Kitchen Garden Journal

La pasta fatta in casa. Mmmm.... Fresh, homemade pasta. I couldn't think of a better way to use the hearty whole grains from our local-grain share than by making pasta. And with a little preparation and a little practice, it can become a fairly quick and easy way to get a decadent yet healthy dinner on the table. (The kids will love it, too!)

This post will show you step-by-step how to get from raw whole spelt berries to a finished, sauced pasta. The first thing you want to do is wash and dry your grain by rinsing it in a large bowl of water and pouring off any dust and impurities that float. Next, spread the grain in a single layer on a baking sheet and dry it in a low oven, 200 degrees for 30 minutes, stirring it around from time to time.

Once your grain is ready to grind, bring it to your local communal mill, or, failing that, grind it with a hand grinder. The folks at Wheatberry Bakery and Cafe in Amherst (who organize the grain CSA) have installed for public use a little electric-powered stone mill that makes quick business of grinding your own high-quality fresh flour. (They also sell locally grown whole grains for grinding on site.) On a recent morning I spent about half an hour there and left with several large sacks of flour (wheat, rye and spelt) and a delicious cup of fair-trade organic coffee. 

Spelt Fettucine with Alfredo Sauce

• 2 1/2 cups whole spelt flour 

• 3 eggs

• salt

• 1 cup heavy cream

• 3 Tbsp salted butter

• 2/3 cup freshly grated parmigiano cheese 

• the slightest hint of freshly grated nutmeg

Now, if you read Mark Bittman, he recently suggested that making homemade pasta was intimidating with all the boards covered with flour and wells for eggs and all that (and offers an alternate way of making the dough). But I think he does us a disservice because once you practice the traditional method it becomes clear why people have done it this way for centuries: there's no way to mess it up. And after a few times, it becomes second hand.

1. Mix the dough. Pour the flour on to a clean surface and make a little hole in the center. Crack the eggs into the hole and begin to beat them with a fork. Scoop up flour from the edges with your other hand and sprinkle it into the center as you stir. Two tips: always mix in the same direction (clockwise, usually) and do not put down the fork until your dough comes together. The photo above shows the proper consistency for switching between fork-stirring and hand-kneading.

2. Knead the dough, incorporating as much of the remaining flour as possible. (Sometimes it helps to scrape up the stuck bits of eggy flakes along with the rest of the flour and sift it all through a fine sieve, so that you're left with only pure flour and no crusty bits.) Knead flour into the dough until it becomes a smooth ball and is no longer sticky, but before there is too much flour that the dough no longer absorbs it. Like so:

3. Rest the dough.Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and rest it for at least 30 minutes at room temperature. Failure to rest the dough will result in lots of problems when rolling it into sheets. 

4.Roll out the dough. Lily and Oliver demonstrate how to use the pasta rolling machine. Cut off a chunk of dough about the size of a golf ball and coat liberally with flour (I used AP flour for this step). Run the dough through the machine on the widest setting (1) a couple of times, dusting with flour and folding it over itself before running it through again. This is a kind of final kneading to make sure the dough is dry enough to run through the thinner settings without getting sticky. Then dust with flour again and roll the dough to the desired thinness. (My machine has thickness settings 1-6, I roll the dough using 1, 3 & 5. I find 6 to be far too thin for most applications and the 5 thickness gives the pasta a nice chewy texture.)   

5. Cut the dough into fettucine pasta. Most pasta rollers come with a cutting attachment that is pretty straightforward to use. Cut each sheet as soon as it you roll it out, as it's easier to leave the cut pasta lying around than it is to leave the sheets. Spread out the finished pasta on a floured board and finish rolling and cutting the rest of the dough. 

(Note: in a dry house in the wintertime you can take certain liberties with fresh pasta. If you are making pasta in the summer, extreme care must be taken to prevent the cut pasta from absorbing moisture from the air and sticking together. An old-fashioned dowel clothes dryer works well.) 

6. Boil the pasta. Bring 5 quarts of water to a rolling boil. Add 2 Tbsp salt. (I use the kind of sea salt that looks like you could spread it on your driveway.) Add the noodles and cook until "al dente," or about 3-5 minutes. Do not overcook them, especially with spelt, or they will disintegrate. 

7. Drain the pasta into a sieve and plunge it into a large bowl of cold water to stop the cooking. This will both prevent the pasta from getting mushy and wash away the excess starch from the noodles that might cause your sauce to do weird things. Once cool, drain again and toss with a little bit of vegetable oil to prevent them from sticking together. (This also gives you greater flexibility in serving; if you are making fresh pasta for company, all this can be done well in advance. Refrigerate the pasta until ready to serve.) 

8. Make the sauce. Add the cream, butter, cheese and nutmeg to a pot or pan large enough to hold the pasta. Heat gently and simmer until the cream reduces and thickens slightly, about 5 minutes, stirring often. (This sauce couldn't be easier or more basic, which begs the question why alfredo sauce usually comes from a packet. It's one of those head-scratchers.)

9. Mix and serve with additional cheese and fresh pepper. (I use this photo to show that Caroline really did have a hand in the cooking. ;) Buon'appetito!

"Papa, this is the best thing I have ever eaten."

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We're not talking about winter spinach or salad mix. We wanted to let you know about Emmet's evergreens.

Our crew member Emmet van Driesche manages a beautiful grove of balsam fir trees in Ashfield and will be offering sustainably grown Christmas trees, holiday wreaths and trimmings this season. It's well worth a trip to the Pieropan Christmas Tree Farm on Pfersick Rd in Ashfield to saw your own You-Cut tree. They're open the day after Thanksgiving through Christmas Day.

Pieropan trees are grown without herbicides or pesticides in a natural forest setting instead of sterile rows. Emmet manages the woodlot by hand using a method called "stump culture." Instead of cutting trees down to the ground they are cut at waist height and two or three new trees are allowed to re-grow from the remaining branches. He carefully prunes the trees' exuberant growth to thin the new trees sent up from the stump, producing a sustainable alternative to conventional Christmas trees. 

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The recent break from the never-ending heat wave of 2010 (is it really finally over?) has us thinking about winter. Summer is barely over and yet all our thoughts are trained on that cold horizon: how much time do we have left before the end? Time is marching quickly toward vegetative slowdown and dormancy, so we have to make sure we can get the most out of the rest of the growing season.

We’ve pulled out the tomatoes, ripped up the mulch and drip lines, and tilled in a covering of rye. There’s really no rush for rye yet, though. You can plant it until the middle of October, but it does more of its good work (stabilizing the soil, absorbing nutrients and creating organic matter) the earlier you get it sown.

This week the last of the quick-maturing salad crops will be seeded in the field, but the greenhouses are empty. Our summer crop of cucumbers is long finished and our seedlings have vacated, so we can think about planting some extra late crops indoors for November harvests.  (Both of the Farmers Markets we attend have extended their season until just before Thanksgiving this year.) The warmth and shelter from wind created by the plastic covering gives us about one extra month of prime growing weather.

We are also doing some experimental plots of super late planted crops that will be wintered-over in the field. This has us thinking not just of the coming winter, but even to next spring. We’d like to have spinach, scallions, carrots and lettuce for the first market of next spring around May 1. So we’ll get the plants to about 4-6 weeks old and then cover them with fabric and sheets of plastic to hold them in suspended animation through the winter. They will begin growing again at the end of February, when the sun starts to shine again and well before we can think of tilling or planting anything new.  

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. It’s September right now and it’s beautiful: big skies, clean air, and the feeling of a fresh start. Let’s try to enjoy it, along with the last of summer’s bounty, while it lasts.

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The sap’s running and while it’s too early to tell what the maple season will be like this year, I can tell you that the pancakes at Gould’s Sugarhouse on Route 2 in Shelburne are fantastic no matter what’s happening up in the sugar bush. Our Saturday morning visit was the third for our daughter, Lily - an annual tradition we started when she was one month old - and the first for our 5-month-old, Oliver. Even though we got there at exactly 8:30 a.m. when they opened the doors, the wait was about an hour. Perfect timing is probably more like 8:15.

 The wait, however, is truly part of the experience of the New England sugarhouse pancake breakfast. It’s the only dining experience I know of where you can chat with real farmers doing real farm work in real time while you wait for your table. A friendly chat with the man working the evaporator about his firewood gave me some insight into his business.

There are two major external factors that determine the success of a maple crop, or of any crop, for that matter: the weather and the economy. Since the economy is bad, the local sawmills aren’t churning out as many boards, so there aren’t as many cast-off end pieces to burn. Luckily, though, last winter’s ice storm took down a bunch of hardwoods on the Gould property and they were able to split and season their own windfall crop of wood. Adding hardwood to the mix buys them more time to chew the fat with customers; instead of stoking the boiler every 5 minutes with an all pine fire, they only have to do it every seven minutes to keep the sap at a fierce 220 degrees. 

So in this case, the negative effects of the economy were offset by the positive effects of bad weather.

In other good news, local demand for pancakes seems to be stronger than ever, and Gould’s serves the best around. The secret? Good luck finding it out, but the essence of the Gould’s pancake is moistness. There are no crunchy fried bits on the outside, but who cares? Their perfect batter, whatever its makeup, is perfectly cooked, not at all raw, and when you dive into a triple stack it’s like taking a bite of birthday cake. And if that wasn’t enough, the homemade sour pickles are the perfect foil for all that syrup.

That’s what’s so great about Gould’s: the traditions. More than at some other places where they have propane boilers or reverse osmosis or lots of Bisquick, this place seems like the real deal. No one’s forcing them to spend the summer making all those pickles for the following spring. They do it out of a sense of pride in what they do, and of doing it right, and that sense carries all the way though the process from sap to syrup to service.

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I love winter food as much as the next guy: potatoes a million ways, root vegetable soups, slow cooked fatty meats, entire meals composed of treasures from the cellar, pantry and freezer. But I have to admit that with nothing much happening in the fields, the dead of winter is the one time out of the year when my cooking is suddenly free of the burden of seasonality.

For once, there is no relentless parade of transient, seasonal delicacies pounding on my kitchen window. It is one of my guilty pleasures that in winter I can go to the supermarket, linger in the produce department, find inspiration in the miracle of freshness, and actually buy stuff. I love buying vegetables. It’s so easy. And I never get to do it during the growing season; there’s always something wonderful I’ve grown left over in the cooler that I feel compelled to cook with, or some blemished cast-off begging for salvation.

At one point a few years back, I thought that winter would be an ideal time for travel to the hotter parts of the globe. We got in one such trip to Thailand in 2007, and then proceeded to have two children. Now I do my tropical getaways in the privacy of my own kitchen. And it must be said that nothing perks me up out of the winter doldrums like a blisteringly hot and tangy green papaya salad studded with raw garlic, fresh herbs, and grape tomatoes from god-knows-where.

Of course there’s nothing quite as special as a Thai salad made with our own cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, and cilantro at their peak of freshness, but hey--August only lasts so long this far from the equator.

When it’s cold outside and I get the urge to crawl out of my root cellar, I head to Food Zone in Springfield. This is a full size supermarket that caters to Forest Park’s incredibly diverse community of Puerto Ricans, Vietnamese, and everyone else in between.

It’s worth a trip just to be enveloped in the sheer other-ness of the place. (It also seems to be one of the best run supermarkets in the area.) And of course, you can stock up on all those great items of produce that are not in season any time of year in Western Massachusetts: plantains, yuca, mangoes, coconuts, sugar cane, countless unidentifiable Southeast Asian herbs and massive piles of tropical roots.

The highlight, though, for sheer wow factor, are the mountains of rice, beans, frying oil and Malta Goya that tower above the center isle like a cross between midtown Manhattan and a Mayan temple.

I have become somewhat of a Southeast Asian food zealot this winter, honing my craft of this exuberant cuisine of perpetual summer as life outside my window lies trapped in suspended animation. Nothing tastes better to me than the combination of chilies, garlic, fish sauce, palm sugar and lime juice over raw and crunchy vegetables, lemongrass-marinated grilled meats, steamed fish, sticky rice, and plain blanched rice noodles, everything infused with the aromas of cilantro, mint, and Thai basil. The contrasts of flavor are as stark as jumping in a frozen lake fresh from a steaming sauna.

I’ve been finding inspiration reading the many incredible food blogs that cover Southeast Asian food. For instant access into this amazing world of flavor check out Rasa Malaysia, Chez Pim, and Viet World Kitchen. Who needs cookbooks anymore when there are real cooks offering their expertise for free?

Having thrown my lot down squarely in the local foods camp, I know as well as anyone the pleasures of fresh food grown at home and eaten the day it’s picked. But being so focused on local foods, local markets and local communities for so much of the year I relish the opportunity to step outside of all that for a moment and appreciate the best things that the other side has to offer: the different communities, cultures, and cuisines that we cohabitate with in our cosmopolitan society, and the fresh foods that we can rely on throughout the barren months if we so desire them. For the winter-weary locavore, these are the true gifts of globalization.

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Recipe: Tostones (Twice-Fried Green Plantains)

On a recent outing to Food Zone I could not resist the green plantains, and despite the fact that they’re heavy and bulky and came all the way from Ecuador, it only cost me two bucks to take home eight of them. When I tasted my own homemade tostones I thought for a second that I never needed to eat French fries again. I mean, what’s not to love? They have that comfortable starchiness of potatoes and that mineral richness of bananas. Besides, I’ve never met a potato that would ripen if you left it sitting around long enough.

•    4 Green Plantain Bananas (1 per person as an appetizer)
•    Oil for deep frying (canola, safflower, peanut, etc)
•    Salt

Peel the plantains. This can be a little tricky. You need to score them lengthwise with a sharp knife and pry your fingers underneath along the cut to loosen the skin. Once peeled, cut them into one inch sections, or about 8 pieces per banana. Heat your oil up good and hot and drop in the banana pieces. Fry until golden, no need for too much precision, about 5 minutes. Lift them out with a slotted spoon or frying sieve and drain on paper towels. Allow to cool for a few minutes, and then gently smash them. A rolling pin, wine bottle or wooden spatula does the trick nicely. (Of course they sell a specific tool for this at Food Zone.) They should end up about ¼- ½ inch thick. Heat the oil back up really hot and toss in the flattened disks. Fry another 3-5 minutes until golden-brown and crispy. Lift them out and again drain them on paper towels (a paper grocery bag does the trick for a large batch rather nicely). Toss with salt and serve as is or with your favorite dipping sauce.

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Greetings from the farm! Nothing at all is growing. What few crops were left in the field at the end of November have long since perished. But that doesn't stop us from eating our own vegetables several nights a week.

Actually, we tend to spend more time and energy cooking with the produce from our farm during the winter. And I'm glad for it, because at the height of the season when we're putting in 12 hour work days, cooking is often the last thing we want to do. But eating our own veggies this time of year is only possible because we devote a special effort during the growing season to canning, freezing, and setting aside the proper amounts of storable crops. You should do this, too. With a little planning and understanding of some basic techniques, food preservation is pretty simple. The first thing to think about when setting food aside is what you are actually going to enjoy eating during the winter; it is just as important to know what not to preserve. When I first became interested in food preservation, I would spend hours making jams and pickles that would just sit on the shelves. My pickles weren't very good, and I like my toast plain, when I eat breakfast at all. Let's just say moving day was a sad one.

Through the years, I have honed my list. I cannot live without canned tomatoes any time of year, so I put away cases of tomato puree and whole peeled tomatoes. We freeze peas, shell beans, hot peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, and a variety of greens (broccoli rabe (see photo), turnip greens, kale, chard, spinach). Strawberries and blueberries are also a cinch to freeze. We set aside enough garlic to get us through til March, and try to avoid selling all of the onions and potatoes, which doesn't always work. Canning tomatoes is time consuming and exhausting, but not disproportionate to the enjoyment I get out of having them. The rest of what we save is a snap: blanch and freeze or simply tuck away in the basement. It's easy and anyone who likes to eat local food should make it a summer ritual. Detailed instructions for preserving all of our vegetables are found on The Vegetable Pages.

If you missed the opportunity to preserve food this year, be sure to check out Winter Fare in Greenfield on Saturday, Feb. 6 from 10-2. (We won't be selling there because we sold everything we grew this year!) There's also a locally grown Pancake Breakfast to support the Northampton Survival Center at Enterprise Farm on Saturday Jan. 30 from 9-noon.

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• 2lbs yellow or cipollini onions
• 1/2 stick butter, or combination of oil and butter
• 1 shot Port wine
• 2 quarts homemade beef stock, or use canned
• salt & pepper
• To serve:
• 4 slices slightly stale french bread
• grated Emmenthaler or Gruyere cheese, or a combination

This is an absolute classic and is actually pretty easy once you get all the onions peeled and thinly sliced. Heat the butter in a large, heavy skillet or dutch oven and add the onions. When they are hot and actively cooking, reduce the heat to low. Continue to cook, stirring occasionally, for a long time, even over an hour. What you are looking for are the various phases the onions go through as they cook: sweaty, soft, mushy, golden, deep golden and virtually disintegrating. Be sure to stop there, before they start sticking and turning black. Add the Port and stir until evaporated. (If you happen to have saved some pan drippings from a roast, throw them in now. There are few better things to use them for.) Add the beef stock and bring to a boil. Season with salt and pepper. The soup is done now but if you wait until the following day to serve it, it's even more delicous. To serve: Toast the bread. Serve hot soup into individual oven-safe bowls, topping each with a piece of bread and some grated cheese. Place all the bowls on a baking sheet and stick them under a hot broiler until the cheese is brown and bubbly.

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With the air inside the house so dry this time of year, fresh bread has a life of about 12 hours. Luckily, there are many things you can do with the stale ends, like this classic Italian peasant soup.

• 2-3 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 medium leeks, thinly sliced, or 2 cups sliced onions    
• ¼  cup extra virgin olive oil
• salt & pepper
• 1 quart whole peeled tomatoes
• 4 cups vegetable stock or water
• 2 ½  cups cubed stale bread
• 8 large basil leaves, cut in strips, optional
• freshly grated parmigiano

Heat the oil in a pot suitable for making soup and saute the garlic until just beginning to brown. Add the leeks or onions and saute until golden brown, about 15 minutes. Add tomatoes, salt and pepper, and cook 10 minutes until soft. Add stock and simmer another 10 minutes. Add bread, cover pot and remove from heat. Let stand 15-20 minutes until bread is falling apart. Add basil, and serve with olive oil and freshly grated parmigiano. Tastes even better the second day.

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One of the best cookbooks of 2009 was "The Pleasures of Cooking for One" by Judith Jones. I gave a copy to my mother and enjoyed perusing it during our Christmas visit. Here's one of the recipes that stuck with me.

• 1 frozen ball of greens or 1 fresh bunch (use chard, kale, beet greens, spinach, etc.)
• 2 Tbsp Olive oil
• 2 eggs
• Salt & Pepper
• Toast

Heat the oil in a small wok or frying pan. Add the greens and saute for 5 minutes, adding a few drops of water if necessary and a pinch of salt. Make two little pockets in the greens and break an egg in each, sprinkling with salt & pepper. Cover the pan with a lid and increase heat to high for 30 seconds to generate some steam. Immediately reduce heat to low and steam for 6-7 minutes or until the eggs are set. Avoid peeking if possible. Serve on toast for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

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