February Harvest Dinner

Here's some of the venison we recently received in trade with one of the neighbors for pickles and other preserves we put up in the summer.

Apparently the neighbors have family with a farm in southern Virginia and have been plying us with venison in exchange for our home-grown produce. What they are most interested in are tomatoes. So this year we will be installing a couple of tomato plants in the garden that they can harvest from any time they like. In the bargain, we get a steady supply of the venison they harvest on the farm.

Call it town meets country.

I didn't do anything special with these venison tenderloin. After defrosting them a few days ago, I just wanted to make sure they got eaten. Season with extra-virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, grill on the Jennaire. I did have some leftover sauce from one meat dish or another to put a smile on that venison when it came to the table. The carrots and parsnips you see in the background are some of those recently harvested from the garden, roasted with thyme. Mashed potatoes round out the picture.

And I still have three portions of that tenderloin left over.

February Harvest

Carrots have stored very nicely in the ground. And since we've been experiencing a bit of a thaw the last week I went out and started preparing beds for planting. While I was digging around, I pulled up this lovely bunch, about five pounds worth.

We've been pulling occasional parsnips through the winter. These were planted last spring and were starting to show new growth on top. Time to pull them before they get too tough to eat.

Lots of beets as well. Some will go into our favorite beet salad with red onion and red wine vinegar. The rest we'll try to store. But not to worry. No chance they'll go bad. We love beets too much.

Winter Roots

It's true what they say: root vegetables only get sweeter when they've been frosted over.

For our cholent dinner over the weekend I foraged carrots and parsnips from the garden. They were planted last spring and have fully grown. I left them in the ground to make their own storage. The soil here in the District of Columbia is only modestly frozen, mostly near the top as a result of below average temperatures, down into the single digits at one point. For the second year in a row, I broke the handle on my forked spade prying the vegetables out of their beds. Last year I broke it trying to bury some kitchen scraps in my frozen compost pile. I have ordered a steel-handled spade.

Cleaning up my carrots and parsnips was somewhat more involved than usual, since the garden hose has been turned off pending a thaw. I have to fill a basin of water in the sink and scrub by hand. They clean up pretty nicely. Then they are peeled, cut on an angle, tossed with extra-virgin olive oil, salt, pepper and thyme and roasted in a 325-degree oven.

I swear, you will not find better root vegetable on any menu.

Homegrown Cholent

So many methods of making pot roast are disappointing. The meat too often comes out of the oven dry and tough. I've settled on traditional Jewish cholent as our preferred method of cooking a piece of beef shoulder for a long time, braising it in a heavy pot with beans and barley.

The result is something much more than pot roast, a gooey unctuous stew that goes straight to the soul and lifts the spirits on a cold winters night.

Traditionally, Jewish cholent was placed in a low oven just before sundown preceding the sabbath so there would be a warm, hearty lunch to serve the following day, when cooking was forbidden. I don't cook mine nearly as long--only five hours.

Last night we had friends over to help us eat a big pot of cholent made with chuck roast from our dairy--South Mountain Creamery--as well as cranberry beans from our own garden. On the side were roasted carrots and parsnips pulled in the morning from the soil where they are overwintering. They are even more sweet and delicious having been touched by the cold. For dessert, my wife served an intoxicating, flourless clementine cake.

Proof again that the simplest foods are the most satisfying.

Season's First Choucroute

Choucroute as a recipe is less important than the people you invite to eat it with. So thank you Linda, Tom, Larry, Valca, Pete and Steve for joining us last night. Since we were all basking in the glow of Tuesday's election results, this also constituted our Kumbaya moment.

Choucroute is a classic Alsatian dish of sauerkraut and pork products but there is no single agreed-upon way to make it. In other words, don't feel you have to make it exactly as written in your picture book of French cookery. My own method starts with home-made sauerkraut, shown in the photo at left beginning with about 10 pounds of shredded cabbage and six tablespoons of pickling salt packed firmly in a heavy plastic bucket so that the brine that leaches from the cabbage rises over the top. Give it a month or more to finish.

I then hop on the subway to Capitol Hill to select my pork products from the local butchers: a smoked hock or shank, bacon ends, smoked chops, fresh pork belly if they have it and Kielbasa sausage and bratwurst. Then I get back on the subway and head downtown to the Cafe Mozart where the deli case holds weisswurst and lots of other goodies. Being made of veal, I'm not sure how traditional weisswurst is in choucroute. But we love it and so do all our guests.

The day before the event, I saute a large onion with some bacon grease at the bottom of our biggest and heaviest cookpot. Cook it until it is soft and lightly caramelized. Then I grate two Granny Smith apples (with skins) directly into the pot before adding about six cups of fresh sauerkraut. I stir in a teaspoon of caraway seeds and about a dozen crushed juniper berries. Then I push my smoked ham hock deep into the middle of the kraut, pour in a half cup of Riesling wine and bring the whole mess to a boil. Reduce the heat to the lowest setting, cover the pot and let it simmer for an hour or more until the kraut is soft, aromatic and unctuous.

But for this particular choucroute, there was something special: sauerruben, or fermented grated turnips, that have been mellowing in our refrigerator for the last year and a half. They have an other-worldly nutty flavor to go with the mild tang of fermentation. I added about two cups of that to my pot as well. The results were beyond anything we've ever experienced from mere sauerkraut.

While the pot is simmering, brown all of your other meats in a heavy skillet with a little cooking oil or bacon grease. These can be wrapped and refrigerated until the following day, when the sausages, the bacon ends, the smoked chops and the pork belly are all packed into the pot to wait until the guests arrive, when we turn the heat up to a gentle simmer and let those kraut and wine juices steam everything for about 45 minutes.

We loaded the finished kraut and meat onto a big platter and served it buffet-style with roasted parsnips and carrots from the garden, mashed potatoes and homemade apple sauce. All of the guests had brought various German wines and the libations did flow. Conversation was lively, interrupted by exclamations over the turnip-infused kraut.

For dessert, we plated a stunning sweet potato pie made by my wife the baker from sweet potatoes grown just outside the kitchen window. More about that anon. I am still recovering.

The Wages of Sin

I suppose that for all the bad things I have done there is a special place in hell reserved for me where I will spend the rest of eternity weeding parsnips.

I knew this day was coming. I planted the parsnips from seed March 7 directly in the soil in a section of a very rich bed about six feet long and four feet wide. Parsnips, like their cousin the carrots, take their sweet time germinating. As I suspected, weed seeds quickly sprouted and surrounded the parsnips. I waited until the parsnips were big enough to be easily identified before attacking the weeds. By that time the weeds were thick and tall and wanting to go to seed.

I gave the garden a good soaking yesterday and today I was up at 6 am to face the weeds in my parsnip patch. There's no other way to do it except dig in with your fingers, moving slowly, being ever so careful not to pull up a baby parsnip. Inevitably you will grab one by mistake and the best you can do is dig a new hole for the long taproot and hope it survives.

In the picture above, you can see clearly the area on the left that was weeded, and the area on the right that is yet untouched.

I work slowly around each plant, sometimes using a dinner fork to get into tight areas where small weeds maintain a tenacious grip on the soil. When the weeds are finally gone, as seen in this photo, the parsnips stand tall and lanky. With no weeds to lean on, they want to flop over. But they are still young. They will grow much larger and eventually create such a thick canopy over the soil they will provide their own mulch, holding moisture in the soil and preventing weeds from taking hold. Or such is the hope.

We love parsnips for their musky flavor and as a source of good nutrition. Seen here in a farmers market display back in January, parsnips are rich in potassium. A cup of sliced parsnips contains around 100 calories. They tend to overpower stocks and vegetable soups, but they are delicious roasted with other root vegetables or all on their own. Try adding roasted parsnips to a fall salad.

Do you have any great parsnip recipes you'd like to share?

How Much Do We Like Parsnips?

I was doing a little maintenance in the garden yesterday and came upon this vigorous bush of green shading my new strawberry plants. I had a suspicion it belonged to a parsnip I planted last fall.

I bent down and pulled on the green leafy part.

I pulled...

And I pulled....

And I PULLED....

Finally I had to get my forked spade to loosen the soil. And this is what came out.

Just proves you can grow some mighty big parsnips right here in the District of Columbia.

Actually, there were two parsnips. The other was just a wee bit smaller, but the tap root was nearly two feet long. I brought them into the kitchen and cleaned them. "Won't they be tough and woody?" my wife asked. I cut off the tip of the bigger parsnip and tasted. It seemed alright to me.

So I cut both roots into pieces and tossed them with some extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper and scattered them on a baking sheet. I set the oven at 250 degrees so as not to scorch the parsnips. I went back out to garden and forgot all about them. About an hour later, my wife pulled them out of the oven. They were a bit overcooked and just a wee bit chewy by that point, but otherwise edible.

I have to admit, the cultivation of parsnips is still a mystery to me. I just haven't focused on them, preferring to scatter a few seeds and see what happens. Well, now I know what happens, so I can plant more and watch them a little more closely and have a better idea when to pull them out of the ground.

Mostly we roast parsnips. Our favorite treatment is to roast them in a heavy casserole with carrots, rutabaga and a little thyme. A very simple yet satisfying side dish for a roast. We like parsnips a lot.