Potted Cheese

When I'm throwing a party and not feeling very rich I often put a potted cheese out for hors d'oeuvres. This is one way to turn an economical slicing cheese into something exotic looking that spreads on a cracker.

Potted cheese is simply cheese grated and marinated in beer, then spiked with dried mustard and Worcestershire sauce and blended fine. Scrape it into a small bowl and guests will think you are an entertaining genius. (You don't have to tell them you're just trying to save a few pennies.) It has the added virtue of keeping almost indefinitely in the refrigerator.

To make this potted cheese, I used two kinds of cheddar, one from Vermont, the other from England, one orange, the other yellow. In general, I prefer a sharp cheddar cheese for flavor. This particular recipe is from Fancy Pantry, by Helen Witty, one of our favorite sources for making tangy dishes out of fresh produce and odd bits.

3/4 pound good quality cheddar cheese (you can combine different kinds if you like)
1 teaspoon dry mustard
2/3 cup excellent beer (I use a dark Belgian ale)
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, slightly softened at room temperature
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
generous pinch white mustard
pinch cayenne
salt to taste

Grate the cheese and combine it at the bottom of a mixing bowl with the mustard and the beer. Press the cheese down until it is covered by the beer, cover the bowl and let it stand for a few hours or overnight.

Place the softened butter in a food processor and process until creamy. Add the cheese mixture, Worcestershire sauce, white pepper and cayenne. Process everything until the mixture is smooth, scraping down the side of the bowl occasionally as needed. Taste and add more seasonings as you desire, as well as some salt if it needs it.

Pack the cheese into a crock or ceramic bowl. Smooth the top and cover with plastic wrap. For longterm storage, cover the cheese with clarified butter to a depth of about 1/4 inch, then cover the container and refrigerate.

Serve at room temperature, but leave the cheese out of the refrigerator long enough to soften. Crackers or toasted baguette are the perfect accompaniment.

Green Tomatoes

I have thirteen tomato plants growing in our garden, which means that a portion of my daily rounds entails admiring all the green tomatoes as they grow huge on the vine and anticipating what an avalanche of ripe red tomatoes we will soon have.

But then I think of some of our favorite tomato preparations such as green tomato and apple chutney and how we will be scrambling to find enough green tomatoes in October to make them and I think to myself, Why wait?

It probably should have dawned on me much sooner, but yesterday it hit me like a thunderclap that there was no reason at all to wait for the end of the season to start canning green tomatoes when so many of them are staring me in the face. So I turned my usual approach to tomatoes inside-out and just continued with my recent pickling operation, only switching briefly to green tomatoes to make a batch of our favorite chutney.

I can hardly think of a better use for green tomatoes, unless it is my wife's famous fried green tomato BLT sandwich, or perhaps her green tomato pizza. For months I have been missing something from the larder and that has been our green tomato and apple chutney, a wonderful condiment that of course fits marvelously well in an Indian meal, but also is fine next to a fatty pork roast, or slathered with goat cheese on a piece of toast or eaten right out of the jar with a spoon.

Since I've already written up the recipe, I won't repeat it. It's not difficult at all if you have a few basic pieces of equipment. And if you've been doing any pickling at all lately you probably have all the spices in your pantry already.

Spend an hour doing this and you will have the best chutney you've ever tasted for the rest of the year.

Yes, We Have Potatoes

All winter I've been digging periodically in our potato bed and coming away with spuds wonderfully preserved underground. There was still one small area untouched and I wondered if it could still yield edible potatoes. Was this possible?

Finally, the rains stopped long enough for a look-see. I plunged my forked spade into the soil and...out came two big, purple potatoes. There were, in fact, a few others going soft. I tossed those in the compost pile. Still, I found it astounding that even now there were a couple of beauties waiting to be unearthed, nearly a year after they were first planted.

The concept of year-old potatoes is something new for me, but I can only speculate that leaving them in the ground is akin to storing them in a cold root cellar. Turns out burying vegetables in place is nothing new. There's a whole chapter on preserving vegetables underground in a new book I recently purchased, Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation.

How's that for a title?

The book is translated from the original French work compiled by gardeners associated with the Centre Terre Vivante (The Center for Living Soil), an ecological research and education center in Southeastern France. Eliot Coleman, the esteemed organic gardener and author, had a hand in bringing the book to the U.S. and writes one of the book's forwards. Another foreward is written by Deborah Madison, author of The Greens Cookbook. Being a big fan of fermenting vegetables, I was curious to see what this was all about.

The long title might as well be the table of contents. It spells out most of the chapters. Since I had potatoes still in the ground, I was most curious to see what traditional French methods had to say about that. "Some vegetables may remain in the ground all winter," the book advises, " but measures must be taken to protect them, particularly from frost and excess moisture."

There's a whole list of vegetables that theoretically keep underground: Brussels sprouts and curly kale, cabbage and cauliflower, carrots, chicory and escarole, endive, Jerusalem artichoke, mache, leek, parsnip, radish, salsify. (Notice, there's no mention of potatoes.) The book has illustrations for "trenching in" cabbage and building various kinds of underground silos. It reminds me of the lessons we learned in grade school about how American Indians preserved their food.

Another chapter discusses root cellars, preserving foods in buckets, in barrels, in sand, in straw, in newspaper. I find this not just fun, but practical. We have a lot of gardening space in our yard. One of our issues has been that we can't eat all of the food we grow. Or, maybe we can, if we learn better ways of keeping it.

What never ceases to amaze is how our vegetable garden here in the District of Columbia, just a mile from the White House, continues to connect us with the soil, with the seasons, with ancient traditions practiced by food growers around the world. Growing our own food has turned into a great journey of discovery. Or should I say, rediscovery.

Tomatoes Gone but Not Forgotten

A stillness overtakes the garden as the plants pass their prime. Or maybe it's just lack of expectation that removes all tension from the air. The fall crops--lettuce, radishes, arugula, greens--are ready for occasional harvesting. But all the jubilant growth of summer--the real fireworks in the vegetable patch--are missing. The tomatoes, for instance, are mere skeletons of their former glory.



But there are still tomatoes. We gathered a peck of green ones and pickled them. That was an easy call. But what to do with the last of the ripe red tomatoes that are ready to drop to the ground?



These are not sauce tomatoes, but our beloved Brandywines and Cherokee Purples. I wanted to do something special with them. My wife and I hit the books and decided to make a fresh tomato ketchup and a tomato jam.



Homemade ketchup turns out surprisingly similar to store bought in appearance and consistency. The truth is in the ingredients. Reading the label on a bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup, I see tomatoes, distilled vinegar , high fructose corn syrup (it's in everything, no?), salt, "spice," onion powder and "natural flavoring," which very well could be some form of mono-sodium glutamate, or MSG.



Our own ketchup, following a recipe from Art of Preserving, calls for ripe tomatoes, onion, garlic, a sachet of allspice berries, peppercorns, cloves and bay leaf, white wine vinegar, granulated sugar, mustard powder and sea salt.



There is no great trick. The tomatoes, onions and garlic are all roughly chopped, then cooked in a pot with the spice sachet. When the vegetables are very soft, the spice bag is removed and the vegetables are pureed in a blender or food processor, then returned to the cook pot with the wine vinegar, sugar, mustard and salt and reduced to the desired thickness.


From four pounds of tomatoes we now have this lovely tall jar as our new tomato ketchup dispenser.



We found several intriguing recipes for tomato jam--one incorporating curry spices, another walnuts, yet another pairing tomatoes and vanilla--but we settled on a recipe for tomato jam with ginger and coriander from Fancy Pantry.

This would require canning and processing the finished jam in jars. Otherwise there is nothing complicated about it.



Remove the skins from 5 pounds firm ripe tomatoes by dipping the tomatoes individually into a large pot of boiling water for about 10 seconds. When the tomatoes are cool enough to handle, cut them in half and squeeze the seeds and pulp into a sieve set over a bowl. Save the juices, discard the seeds. Cut the tomatoes roughly and place them and the juice in a preserving pan or heavy pot.



Grate the zest (outer skin only, no pith) from two lemons and measure out 2 packed teaspoons. Add it to the tomatoes. Squeeze 6 tablespoons lemon juice and add that to the tomatoes, along with 1 tablespoon finely minced ginger and 1/2 teaspoon salt.



Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring occasionally, then lower heat and simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes are soft, about 15 minutes. Stir in 5 cups granulated sugar, raise heat and cook, stirring, until a candy/jelly thermometer reads 219 degrees, or until a small amount of the jam placed on a chilled saucer congeals quickly when refrigerated and does not run when the saucer is tilted.



When the jam is done, stir in 1 tablespoon ground coriander and remove from heat.



At this point, we ladled the jam into half-pint (1 cup) canning jars and processed the jars for 15 minutes in a boiling water bath. Curiously, the recipe from Fancy Pantry said to expect a yield of 4 cups. We ended up with 9 cups.



A delicious bonus.