burdock root. Last weekend my brother-in-law brought me a packet of fresh burdock root from the Asian grocery store he raided for me on his way here, and I made quick pickles with it. I used to make this dish, which in Japan is called either Gobo Kinpira or Kinpira Gobo, all the time when I learned from my herb witch friend that burdock was a superfood. But like some things do, despite their popularity, it had fallen off the menu for quite a while. My children, whose growing bodies are 73% composed of pickles, were happy to see it come back. (This is code for “they ate the whole bowl.”) I supposed that was worth a post, so I did a little reading (“Wikipedia”), and--you may have seen this coming, but I didn't--immediately encountered a quote from Tolstoy regarding burdock. He said, of the tenacious root, “it makes me want to write.”

So there you have it: fusion cuisine! Salad from Japan, with Slavic and Napoleonic overtones.

In case you are curious about burdock's stupendous powers, its roots and leaves and seeds are all a potent part of the herbal pharmacy, acting as a blood purifier, skin soother and cooler of inflammations, among other applications. A particularly prolific member of the Dock family, the widely available leaves were often used by farm wives to wrap the butter they were taking to market, hence the name (“beurre-dock”), and we all have the pesky seed heads to thank for having Velcro in our lives: a Swiss scientist felt a mental light-bulb switch on when he was pulling them out of his dog’s tail, and the rest is history.

I think there is no shortage of ways to make this, and as I recall I make it this way because this is what I deduced from how it tasted in the Japanese restaurant we went to when our girls were tiny tots. It's best to set this up for an hour or so of marinating before you plan to eat it, but you may have to hide it.

gobo kinpira

carrot & burdock pickle

about 5 ozs burdock root (look for firm roots not much thicker than your thumb, or they may have woody centers; if this turns out to be the case just trim that part out)

3 or 4 carrots

2T brown rice vinegar

1T tamari or shoyu

1t maple syrup or honey

1t finely grated fresh ginger root

Have a medium size saucepan of cold water near your cutting board, and into it splash about a teaspoon of rice vinegar. Work with one burdock root at a time, as they oxidize very rapidly. Peel the root, noticing but not becoming alarmed by the earthy smell that's released, and cut it into matchsticks about 2-3" long. Plunge these into the saucepan, and continue with the rest of the burdock. Cut up the carrots in a similar way, but set them aside; they cook much faster than the burdock.

Bring the pot full of burdock to a boil and then reduce the heat to medium and simmer for about ten minutes, until the pieces are barely tender. Throw in the carrots, and cook about two minutes longer. Cooking time will vary somewhat according to how thin your slices are and how old your roots are, so just aim for barely tender.

Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, combine the other ingredients. When the vegetables are cooked, drain them (you may want to reserve this water for making soup, as it is full of goodness) and plop them in the marinade. Stir well and let them sit, stirring occasionally and trying not to finish the bowl as you test to see if they are pickled enough before you serve them. Adjust the sour, sweet and salty to your taste, if need be.

They will keep for days in the fridge for nibbling purposes.

hot-bed of activity

My niece, who visited over the weekend, noted that it was Super Vegetable Week and asked me how this distinguished the present week from the other 51 in my year. “Are you going to post something about dessert today, to reward everyone for all the vegetable stuff?” she asked me. She likes dessert, possibly slightly more than she likes vegetables, a viewpoint which may be reflected in the little snippet of dialogue I have just quoted for you. I have a strong feeling that what I am about to offer you is not the kind of dessert she means, but it is the right dessert for Vegetable Week, in my opinion.

I have been reading Elizabeth David lately, specifically her book about Christmas food, for no particular reason other than it was the one they had at the library and I thought it might have something in it about vegetables in winter. It did.

If you already know all about Elizabeth David, skip this next part and go straight to the excerpt I have excerpted for you below.

If you wonder who she is, I will tell you in the briefest possible terms that she was by her own description a “British cookery journalist,” a food writer of astonishing historical knowledge whose proper tone and decisive manner make me feel as though I have a slightly alarming but fascinating governess in the kitchen with me. David, who died in 1992, lived a wildly unconventional and adventurous life and is credited with nothing less than entirely renovating British food. “She taught us we could do better with what we had,” said Jane Grigson, who is no slouch herself and also worth a google in your spare time.

In her tone, David is kind of Margaret Thatcher meets Mary Poppins--no nonsense tolerated, lots of adventures to tell you about, breezy instructions that must be followed to the letter or certain ruin will follow, and no time for your peevish questions about the details. “If here and there in my account of a cookery journalist’s Christmases a note of desperation is clearly audible, I don’t make apologies. Christmas, at any rate the way we are supposed to celebrate it nowadays, does tend to unbalance people,” she says in her introduction. This either makes it clear why it’s kind of tempting to just re-type the whole book here for you, or makes you glad that I don’t plan to.

With the stern self-control any governess would expect, I am going to limit myself to one story. Thinking about how unnatural it seems to truck vegetables in from other climates for several months of the year had me wondering what people in cold climates ate in this season before such dubious and seemingly irresistible wonders were possible. David quotes from a book in her vast collection (which is now housed at Harvard and seems worth a pilgrimage) called The Complete English Gardener, written by a fellow named Samuel Cooke and published in 1760. It seems the unwillingness to live through winter without salad has some historical roots.

“We have in the conservatory some artichoaks preserved in the sand. There are several sorts of cabbages, and their sprouts, for boiling; asparagus upon hot-beds; and if diligence has been used, you may find some cucumbers, of the plants that were sown in July and August.

“We have this month on the hot-bed sallads of small herbs, with mint, tarragon, burnet, cabbage-lettuce preserved under glasses, and some cresses and chervil upon the natural ground, with which high taste helps the sallads of this season. To these may be added blanched celery and endive.

"There are variety of herbs for soups and the kitchen use, such as sage, thyme, beet-leaves, parsley, sorrel, spinach, cellery, and leeks...Likewise sweet marjoram, dried marigold flowers, and dried mint..."

He writes about forcing peas in a cold frame and coaxing cherries from the December trees and what types of apples are left (Ambret! Colmar!) and generally makes you wonder how a culture known--until David galloped in to rescue them--for boiling everything until it was grey could have sprung from such concern for year-round access to flavorful tender greens. It's good to know the craving for high taste and sallads of the season connects us over time, even if our present methods could bear some adjusting.

No more peevish focus on vegetables alone--back to regularly scheduled programming now.