which came first

actual photo of actual first egg ever laid here on our farm, december 1999

We have acquired chickens by several methods over the nine years that we've been chicken-keepers. We have ordered them by phone and then received them in the mail. We have driven long distances to buy them from crazy people who are bizarrely devoted to some arcane heirloom breed (arguably, by finding these people and then driving miles and miles to their remote location for the purpose of this exchange, forfeiting our own claims to sanity.) We have gone to time-consuming lengths to incubate eggs in our house, only to see a justifiably snooty hen march out from under the coop with a family she hatched the old-fashioned way.

We have some spectacular pure-bred, pedigree, fancy-dan chickens that we ordered: Crested Golden Polish, Frizzle, Silkie, etc.

General Tucker Stinkyfanny, Second Assistant Vice-Rooster, a purebred Frizzle

But the home-brew chickens are among the handsomest on our farm; witness the Golden-Frosted Mullet Mezzo-Frizzle:

Chicken genetics turn out to be fairly simple for the lay-person (you should pardon the term) to understand, in that crossing a green-egg-layer with a speckled-egg-layer tends to produce a speckled-green-egg-layer, and crossing a poofy-head-feathered one with a poofy-cheek-feathered one will net you a bunch of demi-head-poofed, demi-cheek-poofed chickens. And so on. Mullet Boy is not alone--our flock has a bunch of stunning examples of these principles. My friend Suzi says they look like extras in a Metropolitan Opera production set in Paris.

On most farms concerned with things like profit margins and feed-to-egg ratios, chickens head for the soup pot when they stop laying a reliable one egg per day and start laying, erratically, eggs too large to fit in the standard egg carton--by two years of age. Around here, we run a retirement home for chickens and should probably sell eggs for about eleven dollars apiece. A fresh barnyard egg tastes good enough to warrant that charge, but I don’t think the market will bear it.

Whenever I begin to feel weary of stepping in chicken poop and shooing dusty birds off my porch, I steer my thoughts to the eggs, and a memory of one of my then-tiny daughters ordering three scrambled with a side of toast while we were traveling. “Mama, what’s wrong with these eggs?” she asked me after the waiter set them down in front of her. I peered. Eggs scrambled at home are a vivid nasturtium-y turmeric color, while these were the same color as the butter in the butter dish. I suppose that’s worth a little poop on the shoes.

Even if you do not have an opera company of chickens in your yard, you probably have access to a better class of egg than the stupormarket has to offer. I could point you towards plenty of horrifying literature about the egg industry and sobering facts like two hens to a cage the size of a piece of printer paper and eggs warehoused for months before they reach the store shelves, or I could spare you that and just plead with you to fork it over for good ones. If you want a simple guideline, don't even make eye contact with a carton that does not promise at least "free-range." It's not a reliable standard by any stretch of the imagination, but it's the barest minimum standard we should accept. Just try to buy eggs from people, not corporations, when you can. "Pasture-Raised" is a much, much better standard to go by, and here is a resource to help you find those near you. Here is another one, and here is a third.

I can't say we ever get tired of eating eggs, but it is nice to stumble across a new way to feature them. This is one of those endlessly variable deals that you can also make ahead, reserving the prepared crust, covered, in the fridge for as long as a day, or you can finish making the tart and underbake it, to be finished in a hot oven when you are ready to serve it. Everyone here seemed to be happy to gobble it up, with some soup and salad. In place of or in addition to the greens, you could use artichoke hearts, as the original recipe did, or any of the other things you like to throw into a frittata or omelette or quiche.

polenta pie

inspired by Maria Speck's Ancient Grains for Modern Meals

for the crust:

1c +2T coarse polenta

3 c water

1t salt

1t chopped fresh thyme, if you have it around

1/2 c grated parmesan

1 egg

olive oil, to grease the pan

for the filling:

4 eggs

1c plain yogurt, preferably Greek and NOT nonfat

1 T olive oil or butter

kale or spinach, one bunch, cleaned and trimmed and coarsely chopped or torn
scallions, about 5, minced, or a leek, cleaned and minced
3-4 oz feta, crumbled or similar tangy, zippy cheese
fresh pepper to taste
more grated parmesan, to garnish, if you feel up to it

Thinly coat a 10" ceramic baking dish with olive oil and set aside.

To make the crust, bring the water and salt to a boil in a heavy saucepan, and sprinkle in the cornmeal, stirring with a whisk to prevent lumps. Stir for about a minute, until the meal is in a nice suspension, then reduce heat as low as possible and cover the pot. Cook for 10 minutes, stirring vigorously about every 2 minutes, then remove from heat and let stand, covered, for another 10 minutes. You should have a nice, thick porridge. Stir in the cheese, egg and a few twists of pepper. Taste and adjust the seasonings to your liking.

Have a glass of cold water handy, and a soup spoon. Glop the polenta into the prepared baking dish. Dip the soup spoon in the water and use it to push and spread the polenta as evenly as possible across the bottom and up the sides of the pan. Keep dipping the spoon to prevent stickiness. Let the crust rest about 15 minutes before you proceed.

Preheat the oven to 375.

Heat the oil or butter in a skillet with a lid, and saute the scallions or leeks a minute or two, until just soft. Toss in the greens (ideally with a little of their washing water clinging to them) and stir, then cover the pan. Cook just until softened, and remove from the heat and let stand uncovered while you mix the filling up.

Beat the eggs and the yogurt together with a twist of pepper and maybe a pinch of salt, depending on the saltiness of your chosen cheese. Arrange the greens and half the cheese in the prepared crust, pour in the filling, and sprinkle the remaining cheese on top, maybe along with a scratch or two of parmesan.

Bake about 45 minutes, until filling is set and golden brown on top. Best to let it cool about 20 minutes before eating, to firm up.

cake sera, sera

Most of the time, I am all about the shortest distance between grocery bag and plate. In my own twisted way, of course, because I often mean the quickest way to make something from scratch, hence eliminating Hamburger Helper and its ilk (I actually typed “ills” there first, but it was a typo, Doctor, I swear it) from the strategies I use in my vector-like trajectory (ha!) from stove to table.

But this thought process applies only 361 days of the year. On the birthdays for which I am responsible, I am all about fuss and trouble and the Heart’s Desire. A six-tiered, heart-shaped lemon cake with roses on it? OK, I’ll try. Robot cake? Cake shaped like a Boston Duck Tour boat, but with strawberries? I don’t promise to be entirely cheerful throughout the process, nor entirely successful in a Wilton Professional Cake Decorating Level 202/Martha Stewart Eat Your Heart Out way, but I’ll take a run at it.

In the studio of the mind, where the schematics for these things are drawn up, the frosting is always smooth, time is limitless and my wrists are as supple as the spatula’s acrobatics require. Furthermore, in the mental run-through, someone else will be washing the pastry bags.

Reality always intrudes, and brings with her the news that I have never actually gotten around to taking that cake decorating class and that I only have about 47 minutes in real time to assemble the thing. She often brings insufficient frosting, too, as well as crumbly cake and lost utensils and other impediments to the successful manifestation of what my mind’s eye has in its cross-hairs. She can be that way.

Inevitably, no matter what I have told myself in advance, I come down with the Birthday Sweats. What matters, of course, is not whether or not the mother of one of my children’s friends can make a scale reproduction in sugar and flour of Buckingham Palace, or whether my own reach has exceeded my grasp in ways obvious to any onlookers. What matters is how the birthday human receives it.

My son received his first birthday cake, a perfectly boring and plain disk of plain cake with plain pureed apricots on top, like it was the most shockingly beautiful thing he had seen in all his 12 months of life.

Our files are laced with shots of cakes, some passable, some respectable, some lumpy and leaning. The grinning birthday human is the nicest thing in each picture. A fuss has been made, for them and to their specifications, and this is all as it should be.

Today is a birthday in our house, the first of a celebration-laden month. Appetites for birthday treats are still fresh, and I am game for another season. The frosting was a bit stiff, the cupcake batter over-ran the cupcake papers, the little chocolate cups I ordered to go on top of them looked more like frying pans than coffee cups. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Happy Birthday, sweet child of mine.

This was a component of the birthday proceedings, and it stands alone nicely.

caramel mousse

adapted from here

1 cup heavy whipping cream, divided

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

2 T water

1/2 t vanilla

2 T unsalted butter, softened

Bring 1/3 cup of cream just to a boil in a small saucepan over medium heat, and remove from heat.

Meanwhile, heat the granulated sugar, brown sugar and water in a 2-quart heavy-duty saucepan over high heat, without stirring, until the mixture comes to a boil. Cook the mixture over medium heat, without stirring, until it turns deep amber-colored, about 6 minutes.

Lower the heat under the caramel to medium. Slowly add the hot cream to the caramel, stirring constantly with a long-handled, heat-resistant spatula or spoon. Beware, the cream will bubble and foam. Continue to stir until absolutely smooth. Remove from the heat and stir in the butter until it’s completely melted.

Transfer the caramel sauce to a 2-quart bowl and let cool to room temperature.

Whip the remaining 3/4 cup of cream with the vanilla until it holds soft peaks. Set aside 1/3 cup of the whipped cream and fold the remaining whipped cream into the caramel sauce in 3 stages.

Garnish with (if you happen to have it) crumbled chocolate cake, or mashed up chocolate or almond cookies, and the remaining whipped cream. Chill 2 hours if you have not already eaten it all testing to make sure it was tasty. If you haven't, and you portion it out sternly, you could make 6 modest desserts.

bean a while

I’m a little more scatterbrained than usual today. So before I give you a recipe, first I will tell you that when you make brownies, even though the recipe says you have to use cold eggs, and there are none in the fridge and you are halfway through making the brownies and it is too late to go to the store, I can report that if you have to dash out to the chicken coop to see if there are any eggs out there (please oh please, let there be four), figuring it is a cold, snowy day so any eggs you find will be nicely chilled, and you do in fact find exactly four eggs, but they are under a chicken and they are at about the temperature you would expect them to be at given that location, you can use them anyway.

Seeing the wild orange of the yolks against the deep brown of the chocolate may even calm you down a bit, if you are not calm already.

I wasn’t, particularly. But opening my eyes for such pleasures caused me to pause a moment to admire the teeny tiny scoop that lives in my cayenne pepper.

Suddenly I felt much better.

Not so much better that I can in any way connect the brownies to the post I was planning today, which is about green beans, nor so calm that I can find the picture I was sure I had taken of the beans when we had them for dinner. But the trend is positive.

As for the beans, like most things involving vegetables, this is way better with summer beans. But the beans have been passable in the store lately, and so I've been buying them. There is a gap between "passable" and "tasty enough to eat plain," so I was reminded of this preparation. It is hard to think of it as a recipe. It’s more of an idea. But some of the tastiest things are like that--you eat something someone else has made and clamor for the recipe, and they look confused and say, “oh, that--that’s not a recipe. It's just the regular normal thing I do without thinking,” or words to that effect, but even though their family may yawn when they see it coming, it rocks your world because it has not been in your toolbox until then.

I hope this principle applies here. This idea was born in a glut bean year in the garden, when new ways to eat beans needed to be invented. Like the rutabaga, this one has good sounds on its side, and another plus is that it feeds the part of the mouth that responds well to pickles.

The basics are below. The basics are tasty: tangy, salty, creamy. But you can riff in any direction you like from there. Add orange zest, or the copious amounts of minced raw garlic that my one sister favors, or some finely grated fresh ginger, or a lot of chopped parsley, or a pinch of cayenne, or all of these.

tahini beany

About a pound of green beans, trimmed to your liking

2T tahini

2T EV olive oil

1-2T lemon juice, to your taste

½ t kosher or other coarse salt, or to your taste

In a medium bowl, mix the dressing ingredients: first the oil and the tahini until smooth, then the lemon juice, then the salt. It should be just a little bit more lemony and salty than you like, and then the beans will handle mellowing it out a bit.

Bring a pot of water to boil and salt it well. Drop in the beans and cook until the green brightens and they are just tender, a few minutes max. Drain and (if you are lazy like me) rinse with cold water to arrest the cooking; if you are not lazy, plop them into a bowl of cold water. Drain again, and drop into the dressing and toss. Warmish, wettish beans, tossed quickly in the dressing, should render things all creamy and clingy. If the dressing clumps a little, they will be less photogenic but otherwise unharmed.

swede heart

Consider, if you will, the rutabaga.

I never really have, aside from the fact that it is one of my favorite things to say. When I was a tot, my mother gave me Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, a deeply weird collection of fables with names like “How They Bring Back the Village of Cream Puffs When the Wind Blows It Away,” and since then “rutabaga” has been in my top 10. It’s an excellent word. You can say it like a thug from Brooklyn, or with a little tonsil trill like a Swedish soprano might, or use it as a growling expletive, or a very effective courtside cheer for almost any sport. I have done all of these and more, but the rutabaga is not something I have ever really gotten involved with as a food. In fact, I have created a PR problem for it in my house, because whenever anyone asks suspiciously what I will be foisting on them for dinner (I made guacamole out of peas once--just once!--and my reputation has never really rebounded from it), I am likely to say something along the lines of “rutabaga fricassee” or “tangy rutabaga-clam pancakes.”

But now I have cooked a rutabaga, and it was good. Aside from its splendid visuals--purple and yellow! Come on, people!--the rutabaga, or swede, brings a lot to the table, like whopping amounts of vitamin C, iron, calcium and magnesium, and all the health-giving benefits of the Brassica family. The recipe I used came from a totally wonderful cookbook called Veganomicon, by a totally wonderful pair of cooks, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero of the Post-Punk Kitchen, who have never steered me wrong in all the four books I have known them. They told me to put cilantro in my rutabaga, and I was skeptical. As usual, they were right. But they also said you could make it without cilantro and it would be delicious, and they were right about that, too. They included a dab of agave to sweeten this (2 tsp), which I can see the merits of, but I left it out. Your call.

As a parting gift, here is an action shot from the 14th annual Ithaca Rutabaga Curling Competition.

photo by Jerry Feist

Mashed rutabaga with coconut & lime

adapted from Veganomicon

2 ½ lbs rutabaga, peeled and chunked

¼ c coconut milk (use regular, not light, for maximum deliciousness)

2T lime juice

handful of chopped cilantro (or not)

salt to taste (didn't need much)

Put the rutabaga in a saucepan and cover with water; boil until fork-tender. Drain, and either transfer to a food processor with the remaining ingredients, or attack them right in the pot with a stick blender and see it all turn a lovely bright green. If you are not including the cilantro, you could use a potato masher instead.

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photo: thompson-finch farm

Considering our revolutionary beginnings as a nation, it’s kind of appalling how quickly we turn grassroots movements into Astroturf. Any idea that catches on like wildfire is pretty likely to become merchandised, franchised and sanitized until it’s ready for its close-up. But I have my fingers crossed for the Occupiers that they don’t get an ice cream flavor or cable channel. This is not only because the Slow Food, sustainable farming, local foodshed, food justice and environmental movements (my All-Star Team) have linked up with them, but then again maybe it is. It's pretty exciting to me, this Big Idea that it is all one issue--that fixing the food problems is not peripheral or secondary or frivolous but fundamentally connected to everything that caused the eruption of frustration into action.

If you’d like to read something beautiful and motivating about the very simple things you can do right now to start your own ripple of action, go see Alana. She nails it.

My own ripple started this morning in the freezer. Lately, I find that I am unable to go to the grocery store without sliding into a funk. WhatIsThePointWhyBotherTryingLookAtAllThisCrap is the constant refrain in my head, as I reach glumly for tired vegetables and dodge the leering eyes of the Lunchables and try not to stare menacingly into the cart of the person in front of me at the checkout counter.

But this morning I made a smoothie for my family, and as I pulled the berries out of the freezer I was transported, just for a moment, back in time to the hot, sweaty day I picked them with my children.

Last winter I thought I was being clever and I ordered a bulk bag of frozen organic strawberries, a financial savings over the tiny bags in the regular freezer case, and one that had the additional merit of inhabiting a single plastic bag instead of thirty little ones. But when the bag came it was stamped with its country of origin, and that country was China.

I am not going to mouth off about trade relations with China, or their scandalous lapses in food safety. I am just going to moan about the epic ridiculousness of shipping frozen food from there to here, and the nice little lie we can tell ourselves that buying organic is helping the world, and all the ways we ignore the costs incurred by our choices. OK, I’m done.

So last summer we picked our own strawberries, here, so we could feed our insatiable need for strawberry smoothies without the temptation to go back to that well. One afternoon’s work, and we enjoyed a long winter of restorative happiness. I forgot all about that in my grocery funk, but Alana’s voice and my hand in the freezer reminded me that the little actions we manage to take are not shouts in the wind, but the fuel and the fire both.

So it's Occupy Food Day. Here is a little encouragement to do something, some little thing, today that connects your brain to your mouth, your heart to your stomach, your mind to the hands that brought the food to your family. Alana has a great list of actions in her post. Take special note of the encouragement to taste your food. Your food came from somewhere; chew on that.

Here are a few other trees to bark up:

First of all, if you are not outraged, you are not paying attention. Get some facts:

• Four corporations, led by Walmart, control more than half of grocery sales.
  
• Three companies -- Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta -- own 47 percent of the world's seeds.
  
• Nearly every major commodity -- wheat, corn, soy -- is controlled by just four corporations.
• Just four corporations control more than 80 percent of all our meat supply.
• According to USDA statistics, America loses more than 17,000 farmers a year -- one every half an hour.
  

Get your chin up off the desk! Little actions, big ripples.

I've said it before, but buy local honey. Why? Read more.

Read good news and spread it.

Stop buying meat in a chain grocery store. This is the big kahuna on your grocery list. Don't clutter your head with which megaproducers are better or anything like that; just don't do it anymore. If dealing directly with a farmer is not practical for your life, then buy your meat somewhere that knows, understands and identifies its sources. Not sure what the terms all mean? Learn what questions to ask. A lot of meat eating depends on not making the mental connection to its source ("pork" sounds better than "piggy") but if you are going to change one thing only, this is the place to start. Fish? Go here.

Renew your vows with your reusable bags, cups, containers and water bottles. You don't need to buy fancy new ones, unless their sex appeal is what will make you actually use them. Shying away from packaging breeds billowing feelings of liberation and mightiness, especially bottled water and disposable coffee cups. Science. It's a fact. Don't bother looking it up, just trust me.

When you have taken some revolutionary action, whatever its magnitude, reward yourself with a cool drink. Oh, and mark that berry-picking day on your calendar now so you don't forget.

dessert for breakfast
makes one

1 c milk
1 tender-ripe pear, peeled and chunked
1 c frozen strawberries
1 tsp honey
dash of vanilla

Blend, baby, blend.

idling

No food! I made four things in the last two days, not counting some highly medicinal spinach with garlic and lemon that was universally craved after an unpleasant flight home, and all four were flops. I cooked and cooked as dinnertime approached tonight, and still began to feel we were heading for a pizza. I was right. I seem to have forgotten how to cook, so I am going to distract you (and me) with other things.

Last night I had the occasion to yap to someone about the John Irving book A Prayer For Owen Meany. It is not unusual to hear me spouting off about some book or another, either in a rah-rah fashion or more of a poo-poo, but I am especially passionate about this one (rah-rah), because it sustained me through a period of agitated and interminable waiting many years ago. I was stuck in a location I very badly wanted to leave, and could not get a flight out of for 18 hours, and had no desire or ability to explore while I waited. So I read. It occurred to me, as I burrowed into the story, to wonder how people wait when they are not readers.

Thanks to the charmed life I had led to that point, it did not occur to me to wonder how you wait when the level of stress of the waiting makes it unthinkable that you could follow a storyline, or even a sentence, from start to finish, but I have since encountered it. Sometimes knitting serves in this type of situation, because if it is the right kind of knitting you only have to pay attention one stitch at a time, and it keeps your lap warm in the meantime.

One of my good friends is an Olympic-level reader (the quantity that she reads excelled only, in my acquaintance, by the friend who has chronic and severe insomnia) and she was doing that kind of waiting today. She was waiting for her child to come out of surgery. Even she could not read under these circumstances. She also could not knit, under these or any other circumstances. She is one of my most ardent supporters in this venture here, and yet she disagrees with almost everything I have to say, particularly the parts about the satisfaction and relaxation that proceed from making things yourself. The very prospect of making something herself, in the kitchen or in any other room, makes her anxious and unhappy. She told me so again today, perhaps suspecting that I might suggest she lose herself in a tatting project while waiting for the doctor to come out and give her a report. I had no such notions, of course.

But when she said that she was relieving tension by thinking of all the things she was not making, I did compose a little guided meditation for her. She wanted me to make it widely available because maybe someone else in the world would feel the knots leave their neck muscles when they read it, and considering that she almost never asks for anything, and considering the whole forgetting-how-to-cook thing, I am doing as she asks.

Not Crafting: A Meditation

You are not halfway through needlepointing the second of a set of 12 new seats for the dining room chairs.

You won't waste precious time worrying over the choice between felting new Christmas stockings for the whole family and knitting them.

It will not fall to you to prepare tiny canapés or éclairs for a crowd.

No sock darning is on the horizon.

Is your immediate area free of rubber stamps and gel pens? Thought so.

You will never need to purchase or borrow a set of aspic cutters.

It’s highly unlikely that the need to find a glue stick will come up before you get to bed.

IT TOTALLY DOES NOT MATTER IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO GET PINKING SHEARS.

Maybe tomorrow I will remember how to cook.

piece of cake

I do not have a funny story to tell you. I do not even have a picture. But I do have cake.

My mother made friends with the man in the bakery, where she cannot buy anything because all the nice treats in it are made with wheat flour. It’s a general truth (with certain exceptions, as most general truths will have) that wheat flour is what makes things in a bakery tasty.

The man in the bakery said he knew how to make a cake with no flour that he thought my mother would like. Ha, I said, when I heard this. Treats without wheat flour sometimes taste good, say if you buy these cookies, or sell your car and use the proceeds to buy some of this flour, but generally speaking fluffy yummy cake is well outside the reach of the home cook, especially if that cook is unwilling to get involved with xanthan gum, which the very costly flour does contain.

The bakery man scrawled out a recipe on a piece of yellow paper for my mother, and we made it. I was a little too relaxed about folding in the egg whites, and also the man in the bakery conceded he may have been a little off in the amount of baking powder he had written down. More flavor was called for, too. So the first cake, while nice, was texturally a little off.

That’s all behind us now. All necessary adjustments have been made, and now all of us know how to make a gluten-free cake that has no weird gums in it and does not keep your incisors sanded down thanks to its gritty undertones. It is fluffy cake, bless its soul. You could serve it to anyone, whatever their position on gluten.

We scarfed it down plain, but vision of berries and cream, or heaps of delightful frosting--birthday cake!!--danced in my head. Apologies to egg-not-eaters and potato-avoiders--your day will come.

fluffy cake

4 eggs, at room temperature, separated

1 c unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 c sugar

1 ¼ c potato starch

1 ¼ t baking powder

pinch of salt

1 ½ t vanilla

finely grated zest of two lemons

Preheat oven to 350. Butter a 9” cake pan, line the bottom with a circle of parchment paper, and re-butter the parchment. Now dust the pan with a couple of teaspoons of potato starch. Have a baking sheet ready. Make sure the oven rack is in the center of the oven, not too high, not too low.

Cream the butter well with the sugar, until light. Beat the yolks in one at a time, beating well after each, and beat in the zest and vanilla.

Combine the potato starch and baking powder, and add these to the butter mixture.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites with the pinch of salt to firm peaks. Gently combine about a fourth of the whites with the butter mixture, to lighten it, and then, using a large spatula or balloon whisk, very gently and patiently fold in the remaining whites.

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and gently smooth the top. Place the pan on the baking sheet and bake 20 minutes. Reduce the oven heat to 325 degrees, and bake for another 20 minutes. It will look very done before this, but gird up your loins and keep baking.

Let the cake cool on a rack for as long as you can restrain yourself, then invert onto a rack and remove the parchment. Turn right side up onto a plate and have at it.