We're in Martha Stewart Living

And folks, it's certainly not for my photography. But if you turn to page 92 in the just-out December 2007 issue, you will find The Slow Cook's byline atop a holiday story called "Cocktail Companions," about pairing inspired libations with simple hors d'oeuvres.

The challenge was to tell readers how to create a sophisticated cocktail hour without a terrible amount of cooking or bartending--all in 200 words or less.

Longtime readers will notice a different sort of voice--the suave, utterly in-the-know voice--that is seldom heard on The Slow Cook blog. All I can say is, it was a bit of a stretch for yours truly to match the production values at Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Let's just call this a miracle of modern publishing.

In fact, I am a secret fan of Martha's magazine. Does this come under the category of guilty pleasures? The recipes are tight and never too complicated, usually an update of one classic dish or another. People may rib Martha for being too much the busy perfectionist, but you can't say she doesn't have great taste. Too many food magazines are trying too hard to impress with trendy recipes that just fly right over the top. As you all know, we travel pretty much against the latest trends here at the Slow Cook. You might even call us anti-trend.

I can't take any credit for the recipes in this story for Martha. My job was to draw on some of my own experience entertaining and for me that means making the food ahead. Nobody likes to watch the host experience a meltdown while trying to greet guests, prepare food and play bartender simultaneously. In our house we like to keep things simple and, where possible, offer a featured cocktail so there isn't a traffic jam around the liquor cabinet.

The food and drink in this particular spread fit easily within that scheme. I think there just might be something good enough you'll want to give it a try.

A New Season in Earnest

This was a propitious week for us, the beginning of our winter CSA subscription. The first box from Even' Star Organic Farm in Lexington Park, MD arrived on Thursday.

Inside the box were some lovely Beauregard sweet potatoes along with one very long Courge de Longue squash (very much like a butternut squash), some arugula, ancho and Peachy Mama peppers, French breakfast radishes, heirloom eggplants and one dozen brown eggs from farmer Bretts Grohsgal's pastured hens.

This year we are splitting the subscription with our friends Helen and Jeff. There's just too much vegetable matter in each week's delivery for our small family to manage. In the deepest part of winter, we will be seeing tons of greens: kales, collards, mustards. We love our greens, but we can only eat so many at a time.

Things will be a bit different this year because of the prolonged drought that plagued our part of the country. Brett announced that he was accepting no more winter subscribers because he spent much of his summer running irrigation pipes around the farm. At one point, he was sucking mud off the bottom of his holding ponds.

In the most recent of his regular e-mails to subscribers (always newsy, written with flair and well worth the price of admission), Brett reports that many of his winter crops--rutabagas, turnips, collards and kales--were destroyed, either by lack of rain or by starving grasshoppers.

What did survive were sweet potatoes--lots of sweet potatoes. Last week Brett and his wife Christine held their annual fall bash for subscribers. This consists of several dozen families driving their automobiles into a parking area in the fields and feasting on a groaning buffet of exotic dishes such as venison posole, prepared by Brett--a former chef--in huge pots. Conveniently, there is also a keg of cold beer.

Many of the guests take a tour around the farm conducted by Brett while the kids chase through the nearby woods hunting for Halloween candy on a specially designated trail. Then there's a bonfire and subscribers are invited to pitch tents anywhere they please and spend the night gazing at a sky brilliantly lit with stars, especially the Orion constellation for which the winter subscription is named.

As we arrived, I couldn't help noticing huge piles of sweet potatoes outside the farm house, surrounded by empty milk crates where workers obviously had been seated recently sorting through the crop. Being in our fourth year of the subscription now, I surmise that we'll be seeing quite a few sweet potatoes in our box in the coming weeks.

Got any recipes for sweet potatoes you'd like to share?

Dark Days: Meal 3

I see no reason why "Dark Days" meals should not tilt toward the sublime. Truth be told, we are entering The Slow Cook's favorite time of year, when slow cooking yields great depths of flavor and big heavy pots left to their own devices perform transformative magic with the simplest ingredients.

Brother-in-law Tom, the oenophile, had laid down a challenge: make a meal with big, succulent flavors and he would bring some wines to match. Immediately I flashed on the recipe for braised beef short ribs from Second Helpings, the follow-up to The Union Square Cafe cookbook.

The short ribs are first marinated overnight with aromatic vegetables, thyme and a whole head of garlic, all drenched with two bottles of red wine (I used a Merlot). The following day, remove the spare ribs, pat dry with paper towels, season with salt and pepper and brown in extra virgin olive oil in a heavy pot or Dutch oven. Set the ribs aside. Drain the marinade and vegetables through a colander, then drop the vegetables into the pot, dust with w tablespoons all-purpose flour and brown for a few minutes. Add the ribs back to the pot, pour in the marinade (with vegetables), cover and place in a 250-degree oven for about 3 hours, or until the beef is fork-tender.

Now remove the beef and set aside. Strain the liquid, discarding the vegetables. Return the liquid to the pot, skimming away any fat, and reduce over high heat by one half. Add 2 cups of veal stock (I use half beef broth and half chicken stock) and reduce the liquid to about 2 cups. Add a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce and a teaspoon of garam marsala. Return the ribs to the liquid and simmer until the liquid has turned into a syrupy, shimmering sauce. Serve.

In a perfect world, you will be making these ribs a couple of days in advance. The flavors will only become more intense. And once the short ribs have been refrigerated it becomes an easy matter to remove the bones and trim the tough cartilage away from the tender meat. Then simply reheat them.

Anyone who eats these ribs is overtaken immediately by an urge to get horizontal. They are extremely rich.

Prior to the ribs, we served a butternut squash and apple soup that was posted about earlier. What was extraordinary about the soup this time was the wine Tom chose to drink with it: a lightly sweet, acidic German Reisling from the Mosel-Saar region--a perfect match.

With the entree came a sweet potato and Swiss chard mash. I grew the sweet potatoes at my "chef-in-residence" plot at the Washington Youth Garden. The chard came from our garden in the front yard, where it is in full form and eager to be culled. The second side was a curry-roasted cauliflower, the cauliflower gleaned from the Saturday farmer's market down the street.

Tom couldn't have struck closer to my heart than with the big Zinfandel he chose to go with the beef. I love the complex, fruity flavors of the Zinfandel playing with the deep richness and garam marsala twist of the beef.

And for dessert, my wife made one of her famous creme brulees, in this case a pumpkin creme brulee using eggs from the farmers market. Who could ask for a more glorious repast using local ingredients?

Here I have to put in a word for SmithMeadows Meats, the source of our beef short ribs. SmithMeadows is a family farm that's been in operation nearly 200 years in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, west of the District of Columbia. They raise beef, pork, sheep, goat and chickens on pasture and send the meat to a Menonite family near Hagerstown, MD, to be butchered. It's a small operation dedicated to quality--just the kind of people we want to support. And they'll be selling their wares all winter at a few select farmers markets in the area.

We can't wait for first frost...

Note: I use the Whole Foods house brand Merlot for the short ribs marinade. At $4.99 a bottle, it's a good value, not a great wine. You can certainly spend more on a wine you like better.

Weekend Update

The biggest news of the week was barely noticed: A study at the University of Illinois, using data going back more than 100 years, concludes that the use of artificial nitrogen fertilizer is killing our soil as well as polluting our air and water and wasting untold millions of dollars every year.

The results, published in the Journal of Environmental Quality, confirm what organic farmers either suspect or know intuitively--that fertilizing with manufactured nitrogen is bad for nature and unnecessary for healthy crops. Yet modern agriculture has become almost completely dependent on artificial nitrogen, usually in the form of anhydrous ammonia manufactured from natural gas.

The four University of Illinois scientists were curious why yields at one end of their test fields continuously planted with corn and artificially fertilized were lower than yields at the other end of the fields where corn was rotated with wheat and hay. Comparing data from soil samples predating the use of manufactured nitrogen showed that routine application of artificial fertilizer was depleting the carbon in the soil.

In other words, artificial fertilizer was killing the carbon-based life forms in the soil that under normal conditions are nature's way of providing fertility. Although the results seem counterintuitive, the effect of repeated applications of aftificial nitrogen was not more fertility, but less. In addition, the killing of soil life releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide--a primary greenhouse gas--into the atmosphere and destroys the soil's ability to retain moisture.

Since the 1970s, continuous planting of corn and fertilizing with nitrogen derived from natural gas has become standard practice for farmers in the U.S. breadbasket. You might even say this is the backbone of our current food system, since almost everything in the food chain--from livestock feed to the high fructose corn syrup in soft drinks to the derivatives in almost all processed foods--comes from artificially fertilized corn.

Artificial fertilizers--as opposed to composting, applying animal manure and planting cover crops to feed the soil--are also responsible for much of the pollution in the nation's waters. And the widespread agricultural use of natural gas--a rapidly depleting resource vital to heating the nation's homes--has come under increasing scrutiny.

The University of Illinois team, by comparing soil data from other states and around the world, found that farmers are throwing money down the drain by indiscriminately overusing industrial nitrogen that in fact is lowering their yields.

The team concludes that healthy soil--not artificial fertilizers--is primarily responsible for providing plants with the nitrogen they need. But until now, the negative impacts of artificial nitrogen have been hidden by the breeding of higher-yielding crop plants.

******

And evidence continues to mount that organically-grown foods are healthier than those farmed with artificial fertilizers and pesticides.

Preliminary results from a British study find that organically-grown fruits and vegetables contain up to 40 percent more of the antioxidants thought to help ward off cancer and heart disease. Organic milk contains 60 percent to 80 percent more antioxidants and also is higher in vitamin E.

Sam Fromartz in his Chews Wise blog quotes one of the primary researchers as saying, "the figures were so dramatic that they would be the equivalent of eating an extra portion of fruit and vegetables every day."

*****

In yet another study, researchers find that excess body fat--typically the result of a meat-centric diet and sedentary lifestyle--significantly increases the risk of cancer.

After spending years reviewing thousands of studies, an international panel concludes that excess body fat increases the risk of cancer of the colon, kidney, pancreas, esophagus and uterus as well as postmenopausal breast cancer.

"This was a much larger impact than even the researchers expected," Karen Collins, a cancer institute nutrition adviser, was quoted as saying in USA Today. "People forget body fat is not an inert glob that we are carrying around on the waistline and thighs. It's a metabolically active tissue that produces substances in the body that promote the development of cancer."

One of the findings: Every 1.7 ounces of processed meat consumed a day increases the risk of colo-rectal cancer by 21%.

"This is a wake-up call for people who eat hot dogs or pepperoni pizza regularly," Collins says. "They need to be looking for other alternatives. But you can still occasionally have a hot dog."

In that case, please pass the mustard....

*****

The Georgia state agriculture commissioner dropped a controversial proposal to dye raw milk gray after farmers and consumers packed a public hearing to oppose the move.

In Georgia, raw milk can be sold, but only for consumption by animals. The state had proposed adding a colorant to turn the milk charcoal gray as a means of discouraging consumption by humans.

Hardly anyone wants to admit in public they drink raw milk. Yet behind the scenes, many consumers believe unpasteurized milk confers health benefits and they often go to great lengths to find it. They are up against a federal and state health establishment that would like to see raw milk sales to the public disappear entirely.

Said one of the participants in this week's hearing in Georgia:"We've been drinking milk for 10,000 years and suddenly we have to turn it a different color to make it safe?"

*****

Finally, if you get tired of all the bad news, try canning a few vegetables.

Canning may be overtaking knitting and crossword puzzles as the home relaxation method of choice. But as a reporter for the Toronto Star finds, there is more to all this food preservation activity than the urge to find a new hobby. More and more people are using canning as a way to opt out of the industrialized food system and get closer to the food growing in their own communities--maybe even in their own yard.

Can putting up gherkins constitute an act of political defiance? Call this the chow chow heard round the world.

Bon appetit...

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.

Kids Make Butternut Squash Soup

Do you take your squash perfectly smooth, or a bit lumpy?

That was the dilemma I wrestled with in my "food appreciation" classes this week. I wanted the kids to experience the old-fashioned method of turning vegetables through a food mill into soup, but I wasn't sure how they would react to the texture.

As much as possible, I try to make these sessions a hands-on tutorial. For the most part, we do without modern kitchen gadgets and especially electrical appliances. I want the kids to learn original techniques, and to appreciate the difference

between making food by hand and zapping it with electricity.

Turns out texture was a major issue for the smaller children. So on the second day of classes, we tried something different. All the kids got a turn cranking the food mill to see how the old-fashioned device turned sauteed onions, carrots and apples into a puree. Then, to get rid of the bumps, we processed the soup in a blender.

This makes me a pack mule, hauling all my equipment to school, and it does create a bit of extra work. But I think the final results are worth the effort.

This is a classic soup. The apple and winter squash harvests overlap, which leads to this fortunate blend of flavors, the sweetness of the apples giving just the right lift to the savory squash. I adapted this recipe from the many I looked at in my research. There is a startling number of variations, with ingredients including cream, sour cream, half-and-half, chicken broth, maple syrup, honey, brown sugar, curry powder, brandy, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg--and on and on.

Anything that goes with apples or butternut squash, it seems, is fair game for this soup, so don't be afraid to improvise.

In the end, the soup was a huge hit with the older kids--even the lumpy version. The younger children, however, were immediately put off by the rough texture of the soup using only the food mill mill. But they were eager to try it once it had been smoothed out in the blender. Still, many of them found the brownish color of the finished soup a bit intimidating. Some of them, on the other hand, absolutely loved it. And what's not to love about a soup that's practically half dessert?

I tried to keep my final recipe as American as possible, with the accent on maple syrup and brown sugar. Making it is surprisingly easy, really just a matter of combining the cooked squash with the other ingredients, hardly any cooking at all.

For 6 servings

1 medium butternut squash (about 2 pounds)
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, peeled and cut into small dice
2 carrots, peeled and grated
1 semi-sweet, crispy apple, peeled and grated
Coarse salt
1 cup half-and-half

1 cup chicken broth (or water)
2 tablespoons dark brown sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons maple syrup
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
Sour cream or crème fraiche for garnish (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Cut the squash in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. Place squash in an oven-proof casserole cut-side down and add water to a depth of about ½ inch. Place in oven and bake until completely tender, about 1 hour. Remove from oven and set aside to cool.

Meanwhile, in a heavy pot over moderate heat, heat the olive oil and add the onion, carrot and apple. Cook until the onion is completely soft, about eight minutes. Remove from heat. When the vegetables are cool enough to handle, process through a food mill (or in a blender or food processor with the addition of some broth or water).

Return pureed vegetables to cook pot. Scoop flesh from squash and add to cook pot. Add remaining ingredients and use a potato masher to thoroughly blend squash into the mix. (For a very smooth soup, process the mix in a blender or food processor.) Return pot to moderate heat on the stove and bring to a simmer. Adjust seasonings.

To serve, ladle soup into bowls and garnish with a swirl of sour cream or crème fraiche.

Note: if the soup is too thick, add half-and-half, chicken stock or water.

A Devilishly Tricky Halloween

Devils don't smile

On, no! The Snow Princess is taken prisoner

A kindly stranger restores peace to the kingdom

A grateful public celebrates