Dark Days: Sorrel Sauce from the Garden

In the course of researching an article on rhubarb recently I discovered that a close relation is sorrel. Oxalic acid makes rhubarb leaves toxic. It gives sorrel leaves a distinct and almost addictive tartness, although sorrel should not be eaten to excess either.

We planted sorrel from seed in the garden at my daughter's school. The plants thrived for a while, but now there's no sign of them. The kids liked the citrusy flavor so much they ate the sorrel down to the nub.

In our own garden we have two sorrel plants. They seem to be perfectly content in average soil amended with compost and fin ull sun with some shade in the afternoon. Sorrel is perenniel and holds up well to our winters here in the District of Columbia. That makes it one of the first greens available in spring when we are still waiting for the rest of the garden to germinate.

Sorrel grows wild as "sheep sorrel" (Rumex acetosella). The garden varieties, (Rumex acetosa), with long, narrow leaves growing in clumps, and "French sorrel" (Rumex scatacus), with smaller, rounder leaves growing in mats, are perhaps best known for their role in sorrel soup. Sorrel will also brighten a salad or omelet and makes a piquant sauce for fish or foul.

The sauce is a fairly simple matter of sweating shallots in butter, "melting" a couple of big handfuls of sorrel leaves, incorporating a bit of white wine and then finishing with a large dose of heavy cream.

I rarely see sorrel in stores. Perhaps one of the vendors at your farmers market will have some for sale. Otherwise, sorrel is so easy to grow, there's no reason not to have some in your herb garden or even in a pot on the deck.

Note: to use the sorrel leaves, remove the stem and tough portion of the vein by grasping the leafing part with one hand and pulling the stem backwards with the other.

Sorrel sauce:

2 medium shallots, minced
1 tablespoon butter
2 bunches sorrel, about 20 leaves each, stem and tough vein removed, leaves finely chopped
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 2/3 cup heavy cream

In a medium sauce pan over moderately-low heat, melt the butter and sweat the shallots until soft, about 8 minutes. Add chopped sorrel leaves and "melt" (the leaves will quickly cook down and become extremely tender). Add white wine, bring to a simmer and cook until reduced by about 1/4. Add cream, bring to a simmer and cook until thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

The sauce can be made ahead and reheated. Here it's used to give the star treatment to a free-range chicken breast from Pennsylvania.

Dark Days: Butternut Squash Lasagna

No, this is not an April Fool's joke. I really am writing about squash in April.

But when you think about it, winter squashes will store for such a long time they could almost be considered a spring vegetable. Especially this time of year we need every bit of vegetable goodness we can get: We've used up almost everything that overwintered in the garden, and it will be weeks before any of our new crops are ready to harvest.

So we walked to the farmer's market and bought almost everything we needed for this lasagna: the squash, the ricotta, the mozzarella. It made our hearts beat just a little faster knowing we could purchase such fabulous ingredients from local farmers within range of our home here in the District of Columbia.

But there's another compelling reason to write about butternut squash. Our friends Charlotte and Freddie at the Great Big Vegetable Challenge blog continue to work their way through the vegetable alphabet, searching for recipes with kid appeal. Their challenge to us: come up with a squash recipe Freddie will love.

Well, the first thing that came to mind was spaghetti squash with vegetarian marinara sauce. It's one of our favorite ways to enjoy squash--a lot like conventional spaghetti--but I thought the occasion called for something with a little more pizazz. Acorn squash glazed with pomegranate is a quick and elegant side dish. But it's almost too easy. And then I remembered this decadent, totally elegant butternut squash lasagna.

This is neither quick, nor something you will want to attempt every night.

In fact, you will get a few pots and pans dirty making this lasagna. You may even have to save a few pennies for the fresh ricotta and mozzarella cheese. And if you are obsessed with calories and cholesterol, you may want to substitute low-fat versions of the ricotta, the mozzarella and the milk.

This is probably unlike most lasagnas you've had before. Not only is the creamy, butternutty filling a surprise, but the seasonings--fennel, cinnamon, garlic, sage--are more like something out of a Renaissance cookbook. Read the recipe through completely to get your bearings. Basically you make a filling with roasted squash, ricotta, fennel, cinnamon and sage. Then you make a sauce with butter, flour, milk, garlic and more sage. Finally you layer everything in a casserole using your favorite lasagna noodles (I used no-boil, simply because there is plenty of work to do elsewhere without having to cook pasta as well) plus some grated mozzarella and Parmesan.

This lasagna makes six generous portions, and some of those can be divided for children. I make mine in a non-stick metal pan 8 1/2 inches square and 2 1/2 inches deep. Getting individual slices of the pie out of the pan can be tricky. Consider making the lasagna a day or two ahead and refrigerating it. This would give the incredible flavors time to meld, and it would be a simple matter of removing the whole pie from the pan, slicing it into individual pieces and reheating them for dinner (or breakfast, or lunch).

For the squash filling:

1 medium butternut squash, about 2 pounds
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons fresh sage, finely chopped
1 teaspoon ground fennel
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup ricotta cheese
1/2 cup grated Parmesan
1 large egg

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit (the Brits will have to make a conversion).

Trim about 1/2 inch from the top and bottom of the squash. Use a vegetable peeler to remove the skin. Cut the squash in half lengthwise, remove the seeds, then cut the halves into 1-inch pieces. Toss these in a bowl with the olive oil, sage, fennel, cinnamon, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Spread the squash on a baking sheet and roast for about 45 minutes, or until the squash is completely cooked through.

Place the squash in a food processor (or do this in a bowl with a potato masher) and blend with the ricotta, the grated Parmesan and the egg. Place in the refrigerator to cool.

For the sauce:

1 quart milk
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 teaspoons minced garlic
2 teaspoons sage, finely chopped
1 teaspoon salt
freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 cup all-purpose flour

In a saucepan, heat the milk until it is steaming, but do not boil

In a separate saucepan, melt the butter over moderate heat, then add the garlic and sage and cook a minute or two. Stir in the flour and cook, stirring frequently, for three or four minutes to make a roux. Begin adding hot milk to the roux, a ladle full at a time. Stir continuously as the sauce begins to bubble and thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. Remove from heat.

For final assembly:

Greased casserole or pan
8 ounces no-boil lasagna noodles (or substitute your choice cooked noodles)
8 ounces grated mozzarella cheese
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan

Set oven to 375 degrees

Now it's time to put everything together. You'll make about four layers, so be sure to have some of the mozzarella and Parmesan for each layer as well as the top.

Start by ladling enough of the sauce to cover the bottom of your pan or casserole. Cover the sauce with noodles (some may need to be cut to fit). Use a spatula to spread a layer of squash mixture over the noodles, then ladle some sauce over the squash and dust with mozzarella and Parmesan. Repeat until you reach almost to the top of the pan or casserole--or run out of ingredients, which ever comes first. Ladle the last of the sauce over the top and finish with a dusting of more cheese.

Cover the pan with aluminum foil, place on a baking sheet and put it in the oven to bake for one hour. Remove the foil and bake an additional 15 minutes. The top of the lasagna should be bubbly and lightly browned. If not, set it under the broiler for a minute or two.

Add a fresh green salad and a cold glass of a buttery Chardonnay and you have dinner.

Dark Days: A Buffet for Urban Gardeners

My home is ground zero for our local gardening group, D.C. Urban Gardeners. This is no garden club, but an insurgent conclave committed to greening the District of Columbia.

To entice their attendance at these monthly planning sessions, I lay out some kind of buffet. It gives me a chance to show off the food that comes out of our own urban food garden, about one mile from the White House.

This menu started with sweet potatoes that arrived in last week's CSA box. I added a mix of cooked greens from the CSA and the garden plus some Gorgonzola cheese to make the sweet potato galette I wrote about some weeks back.

Also on the buffet were bowls of our pickled beets and pickled green tomatoes. The green tomatoes are always a sensation. In addition, we still have a surfeit of tomato jam. For that I baked some tall, fluffy buttermilk biscuits.

Finally, to calm the sweet toothes in the crowd, daughter and I made a batch of heart-shaped brownies. We displayed them on a lacy, white ceramic stand, dusted with confectioner's sugar.

We then continued with our insurrection.

Dark Days: Ghitarra Pasta with Pesto

We had so much fun making pasta on the ghitarra at school that I decided to try it at home. Daughter was happy to help. We took turns rolling the dough through the pasta machine, then pressing it through the ghitarra.

We keep a big Ziploc bag of pesto cubes in the freezer that we don't use nearly enough. At the end of the summer season we harvest all of our basil (usually much more than we really need) and turn it into pesto sauce with plenty of garlic and pine nuts. Then we freeze the pesto in ice cube trays for storage.

My pasta recipe--half all-purpose flour and half whole wheat, and three eggs from our farmer friend Brett--makes at least twice as many noodles as we can possibly eat in one sitting. So when our friend Shelley called to check about Easter plans we immediately invited her and husband John for a casual, impromptu dinner.

The pasta pot was ready to boil when they arrived. As cocktails were winding down, I dropped the noodles in the salted water to cook for just a few minutes, then tossed them in a bowl with about four cubes of defrosted pesto and a little of the cooking water.

Our CSA box arrived on Thursday with a bag of salad mix. It was a perfect way to finish our simple meal, but I had to add something besides my own vinaigrette. The answer was shouting at me from the herb garden: rosemary blossoms.

One of our rosemary plants is in a riot of bloom at the moment. We've never seen anything quite like it--hundreds of tiny, bluish blossoms that on close inspection are quite intricate in their architecture. I gathered a few dozen and sprinkled them over our salad. They do have a faintly rosemary flavor, something to nudge us gently into the new season.

Dark Days: Beet Salad with Arugula and Pickled Red Onion

Our recent beet harvest yielded about seven pounds, but since these beets were first planted last August I was anxious to see if they were actually edible.

The beet greens, braised with garlic, shallots and red wine, yielded a delicious lunch earlier in the week. I cooked the beets yesterday in batches in a large pot of water, leaving the root and some of the stem intact.

From the boiling water they went directly into a cold water bath. The skins slipped off easily. I cut the beets into wedges. Now to taste.

The verdict? Not bad. A wee bit chewier than you would normally hope, but sweet and quite edible, especially for beets that had been in the ground for seven months. We are learning lots lately about how things overwinter in our kitchen garden here in the District of Columbia.

We decided these beets would be good candidates for pickling, but I put a few aside for dinner. I made quick pickles of some red onions. (See below). I tossed the beets and pickled onions with overwintered arugula from the garden and some blue goat's milk cheese, then dressed everything with a simple honey-mustard vinaigrette.

Now that spring is here, the arugula is desperate to go to seed. The seed stems seem to rise overnight. But that's fine with us. Along with the peppery leaves, the buds and flowers are great for spicing up a salad.

To pickle a batch of red onions, peel and cut two red onions in half lengthwise, then slice the halves into thin crescents. Put these in a bowl and cover with four cups of boiling water. Let stand 5 to 10 minutes, then drain in a colander.

In the same bowl, mix together a marinade of 1/2 cup cider vinegar, 1/2 cup water, two tablespoons honey, 1 teaspoon black peppercorns and 1 teaspoon whole cloves. Return the onions to the bowl, mix and let stand for about 4 hours, tossing the onions in the marinade occasionally.

The onions are best chilled before using. Or pack them into 2 pint-sized canning jars with the marinade and store in the refrigerator.

Dark Days: Chicken And Sweet Potato Tagine

Each year around this time I give our farmer friend Mike a call to order potato sets and onion sets for planting. This year I was surprised to hear Mike offer to deliver the goods (we usually drive the 30 miles to the farm). And he had other tantalizing items for us to consider. How about some eggs? Butter? A nice, big roasting chicken?

Mike's a small-scale farmer. He's always looking to sell something. And we are happy to purchase food fresh off the farm. This time of year, his produce is still in the seedling stage, lined up in rows in the greenhouse waiting to be transof planted. There's not much for Mike to sell except chickens and eggs.

The chicken far exceeded our expectations--size-wise, at least. I did not put it on the scale, but it was nearly twice the size of the roasters we typically see at the grocery, somewhere near 7 pounds, I would guess. This one came frozen. I defrosted it, originally intending to make it our first spit-roasted bird of the year. But the dinner party we'd arranged around the spit-roasting fell through and temperatures were in the 40s. I switched gears and found this recipe for a chicken tagine in an old issue of Food & Wine magazine.

Tagine is a traditional North African dish cooked in a ceramic pot with a distinctive conical lid. Tagines are robust, one-pot stews where meat and vegetables cook for a long time together with strong spices such as cumin, cinnamon, paprika until everything is buttery soft. I don't own a tagine, but the results I get from my enameled-iron Le Crueset pan are adequate for our tastes.

I especially like this tagine--or magazine version of a tagine--because the vegetable that cooks along with the chicken is sweet potato, which is arriving in quantity lately in our CSA box. Sweet potato and chicken, it turns out, go quite well together, especially when you season them with plenty of cinnamon and ginger as in this dish.

There's nothing complicated about this. First heat about 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil in the bottom of a heavy pot and brown a whole chicken cut into pieces. Separate the legs from the thighs. Divide the breast into quarters. Season the pieces well with salt and black pepper. You'll probably need to do the browing in two batches.

Set the chicken aside and pour a whole onion, cut into medium dice, into the pot. Season with 1 teaspoon coarse salt, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon and 1 teaspoon ground ginger. Stir, scraping up any brown bits from the bottom of the pot. Cook until the onion is soft, about 8 minutes, then put the chicken back in the pot layering the pieces as necessary.

Cover the chicken with a 1-pound sweet potato, peeled and cut into fairly thin slices. Toss 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped, over the sweet potatoes and on top of that 1 14-ounce can of diced tomatoes, drained. Season with salt and pepper. Add 1 cup chicken stock to the pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and cover tightly. Cook until the sweet potato is tender and the chicken cooked through, about 50 minutes.

To serve family-style, lift the sweet potato-tomato-garlic layer off the chicken and pile at one end of a platter. Arrange the chicken pieces to cover the rest of the platter. Garnish the platter with chopped parsley and sliced lemon and serve with a big bowl of couscous, or, in our case, a winter tabbouleh of sorts made of bulgar with lots of parsley, mint, endive, radicchio, dried cranberries.

Suddenly, you have a lovely, almost-spring feast. The pasture-raised chicken will blow your hair back. The flavor is exquisitely fresh and intensely chicken. Not gamy, mind you, but meatier and more distinctly chicken than what you are used to from store-bought birds. The local sweet potatoes could not have been a more perfect partner. Each bite called for another spoonful of the delicious pot liquor, spiked with onions and cinnamon and ginger.

Dark Days: Sweet Potato Galette

A potato galette traditionally is made with standard potatoes. But I thought, Why not sweet potatoes? We love sweet potatoes--they are so nutritious and full of flavor--and we often get them in our CSA box from our farmer friend Brett. These were purchased at the Dupont Circle Farmers Market last Sunday.

To make the galette, preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Coat the bottom of a well-seasoned, cast-iron skillet with extra virgin olive oil and place it over moderate heat. Peel the potatoes and slice them into thin rounds. (A mandoline makes quick work of this.) Shingle the rounds to cover the bottom of the skillet. The bottom-most potatoes will begin to cook and brown while you are assembling the rest. Between each layer, I dot the potatoes with cooked greens like these that came in our weekly CSA box.

I also like to alternate layers of cheese. I've used a soft Gorgonzola in the past. But for a strictly local galette, I bought a piece of blue goat's milk cheese from Firefly Farms in Bittinger, MD. Firefly is one of the regular vendors at the Dupont Circle market. Between each layer, after you've capped it off with more potatoes, press down very firmly with a flat object, such as a pot lid or another skillet. Then season with olive oil, salt and black pepper.

I usually continue layering the galette until the skillet is nearly filled to the top. Place in the oven and bake until the potatoes are easily pierced with a metal trussing skewer, about 20 minutes. Remove the skillet and allow the galette to cool. To remove the galette from the skillet, use a knife or spatula to cut around the edge, then invert onto a large plate or cutting board.

This galette is delicious warm or even at room temperature, and it can easily be made ahead and reheated. The sweetness of the potatoes seems to meld exceptionally well with the pungency of the cheese and the pleasant bitterness of the greens. Try it with your favorite local salad and a crisp glass of Chablis. Or if you've got a particular hankering for meat, this galette would be an ideal partner for a juicy pork roast.

Dark Days: Choucroute

"Choucroute" is simply French for sauerkraut. But it has also come to mean a dish marrying sauerkraut with some of our favorite pork products, such as garlic sausage, bacon, pig's knuckle or hock.

I've been looking forward to having friends over to sample some of my homemade kraut and Kielbasa sausages. But this is a compromised "Dark Days" meal, inasmuch as I am boycotting the local pork shoulder at $6.95 a pound in favor of the Niman Ranch pork sold at the local Whole Foods for half the price.

Niman Ranch pork is a cooperative arrangement of pig farmers east of the Rockies who have foresworn the confinement method of raising bland pigs crammed together indoors, the kind of pork engaged in by Smithfield, Hormel and the other industrial producers. Niman Ranch pigs typically are raised on small family farms where they get to root around outside and act more like real pigs.

I have yet to find a local source for the kind of processed pork products I like to include in my choucroute, such as smoked hock, salt pork, bacon ends. I see this as a real issue with local foods. If local pork is not processed into these traditional products, we are in danger of losing an important food legacy, no? Or perhaps I simply have not looked hard enough. I have tried bacon made by a local pig farmer, sold at one of the nearby farmers markets, and it was really bad. We continue to buy our bacon from Benton's out of Madinsonville, Tennessee.

The sauerkraut fermenting in my ceramic crock is about six months old. To turn it into a choucroute, I first cut an onion into thin slices lengthwise and sautee it at the bottom of a heavy Dutch oven in extra-virgin olive oil (bacon grease or lard might be more authentic, but I'm trying to be a wee bit healthier). Peel a tart apple such as Granny Smith and grate it into the pot. Stir in about 1 teaspoon coarse salt, then about two pounds sauerkraut, preferably homemade. Stir evertying together, add 1 teaspoon carraway seeds and a dozen juniper berries, crushed. Then pour in about 1/2 cup white wine. Nestle a smoked ham hock (again, from Whole Foods) or two in the kraut. Bring to a boil, then cover, reduce heat and simmer for an hour.

White the kraut is cooking, you can brown your sausages. I like to use fresh (not smoked) Kielbasa and Weisswurst. In the past, I've added bacon ends, but the only source I know of comes from industrial pork. No more of that. This time I bought some salt pork at Whole Foods. It's not local, but for this mongrelized choucroute, it will have to do. Cut the salt pork into thick slices and brown those as well.

About a half-hour before serving, place the browned sausages and salt pork on top of the sauerkraut and continue cooking another half-hour. Arrange everything decoratively on a warm serving platter and garnish with chopped parsley. I served this with parsleyed boiled potatoes and a selection of mustards.
As preamble to the choucroute, I had set out a mushroom frittata, cut into small rounds, as well as some goat cheeses accompanied by our homemade green tomato-apple chutney and pickled green tomatoes from the garden. Spread goat cheese on a cracker, top with chutney, wash it down with one of the lovely Riesling wines furnished by my oenophile brother-in-law, Tom.

We finished our meal with a salad made of greens from our farmer friend Brett, tossed with clementines and a chili-orange vinaigrette. Follow with chocolate creme brulee and coffee.

Dark Days: Roasting Chicken and More

A roasting chicken arrived in our weekly CSA box which happily answers the question, What are we making for our Dark Days Local Challenge meal this week?

Concidentally, our friend Marty from California, who we haven't seen in a lifetime, came to visit. Isn't it nice to have a friend who exclaims over a simple roasted chicken, turnips and potatoes?

Since we share our CSA box with friends Helen and Jeff, we had half a chicken to split three ways. I used diced carrots and onions and some thyme leaves as a bed for the chicken on a baking sheet and surrounded it with baby turnips, also from the CSA box, and purple potatoes from our garden, tossed with extra-virgin olive oil and salt. Yes, we still have potatoes. Some are still in the ground. These have been languishing in our pantry.

Prior to baking the chicken, I had harvested some chard from the garden. The weather has been fluky: heat waves followed by extreme cold. When it's very cold, the chard falls to the ground. When the air warms, the chard springs back to life. I harvested enough--stems and leaves, roughly chopped--to fill my cast-iron skillet, along with some sauteed red onion. Season with salt and orange juice, then braise on the stove top, covered, until the chard stems are tender.

This made a nice plate with a diversity of flavors--a little bite from the turnips, fruitiness from the chard, the smooth mouthfeel of the potatoes and the aromatic carrots and onions. The pastured chicken is a bit chewier than what you get from a store-bought bird, but that just adds to the excitement.

Dark Days: Hungarian Sausage with Braised Red Cabbage

It's been nearly a year since we spent a weekend at our farmer friend Brett's place killing pigs and making sausages. When I went digging for something to make for this week's Dark Days meal, I found two packages of Hungarian sausages at the bottom of the freezer, transporting me back to our pork "matanza."

I like the idea of suspending grocery purchases and living off what's in the pantry--or what's in the freezer, as the case may be. Riana, at the Garlic Breath blog, has been doing just that with great success for the last several weeks. In fact, Riana is on day 40 with no end in sight. At this point, she says, "the freezer is getting bearable but not bare. At least I can see the sides and figure out what is in there."

I think we Americans have a kind of unnatural fetish when it comes to needing something different, fabulous, thrilling to eat every night. Meanwhile, food piles up uneaten. Will we ever consume those Vietnamese rice noodles in the back pantry? Or that frozen pork tenderloin I don't even remember where it came from? How about that 29-ounce can of Manning's hominy taking up space next to the Middle Eastern fava beans?

In fact, we've been pretty good the last couple of months about not blowing our budget at the grocery store. Doesn't that make the occasional "special" meal all the more "special?"

I thawed the Hungarian sausages and browned them in the cast iron skillet. There was a red cabbage from the farmers market sitting in the cold room, waiting for just such an occasion. And this week's CSA box arrived heavy with Beauregard sweet potatoes and turnips. Since the produce box also comes from Brett's farm, it created a nice bit of circularity with the year-old sausages.

As the cabbage braised, I dropped the browned sausages into the pot to cook through. I steamed the sweet potatoes in a saucepan, then seasoned them very simply with salt, allspice, nutmeg, cloves and mashed them with a pat of butter and a bit of cream.

Nothing fancy. Just good food. Crack open your best bottle of mustard and pour a nice glass of wine. And look forward to lots of leftovers.

Dark Days: One-Pot Chicken

This meal starts with the roasting chicken we received in our weekly CSA package from farmer friend Brett.

This is not to be confused with the stewing hen I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Brett, being a man of many facets, deals in two kinds of chicken. One, the laying hen, needs to be cooked forever. The roaster cooks more like a conventional bird. Brett advises that it may be a bit chewier than the chicken you buy at the store. It does spend most of its time running around the farmyard pecking at things, after all.

We share our CSA subscription with friends Helen and Jeff so what we were dealing with in fact was half a bird. My visit to the farmers market over the weekend was intended to find some companion vegetables for the chicken. The dish that took shape--improvisational in the truest sense--was a one-pot affair with rice and squash on the side.

Divide the chicken into pieces and brown it in batches with extra-virgin olive oil at the bottom of a heavy pot or Dutch oven. Set the chicken aside and toss an onion, diced large, into the pot, scraping any brown bit off the bottom of the pot. When the onion has softened and browned a little, add about three cloves garlic, thinly sliced, to the pot and cook for a minute or two. Then add a large carrot and a large parsnip, peeled and sliced on an angle. Also add a large white potato and a sweet potato cut into 1-inch pieces. Place several sprigs thyme and a bay leaf or two amongst the vegetables and add two cups chicken stock and one can diced tomatoes with the juices.

Note: this dish cooks for about 1 1/2 hours on the stove top. If you like your potatoes and sweet potatoes more on the firm side, wait until 45 minutes or so into the cooking before adding them.

Bring the pot to a boil, then reduce the heat to very low and simmer until the chicken is extremely tender and ready to fall off the bone. Originally I had thought of serving this in a bowl with the broth, like a pot au feu, but changed my mind and decided to present it more in the Hispanic manner with rice.. I drained off the cooking liquid and used it to make brown rice, making the plate a bit monochromatic and bit redundant in the starch department. A squash I had intended to cook with the chicken was impossible to peel, so I baked it in the oven and served it--mashed--on the side, mixed with some brown sugar.

This simple, rustic dinner could have come out of your grandmother's root cellar, but of course you have the satisfaction of knowing you made it yourself from the best ingredients around.

Dark Days: Meat Grinder Pasta with Pork Ragu

Armed with my new meat grinder, I've been anxious to try this trick I first saw performed by Mario Batali: extruding whole-wheat pasta.

The sauce was a simple pork ragu made with ground pork ($8 for a little more than one pound at the farmers market), diced onions, diced carrots and, in the absence of our own canned tomatoes, a prepared tomato sauce from the farmers market.

As it turned out, the pint jar of sauce I purchased ($4) was only half what I needed. Enter one large can of Cento tomatoes.

What you see on the right in this picture is Hubbard squash ($4 at the farmers market), roasted then mashed with brown sugar, allspice and nutmeg. Quite delicious and a very generous quantity.

Again, I felt a bit stung by the price of the ground pork. By my wife was quick to point out that it made perhaps two quarts of sauce. We'll be freezing some, or eating it for quite a few days to come.

The pasta noodles were another story. The dough is simple enough: 2 cups white whole wheat flour with two eggs, kneaded for about five minutes. My first attempt came out more like spaetzle. I'd forgotten that you need to remove the blade from the grinder. On the next go-round, I removed the blade and increased the size of the die in the grinder. The noodles came out looking like alien space worms only chewier. What I need is a die sized somewhere between the two choices that came with the machine, or around 1/4-inch.

But I was pleased to see daughter gobbling up the whole-wheat pasta (the spaetzle kind) with the pork ragu. "These carrots are delicious," said the little girl who hates cooked carrots. But wait--it's not all cooked carrots she hates, just the big slices that we make as a side dish.

Carrots, apparently, are very complicated.

Dark Days: Coq au Vin

Throughout the winter CSA season, our farmer friend Brett will occasionally include a chicken with our weekly produce delivery.

This is one of his laying hens. People sometimes tell Brett the chicken is tough. Brett says, cook the chicken longer. By that he does not mean an hour or two. He means three or four hours.

This particular chicken, cooked with red wine, bacon, garlic and beef broth, braised four hours in the pot. Still, it was on the chewy side. But oh, the flavor. Dark and gamey, that's how I like it.

I had also been watching carefully the progress of the turnips in my garden. I had a hard time getting the turnips to germinate this summer. Rutabagas, too. Was it too hot? Did I not water the seeds enough? I don't know the answer. I planted seeds twice and still did not get a full crop. But the turnips that did finally take hold are beauties. I can see their white flesh rising out of the ground all the way from the front stoop.

The two I pulled yesterday were baseball size, perfectly round with rich soil clinging to the roots. These are not the turnips I would normally plant for greens. But I tasted the leaves anyway and they were delicious--sweet. I decided to include them in a braise with the other greens from our weekly package.

So there you have our totally local meal for the week: coq au vin, turnips mashed with blue cheese and braised greens seasoned with apple cider. Homely, yes, but very satisfying. Just the thing for a winter's night.

The turnips came out so well--sweet, with just a hint of horseradish--that I am convinced to plant more and pay better attention to them in the coming year.

Dark Days: Turkey Tetrazzini

I am embarrassed to say how long this meal has been in the planning. But our leftover turkey from Thanksgiving has bounced from the fridge to the freezer and back again. Our CSA (local farm) delivery has been on haitus and I did not want to make the noodles for the tetrazzini without our local eggs.

Do I sound desperate, or what?

What it is, I think, is just guilt over the fact that I have not been able to source all of the ingredients for our food locally. Call it lack of preparation, lack of spunk, or just a beginner's floundering around. The turkey in this dish is the dark meat from the last drumstick and wing that I have been so carefully hoarding. The pasta is made with local eggs but King Arthur flour. The salad is from our garden, dressed with a honey-mustard vinaigrette from standard pantry items. (I'd even been saving the salad greens for this occasion--the weather has been so fluky, I wasn't sure we'd have any left in the garden to pick otherwise.)

Yesterday our CSA deliveries finally resumed. So when I arrived home from teaching my "food appreciation" classes in the evening, my daughter and I set to work making the pasta. It's a two-egg affair with a 50/50 mix of all-purpose flour and white whole wheat flour. I gave the dough a quick knead on the countertop, then fed it into our pasta machine while my daughter cranked. Turns out we make a great pasta making team and it's so easy, I wonder sometimes why we bother buying prepared pasta. We rolled the dough up to the next-to-last setting, resulting in a sturdy noodle once it was cut into linguine.

The golden, almost orange hue of the pastured egg yolks give the pasta a rich depth of color, while the addition of whole wheat flour produces a very satisfying chew.

The pasta is cooked in a big pot of salted water just to the al dente stage, then quickly drained and rinsed in cold water to arrest the cooking. Meanwhile, we sauteed onion and mushrooms and mixed these with frozen peas in a veloute sauce--a roux of butter and flour blended as for a gravy with homemade turkey stock and finished with a bit of heavy cream.

Layer the pasta and sauce in a greased casserole (a small square, in this case), dust with bread crumbs and bake in a 375-degree oven until the bread crumbs are golden brown and the sauce is bubbling. Scoop onto plates with the salad and serve.

(Note: for an even richer Tetrazzini sauce, try adding a tempered egg yolk and some Marsala wine.)

Dark Days: Poor Man's Chicken Stew

I find myself constructing these winter meals in my head days in advance.

Where will the calories come from? I ask myself. What can I do that doesn't repeat what I did last week? Which of my two farmer's market options to employ?

Obviously, I have too much time on my hands. But soon after joining this challenge I realized how little planning I had done for the winter. Go back a hundred years or two and that would have been my preoccupation in July, August, September: planting then preserving enough various foods to get me through the dark days.

Alas, it is so hard to extricate one's self from the convenience-oriented mindset. Kicking blueberries flown in from Chile in the middle of December turns out to be not such a hard thing after all. But then make a list of all your other favorite fresh foods--lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, leeks, potatoes, apples, chicken--and see how well you do without those. That's precisely the point of this Dark Days challenge, to start poking around for local sources of all these staples. You learn very quickly that the sources are few and far between and that the available ingredients soon start to repeat themselves.

We are fortunate to have two farmer's markets still going strong. How strong for how long is the question. This week I opted for a package of two very large chicken quarters from Eco-Friendly Foods in Virginia. They are regulars at the Dupont Circle market on Sundays here in the District of Columbia.

I had in mind turning the chicken into a simple, rustic stew--the kind of stew some of our immigrant Salvadorn neighbors might recognize--using potatoes that we are still harvesting from our garden, in this case big Peruvian purple potatoes. This stew is a bit of a train wreck, because I also used the better part of a sweeet potato from the farmers market as well some cranberry beans from the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa. I mail-ordered the beans in spring intending to plant them, but they germinated none too well and from the size of the package I finally decided that these beans were meant for eating, not replicating.

I soaked them overnight and cooked them with some Henderson smoked bacon.

To make the stew, divide the chicken quarters into legs and thighs and brown them well with extra-virgin olive oil over high heat in a heavy pot. Remove them to the side, and add an onion, cut into medium dice, to the pot along with a couple of carrots, peeled and cut on an angle. Let the onion brown a little, stirring the vegetables to deglaze the pot, then reduce the heat, season with salt and black pepper and add two or three cloves of garlic, thinly sliced and continue cooking until the onion is soft, about 8 minutes.

Return the chicken to the pot, add 2 cups chicken broth and several sprigs thyme tied in a bundle. Cover and bring to a boil, then place in a 250-degree oven. Bake for about two hours, then add potatoes and sweet potatoes, about 2 cups worth cut into 1-inch pieces, along with a cup or two of beans that have been previously cooked but are still firm. You could also add some crisped bacon at this point if you like.

Bake the stew another hour, or until the potatoes are perfectly tender, the chicken is falling off the bone and the pot is redolent of garlic and thyme. Serve with a mess of hearty greens and a sturdy red wine.

Dark Days: My $28 Pork Butt

Don't get me wrong. I am all behind locally produced foods. In fact, in a perfect world, I think all foods would be grown within walking distance--more or less--of where they're consumed. That would mean a huge shift in the way affluent Americans approach agriculture and food production. Maybe we wouldn't eat so much meat. Maybe we'd all be raising chickens in our back yards.


Still, I am a skeptic by nature. And one of the things I find a little irritating is the knee-jerk hysteria of some foodies to any critical examination of how our local food system currently operates. A few stories questioning the carbon footprint of local foods have popped up in the mainstream media lately and from the reaction on the food blogs you'd think war had broken out.


As far as I can tell, the system we have for getting local foods to consumers is incredibly inefficient. You could start with all those trucks driving long distances with relatively small loads of food to our urban farmers markets, only to drive away again a few hours later having sold maybe half their goods. Wouldn't it be so much easier--so much less costly--for everyone involved if there were some kind of co-op that were open every day of the week, and where vendors and shoppers could all congregate indoors?


I think so.


Another thing I find disturbing is all the plastic at the farmers market. Plastic bags to tote naturally-grown fruits and vegetables. Every single piece of pasture-raised meat individually wrapped in plastic. How eco-friendly is that?


So I just don't see why everyone gets up in arms when the mainstream media bothers to point these things out. Sure, local farming is way better than industrial agriculture. Agreed. But hopefully we can do better.


Which brings me to my pork butt. I don't care what anyone says: shopping at the farmers market--hereabouts, anyway--is expensive. Too expensive for the average Joe. In fact, what we are seeing here in the District of Columbia is farmers markets geared toward lower-income shoppers going out of business. You simply cannot do your grocery shopping at the farmers market. Too expensive.


Last week at the Arlington farmers market I picked up this pork shoulder roast, aka pork butt. It cost me nearly $29, or $6.95 a pound. I felt my you-know-what constrict when the vendor told me it was a bone-in roast. For $6.95 a pound? I wanted to say. But I bit my tongue.


After I got the roast home, I decided to break it down. How much of this pork butt was actually edible? How much per pound was I paying for the meat portion I intended to turn into a stew?


Well, on the left in the picture above you see the fat cap and rind that I removed from the roast, along with the bones. I put them on the scale: 1 pound, 15 ounces. Next I weighed the meat: 2 pounds, 3 ounces. In other words, 46 percent of my pork butt was bones, fat cap and rind. The meat, meanwhile--or edible portion--works out to 80 cents an ounce, or nearly $13 a pound.


I ask you, when was the last time you paid $13 a pound for pork shoulder, a cut butchers typically turn into sausage?

But here's the real kicker: Boneless Niman Ranch pork shoulder sells at our neighborhood Whole Foods for $3.49 a pound. In other words, trekking to the farmers market for locally produced pork butt on a frigid Saturday morning costs me four times as much as buying already trimmed, humanely-raised pork in the comfort of a tricked-out grocery. Is there anyone besides me crazy enough to do that?


Not to say this meat is not worth $13 a pound. Lord knows, our local farmer has taken great care in raising this pig. The animal lived out his days and met his end in a humane fashion, no doubt. And we want to support our local farmers. My point, simply, is how many consumers can actually afford this? Do we really foresee a day when this product will become mainstream?


Currently, local foods account for about 2 percent of all U.S. food purchases. I sometimes wonder at which price inflection the other 98 percent will move into the local column.


But enough of my rant. What I did with the meat portion of my pork butt was cut it into large chunks, season them aggressively with coarse salt and pepper and brown them in extra-virgin olive oil at the bottom of a very hot Dutch oven. Do this in batches. Remove the meat and replace it with an onion, cut into medium dice and seasoned with salt. Lower the heat and stir the onion to deglaze the bottom of the pot. Then add two carrots, also cut into medium dice, and four garlic cloves, sliced fine. Continue cooking and when the onions have softened, add about 3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar.


Place the meat back in the pot and add about 1 1/2 bottles of stout, dark beer. I was happy to find a Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout at the local Whole Foods. My wife and I served Brooklyn Lager at our wedding many moons ago, so we have a soft spot for that brewery. The left-over half-bottle, of course, is for the cook to drink while she is contemplating her next step.



Bring the pot back to a boil. Then cover it and put it in a 250-degree oven for three hours. Meanwhile, cut up some other root vegetables, such as celery root, parsnips, potatoes. We had all that on hand already, plus some baby corn on the cob left over from a cocktail buffet. When the three hours are up, stir all these vegetables into the pot and put it back in the oven for another hour.


When everything is tender and aromatic, strain the solids out of the stew. Ladle some of the dark juice into a bowl and mix in 2 teaspoons corn starch. Bring the pot to a boil on the stove top and stir in the corn starch mix. Stir until thickened, just a minute or two, then mix all the solids back into the pot. Serve hot in shallow bowls.

What I served with the stew was a braised Savoy cabbage we bought last weekend at the farmers market. Chop the cabbage into pieces, then cook in a pot of boiling water seasoned with salt and cider vinegar. Strain the cabbage into a bowl and season with extra-virgin olive oil, more cider vinegar, salt and ground pepper. Stir in plenty of chopped parsley and chives from the garden.

I think you'll agree, whatever the price, this is a killer stew.

Arlington Farmers Market

The farmers market next to the county courthouse in Arlington, just over the Potomac River from the District of Columbia, is one of the area's oldest. But I had never been before this weekend.



The market does not have a cozy feel at all--at least not this time of year. It's set up in a parking lot and is really cold when the winter wind blows.


Around 30 vendors congregate at the Arlington market during the regular season. But many of them close shop for the winter. I counted about a dozen hardy souls manning the booths.

Still, there was plenty to choose from. This woman had an impressive array of mushrooms...

We had to stop and admire them.

There was a full line of bread.

And many different kinds of preserves.

Meats, too.

We bought a jar of blueberry syrup and some apple cider from D&S Farm in St. Mary's County, MD.

We couldn't resist the honey-flavored yogurt from Blue Ridge Dairy.



I really wanted to buy some turnips, but the closest I could get was this lovely Savoy cabbage.

The beets were quite handsome.

The vegetable empanada was exquisite.

Dark Days: ISO Apple Dishes

Here's a case of things not turning out quite as planned.

Last weekend on our trip to the farmers market I bought three pounds of apples. Apples are in plentiful supply, even with most of the farmers markets closed for the season.

My plan was to make the kind of apple torte we used to have for dinner when I was an exchange student in Switzerland. This was centuries ago, of course. But I still have vivid memories of my host mother--Tante Marie--rolling dough onto a sheet pan and covering it with whatever fruit was in season at the moment--apricots, plums, peaches, apples--adding some kind of custard and baking it in the oven.

The torte--if that's what you want to call it--seemed a little like dessert for dinner: not too sugary, with the fruit, the eggs and the soft crust postitioned somewhere between sweet and savory and bringing plenty of wholesome nutrition to the table. It was a perfect meal as far as I was concerned, simple yet satisfying. So I had a vision of recreating that torte with apples, serving it with our homegrown salad and calling that our Dark Days meal for the week.

Except I was not able to find the recipe. Okay, I didn't spend that much time looking. My sister, who lived many years in the German-speaking part of Europe, brought over a couple of her German pastry cookbooks. There were all kinds of cakes and tortes, but nothing hitting the mark. By the end of the day, I was desperate for something to make with apples and landed on this simple recipe in Joy of Cooking.

It calls for layering sliced apples with almost-cooked sweet potatoes (from our CSA box), along with brown sugar, raisins and pecans. Add some apple cider and bake in the oven at 350 degree for about 30 minutes. It didn't sound like much, and it turned out to be about how it sounded. That's what you see in the picture, along with a homegrown salad and a biscuit made with fresh buttermilk and smeared with the tomato jelly we made from our garden.

It occurs to me now that although I like very much the idea of making dinner out of apples, I am woefully short on apple know-how. So I am broadcasting this appeal: If you know of any great ideas for apples entrees--especially if you know how to make the torte I described above--please do send along your suggestions.

To Market, To Market

Nearly all of the farmers markets in our area here in the District of Columbia have closed for the season. As I see it, this presents a real challenge to those locavores among us who've signed up for making Dark Days meals. Unless you have found a way to grow your own food through the winter (a personal hot house, perhaps?) or had the foresight to stock your cellar with several months worth of canned goods, where are all those local ingredients supposed to come from? (And I'm not talking to you, West Coast, Southwest, Texas, Florida).




One of the few farmers markets in our area that remains open year-round is the one at Dupont Circle, the biggest and most diversely stocked market in the city. Yesterday was cold and overcast--perfect for the 20-minute walk from our house to the upscale Dupont Circle neighborhood. As you can see, we were not the only ones thinking along these lines. It may be just three weeks till Christmas, but the farmers market was jammed.

We found that there are still loads of apples for sale in many different varieties...




As well as apple products.



There are always cheeses, jams, preserves, soaps and other handmade goods on display at the Dupont Circle market. I was impressed with this vendor's large selection of local yarns in a range of colors and textures.


But what I really came for was to get a sense of the kinds of foods that might be available to fill our caloric needs in the months ahead. So I was glad to see lots of sweet potatoes and standard potatoes, turnips, rutabagas...



And of course squashes...





Plenty of greens...



Radishes, leeks, onions, garlic. I also noticed cabbage--makes me think it's time for sauerkraut. There were also several vendors hawking meats: lamb, pork, beef chicken, even local oysters. No lack of protein there.


By January, when we are in the depths of winter--and it can get pretty cold and nasty here in the nation's capitol--there will probably be no more than a handful of vendors still standing. That will be the true test of our local food supply.



For now, it was enough to visit the Churreria Madrid and warm ourselves over a hot cup of chocolate and a plate of fresh churros.