I forget her name so I’ll call her Corn Maiden, based on a Pueblo legend about a woman who gives corn to the people. I hope she’s reading, and if so, I want to thank you again for this gift that continues to give, and has led me on a tasty journey of corn discovery.

Also known as maize, corn has been an important component of the indigenous American diet for centuries. Lately the plant has become a darling of the processed-food industry because of its versatility as a sweetener and thickener, but the modern varieties in use by the corn industry are a far cry from the ruby-kerneled Indian corn that Corn Maiden gave me. With red stalks, red husks, and red veins crisscrossing the green leaves, the whole plant is a feast for the eyes as well as the belly.

This isn’t sweet corn to be boiled and lathered with butter. The kernels are hard and dense, even when fresh, and are as starchy as rice. For a while I wasn’t sure  what to do with it, beyond save a few ears for seed. There wasn’t enough for grinding, and the corn’s tough, starchy nature put me in uncharted culinary waters. I ended up peeling the husks and simply leaving the naked ears to dry in the New Mexican sun. Then I put those beautiful ears in a bowl in the kitchen to admire, for months, while I worked on figuring out what to do with them.

I figured out how to rub the dried kernels off the cob and add them to a pot of posole, which is a type of Mexican corn soup. The principal ingredient in posole is hominy, a large-grained corn whose kernels have been treated to remove the fibrous outer shell, and are then dried.

Corn Maiden’s red corn added a toughness to the stew, and a mild corn flavor, and starchiness that did what potatoes do in other stews, balancing and absorbing the broth, meat, and veggies.

I soon discovered that other forms of dried corn perform well in the posole as well, including seed corn, dried sweet corn, and an local style of smoked hard corn called chicos.

It’s not unusual for me to use five types of corn in my posole, which has become so different from typical posole that I can’t even call it that, so I call it: Cinco de Maize.

Start by soaking your dried corn, be it posole, chicos, plain dried kernels, popcorn, whatever. Soaking overnight is ideal. Meanwhile, brown some cubes of meat.

Begin simmering your soaked corn in chicken or veggie stock, with bay leaves, salt and garlic powder. Add the browned meat and let it all cook and soften together.

While that’s going, clean some dried red chile pods, removing stem, seeds, and inner membranes in a manner appropriate to the hotness of the chiles and heat-tolerance of your audience, and soak them in warm chicken stock. After 30 minutes, put the chiles in a blender with raw garlic and oregano and, adding some of the red soaking water as necessary for a good vortex, blend until it’s a smooth, red paste, which is also known as red chile sauce, to your simmering corn chowder.

Each type of corn will cook differently, so as you get to know your dried corn you’re better off making it the day before and letting it sit overnight, which will improve this as well as almost any other stew.

While some corn will soften to the point of disintegration in just a few hours, others will hold their form and toughness longer. Cook until no kernels are hard enough to break teeth, and then add chopped onions and winter squash to the pot and let it cook together, seasoning with salt and pepper. Serve garnished with chopped raw onion and a squeeze of lime.

Each of the many corns contributes differently, and a complexity emerges from the repetition of parallel corn vibrations. It’s brothy, hearty, spicy and sweet corny comfort food.

The principle ingredients of Cinco de Maize, dried corn, dried chile, and meat, garlic, and onions, can all be grown at home and stored for months. This means it’s a homegrown dish you can eat year-round.  I look forward to my January soup being lit up by the next generation of Corn Maiden’s ruby kernals.

My current phase of corn research has been to make chicos – those smoky, hard, dried New Mexican corn kernels – from homegrown corn, rather than simply sun-drying the cobs as I had the previous year. Turning corn into chicos adds a tea-like aroma that seasons everything the chicos are cooked with.

Traditionally, chicos were made by lining a pit with hot coals and filling it with ears of corn. This produces wonderfully smoky chicos, but a modern alternative is pretty good too. Place the ears of corn, husk on, in a covered baking dish in the oven at 350 degrees for three hours.

After a few fragrant hours in the smoldering corn husk, remove the ears of corn from the oven, let them cool, and pull off the husks. Let them dry in the sun for a few days.

I recently dried a few ears of chicos-to-be upon a sheet of aluminum foil atop my dashboard during a road trip. Sharing the dashboard were some plums and grapes in various phases of dehydration. These chicos began the journey as sweet corn, and as I drove I peeled off the chewy half-dried kernels one by one and ate them. They were completely amazing. Their concentrated sweetness reminded me of Halloween candy corn. I could go through a lot of corn like this.

Had I not eaten them, these chicos-to-be would have dried to the point of being hard and crunchy, at which point they’re ready for storage. With a little soaking and cooking they will plump out and sweeten again, giving a breath of smoky, nutty sweetness to whatever’s cooking, from a simple dish of baked pinto beans and chicos to an elaborate version of Cinco de Maize.

The next generation of Corn Maiden’s plants are currently taller than I am. Tomatoes and beans are climbing high up the stalks as I prepare to make chicos from their first ruby kernels.  This winter, instead of looking at pretty ears of dried corn in the kitchen, I’ll know just what to do.

Green chile comes from the first harvest, in July, of the New Mexico Chile, a type of long green chile pepper that has flourished in New Mexico after Spaniards imported chile seeds from South America. Since then, chile has burrowed deeply and inextricably into the New Mexican palate.

The two forms of chile, red and green, both come from the same plant. Green chile is harvested while red chile is allowed to vine-ripen into a deep shade of red.

These two forms of chile are processed in completely different ways and have dramatically different flavors. Red chiles are sun-dried and woven into decorative ristras, which hang around looking pretty until the chile is needed. Green chiles, which are still fleshy and full of life at the time of harvest, are flame-roasted in propane-fired steeltumblers, liberating that seductive wind-born New Mexican nerve agent: green chile smoke.

Although New Mexicans have been enjoying roasted green chile in summertime for as long as they’ve had chile, it’s only with the advent of modern preservation techniques-freezing and canning-that green chile has become a dominant player in New Mexican food.

Red chile has been New Mexico’s culinary lifeblood for years, and done much to forge the identity of this region, but it isn’t indigenous to New Mexico the way green chile is. Foods made from dried red chile, from Moroccan harissa to Thai red chili sauce, are found in many countries on most continents. And while cooks in other regions could roast and eat their chiles when green, they don’t.

The addition of chopped green chile to a cheeseburger creates one of the most beloved local delicacies. Or it can be combined with tomatoes, onions and garlic into a simple, chunky sauce full of green flavor and watery heat. This sauce is added to most other local dishes, from enchiladas to burritos to huevos rancheros.

In New Mexico’s mountainous north, many sub-varieties of chile have adapted over the years to the specific climates and soils of their home valleys. This kind of haphazard selective breeding managed to produce some wonderful chiles, like the Espanola and Santa Cruz varieties, but also some crops irregularly shaped chile that were vulnerable to disease.  Chile evolution took a turn to the more scientific in 1907, when Dr. Fabian Garcia, at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, began breeding a chile with the heat and flavor of a jalapeno, the size of a bell pepper, and traits like disease – and drought -resistance that would enhance commercial production. In 1917 he released his masterpiece: the New Mexico No. 9.

Many variations created by several breeders followed. The New Mexico No. 6, released in 1950, was aimed at middle-American palates by dispensing entirely with the chile’s trademark heat. It worked. No longer scared of chemical burns, millions of new chile eaters emerged from America’s woodwork. Some of these No. 6 seeds found their way to southern California,where they took hold and became known as the Anaheim pepper. While California went on to produce a sizeable chile industry, the nation’s leader continues to be New Mexico. And most of the states chile is grown in the lower Rio Grande valley, especially around Hatch, just north of Las Cruces.

Sandia, Rio Grande, Joe Parker, and the foot-long Big Jim are just some of today’s popular varieties in the Las Cruces lineage. Northern growers of niche chiles like Santa Cruz and Espanola are prone to dismiss these southern varieties for having lost their flavor as breeders focused on more commercially important factors like size, yield, resistance, and mellow heat. Somewhere along the way, the commercial varieties lost their green flavor as well. Cognizant of this dilemma, researchers at the New Mexico Chile Institute in Las Cruces have collaborated with Biad Chile to develop the NuMex Heritage 6-4. It isn’t the sexiest name, but it’s supposedly got five times the flavor of the average Hatch chile.

While the hair-splitting will continue in dusty New Mexican think-tanks over which chile is best, it’s actually the roasting, more than the variety, that’s responsible for the magic of green chile. And the good news is, you don’t need a big metal propane-fired roaster to roast chiles on a domestic scale. Nor do you need the newest-fangled variety of chile; you can roast any chile you might have growing, though fleshy chiles are superior. In the average American market, where you won’t have Sandias or Joe Parkers to choose from, a combination of jalapenos and Anaheims will create a nice approximation.

Preheat the oven on broil, with a baking pan or skillet in the oven. Make a lengthwise slit in each chile to allow steam to escape, and then place the chiles on the hot pan under the broiler, about 4 inches from the heat. Start checking on the chiles after about 3 minutes. As they begin to blister, turn them. Keep checking every two minutes until the skins are burnt and blistered all the way around. Remove the chiles, place them in a bowl, and cover with a damp towel. After they’ve cooled to room temperature, pull or rinse off the peels. If it’s a hot chile and your audience isn’t especially heat tolerant, consider cleaning out the seeds and internal membranes.

Your roasted chile is now ready for use. Chop it up and add it to your cheeseburger, scramble it into some eggs, or stuff it into a chicken and bake it. The use of roasted green chile with non-New Mexican ingredients is a young art, so go ahead and experiment. Put it in coconut curry or on pizza. This is how you become a part of green chile taking over the world.

I was going to explain how to make a very special green chile stew, and how a variation of that stew can be stuffed into a chicken and baked. But instead I fell so deep into the history and culture of New Mexico green chile that it was all I could do to describe how to roast it at home before I ran out of space. Today I’ll assume you know about green chile and skip straight to the stew. Then I’ll tell you how to shove it up a chicken’s butt, bake it, and love it.

A good green chile stew is a poem in a bowl, a New Mexican ballad whose hot winds, heavy with the scent of green chile, fan the smoldering fragrance of garlic, dry the dusty potatoes, and drive the cold, tomato-splitting rain. Typically served with a folded flour tortilla tucked between saucer and bowl, green chile stew will make you sweat, cry, cough, and clap your hands like desert thunder.

It’s a simple dish, little more than potato, tomato, onion, garlic, meat, and roasted green chile. There are, of course, variations. Some cooks add olives. Or carrots. Or even red chile. Some serve their stew with a sopapilla instead of a tortilla.

First you brown the meat — typically pork, but any will do. Then, for each pound of meat add one onion and two tomatoes, chopped, and a few minced cloves of garlic. After it cooks together – about ten minutes – add two cubed potatoes and enough stock to cover it all, and simmer until the potatoes are done. Season with salt and garlic powder, add 10-20 chopped green chiles, cook another two minutes, and serve.

Despite being a hearty, chunky affair, very few incarnations of green chile stew are thick enough to actually stuff into a chicken. So I’ve adapted the stew into a low-water, oven-roasted product that works great as a stuffing and absorbs juices from the surrounding chicken.

This is a great wintertime dish, but I’m giving you the recipe in the height of summer to get you hooked. Hopefully you’ll consider putting away a stash of green chile so you can make this dish all year round. If so, now is the time to assemble that stash.

Green chile, as discussed last week, is typically frozen after roasting. If you live where you can acquire freshly roasted green chile by the sack, that’s a lot easier than spending all day roasting chiles on the grill or in the oven. I usually drive to Hatch, NM, and buy 5 bushel sacks of fresh chile, which I have roasted on the spot. Then I drive my green chile home to Albuquerque, where I pack it into quart-sized freezer bags and freeze it for year-round use.

Most of the other ingredients — for stew and chicken both — are crops you can grow in your garden and keep until spring. Potatoes, garlic, and onions store themselves, given a cool space. Tomatoes may be frozen, canned, or dried, and most any unadulterated form of preserved tomato will do. I use sundried tomatoes.

The quantities suggested in this green chile chicken recipe will create about twice as much stuffing as will fit into a 4 lb. bird. You can place the extra stuffing around and beneath the chicken.

- Four medium potatoes
– two tomatoes (in my case, two tomatoes’ worth of sundried slices)
– one head of garlic, chopped
– one good-sized onion, chopped
– at least 20 roasted green chiles
– a quarter-cup of mixed pine nuts and pecans
– two carrots

The carrots and nuts are not typically found in the stew, but I like them in the stuffing. Also, you will need a chicken, obviously. And the following ingredients are optional:

- oregano and sage (to sprinkle on top of the chicken)
– tortillas and a big summer squash sliced into ¾-inch slabs (for placing under the chicken to absorb the juices)

Because the stuffing is oven-roasted, and the chicken subsequently baked, your oven will be hot for a long time. It’s good if you can multi-task to keep it full and make use of the heat. Bake some bread, or pies. Bake me a cake. Last time I made green chile chicken, I did a load of oven apricot butter. Of course if you make this recipe in winter, a hot stove will be an asset to the kitchen.

Cut the potatoes and carrots into 1-inch chunks, arrange them on a baking pan, sprinkle with salt, and roast in the oven at 300. (You can adjust 50 degrees either way if you have other stuff in the oven, and adjust cook times accordingly.) Stir every 10 minutes.

With the roasting in progress, prepare the chile and tomatoes. Wash the burnt, blistered skin from the roasted green chile, remove the tops, and clean out as many of the seeds and inner membranes as you wish — depending on how hot the chile is and your heat tolerance. Chop the green chile into chunks and mix them with your tomatoes in a bowl. In my case, the moisture in the chile begins to rehydrate the sundried tomatoes.

When the potato and carrot chunks develop dry skins, stir in the chopped onion and continue roasting for 15 minutes, stirring at least twice. If the pan starts to stick, deglaze with white wine. Add the garlic and the nuts and keep roasting.

When the smell of roasting garlic reaches intoxicating levels, stir in the chile and tomatoes. Roast until the moisture is nearly gone from the pan. Remove and let cool.
When the stuffing is cool enough to handle, adjust the salt, add black pepper if you wish, and stuff it into your chicken.

I like to line the bottom of a baking pan with tortillas, and then cover them with slabs of summer squash (this is only an option in summer). Either way, put your stuffed chicken in the pan, surrounded by the stuffing that didn’t get stuffed. Sprinkle the chicken with oregano and sage and bake for three hours, or until done, at 300.

Let it cool to an edible temperature, and enjoy the poetry.

It’s the height of summer and the harvest has only just begun, but it’s already time to start over in the garden. Here in the northern hemisphere, the second growing season is on. The seeds we sow in summer will produce this autumn, after which they will hopefully linger a while into winter.

Fall gardens behave differently then spring gardens. They start off more quickly and peter out more slowly. They have more relaxed personalities. The weeds don’t grow as fast. And while baby spring crops are vulnerable to cold, baby fall crops are threatened by heat and dryness. It may all seem like a bunch of unnecessary work when you’d rather go tubing down the river, but the potential rewards of a fall garden are many.

For some, a fall garden offers redemption. If your regular season garden came up short, or didn’t come up at all, a summer planting can help you salvage the year.

For those with limited space, a fall garden results automatically from the practical strategy of filling any empty space as soon as it appears with new plants.

Committed fall growers have a new round of seedlings already started in their greenhouses. Broccoli, kale, lettuce, mizuna, tatsoi and other Asian greens are all great summertime seedlings to plant – if you can get them. Alas, summer planting isn’t like in spring, when casual growers can pick up seedlings at the farmers market. In summer, if you want seedlings for a fall garden you’ll have to sprout them yourself.

By all means, ask around at the farmers market and try to find out if anyone has extra starts in their greenhouses. Otherwise, take heart. Most fall crops are started from seed, including beets, spinach, turnip, lettuce, kale, Asian greens, and radishes.

Spinach is the ultimate fall crop. It will hang on into winter and produce hearty salads as the days turns gray. Eventually it will die back, but only temporarily.  That same spinach will return with a vengeance in spring. Which means that by planting spinach next week you’re sowing the first seeds of spring. So get a large package of spinach seed, and sow it several times in different places over the next few weeks to make sure enough plants take hold.

The spinach plants I planted in spring, meanwhile, are sowing their own next generation. The heat of summer has changed the tender plants into tall, bitter-tasting seed factories, and I let them do their thing. The seeds fall on the ground, as do seeds of cilantro, mustard greens, radishes, turnips, and whatever else goes to seed. As the seeds come up I’ll decide which ones I should let live. It’s the easiest fall garden ever.

All summer plantings, seed and start alike, must be kept wet – otherwise they will quickly die in the hot weather. So once you plant or sow your fall crops, keep them extra wet until they get established. Then you can scale back a bit in the frequency of irrigation.

Garlic growers have an interesting fall gardening opportunity after their July garlic harvest, when a bare field is exposed in dramatic fashion. Garlic is a heavy feeder, and takes its toll on the nutrients and organic matter in the soil. So regardless of what your future plans may be for that land, you’ll want to amend the soil after pulling out a big garlic crop by mixing in some compost or well-aged manure.

An exception to the post-harvest manure spreading rule is in order if you have a garlic patch like mine, in which many kinds of seeds were sown all spring long in the shade of the garlic plants. When I pulled the garlic, this shaded understory burst out into full sun and is growing fast.

I don’t want to shovel compost or manure onto my radicchio, endive, or lettuce leaves, so for a less invasive shot in the arm I spray fish emulsion on my post-garlic fall garden to help make up for the post-garlic nutrient depletion. It will smell rather strong for a day or two, but you can eat out of your garden again by day three.

For more detailed ideas on various extended season topics, check out the work of Eliot Coleman, the godfather of year-round farming. Coleman has gathered and created many important techniques for keeping yourself in garden-fresh food through the winter. You can find his information and buy his books at fourseasonfarm.com.

The success of your fall garden depends largely on how well you know your place. You need to figure out which plant varieties grow well in your home ground over the extended season, as well as keep track of which storage methods will help which produce make it through your winters.  When you’re constantly thinking six, seven, eight months ahead, you’re not just four-season gardening. You’re farming.

I know an old farmer whose beets help keep him warm in the winter. He’s become an expert on keeping them in top form for months.

“I used to store beets in a bushel of moist sand, but they got shriveled and worthless after a few months,” he says. “Now I leave them in the ground all winter, and dig them up as I need them.”

This technique led my farmer friend to a variety of Egyptian beets he’s been getting from gourmetseeds.com. He likes them because a summer planting will stay hard and sweet in the ground all winter long.

“They don’t get an earthy taste in the ground over the winter like some beets do.”

He covers his beet patch with a thick layer of straw mulch. If you have really cold winters where you live, you might want to use an old blanket or quilt on top of the beets, and cover the blanket with straw. When you lift the blanket the straw will come up with it, along with any snow that has accumulated on top. Underneath, your beets will be hard and sweet. The same technique works for carrots as well.

So, as you frolic in the salads and stir-fries of summer, be mindful of the impending winter. If you can enjoy the fun as you get it done, planting for fall, winter, and spring will pay off.  Turning your growing operation into more than just a summer vacation will transform your diet and your life. Getting started is as easy as planting a seed.

It’s the largest certified organic cattle operation in the U.S., which isn’t saying much given what’s permitted under today’s organic standards, which regulate an animal’s diet more than its lifestyle. While organic cattle can be confined for up to eight months a year without losing their certification, the cattle at Arapaho Ranch spend their entire lives grazing outside. They follow the melting snow up the mountain in springtime and retreat to lower ground in fall. The cattle breed naturally, without the help of artificial insemination, as do the ranch horses. The word “organic,” while applicable to the beef produced on Arapaho Ranch, doesn’t do it justice.

When the Arapaho Ranch, which is owned by the Northern Arapaho Tribe, made a deal to market its beef at Whole Foods, it was a dream come true: an economically feasible way for the tribe to steward its land in an ecologically responsible way. It created a revenue stream that stands in stark contrast with gas drilling and casino gambling.

Whole Foods celebrated the agreement with great fanfare, featuring eagle feather headdresses and traditional Arapaho prairie chicken dances in the parking lot of a Denver store. “[It] was a great idea,” says David Ruedlinger, Whole Foods’ meat coordinator for the Rocky Mountain region. “They could supply us with beef 52 weeks a year. Their cattle grazed year-round and knew their way around the ranch, which microclimates would have grass in winter. Everything at the ranch seemed as it should be according to Mother Nature.”

Everything, it turns out, except the bottom line. In March, barely a year into the deal, Arapaho Ranch pulled out.

“We couldn’t have asked for a better situation,” explains David Stoner, general manager of the ranch. “They’re beautiful stores. They presented our product beautifully. But it’s a difficult product to produce. We’re keeping cattle until they’re 30 months old, through two winters. It takes range-fed beef that much longer to grow, and we’re still three to four hundred pounds less than the ones that come out of a feedlot.”

The move to gain organic certification was a big investment for the ranch. Then the bank that helped finance the operation backed out. A sizable percentage of the meat’s retail price was going to Panorama Meats, which handles the slaughter, packaging and distribution of Whole Foods’ beef. The ranch was getting squeezed, Stoner says, and when the price of conventional beef shot up by 20 percent last spring, Arapaho asked Panorama for a commensurate increase in the wholesale price. Panorama declined.

Arapaho Ranch then tried to strike a deal directly with Whole Foods. But that proposition wasn’t as simple as the tribe might have hoped, according to Whole Foods’ Ruedlinger.

“They might view Panorama as a middleman, but they’re more than that. Panorama provides services I can’t do myself. They have a market for the bones, offal, livers, bench trim, etc. You don’t see us selling tripe, tongue, or oxtail at our store, but all that stuff is marketable and should be used if you’re trying to get the best carcass utilization possible. And carcass utilization is important not just for economics, but to honor the animal.”

For a large, publicly traded company like Whole Foods, it’s more efficient to deal with one supplier — Panoroma — that works with several different producers, than to work directly with individual ranches. “In winter, sometimes inclement weather means the roads in Wyoming are closed, and we can’t get the product,” Ruedlinger explains, as an example of why going around Panorama to deal directly with Arapaho Ranch was a can of worms he didn’t want to open.

All parties claim no hard feelings.

“We have no ideological differences,” says Stoner, “I believe in Panorama’s integrity, that they try to provide what they promise, that they’re a transparent company, and they treat their producers with a lot of respect. It’s not their fault, it’s not Whole Foods’ fault, and it’s not our fault. It’s just unfortunate. It’s pure economics.”

Ruedlinger says he has “all the respect in the world” for David Stoner and what they’re doing on the ranch.

And Mack Graves, chief executive officer of Panorama, told WyoFile.com. “I feel horrible about it. They were such good folks. We could have worked it out, and we didn’t.”

So why can’t these sympathetic parties make a deal?

Stoner is correct to blame economics. And the root of this economic problem is a marketplace where consumers want their meat fresh rather than frozen. This is due in part to the inconvenience of waiting for meat to thaw, and also due to the false assumption that freezing meat lowers its quality.

If consumers warmed up to frozen meat, ranchers could slaughter their cattle during the growing season when the quality of forage — and consequently of the meat — is much higher. They wouldn’t have to overwinter as many animals, or contend with bad winter roads. And it would make range-fed operations more competitive with feedlot operations, which can finish their animals on high-quality feed in winter and guarantee fresh, marbled meat year-round.

Arapaho Ranch is currently exploring other markets for its range-fed beef, but it’s running out of time. “We could be making a lot more money selling calves to feedlots,” Stoner says. “Do we believe in that model? No. Are we going to be forced into it? Possibly, yes. By fall we’re going to have to make a decision.”

The willingness of consumers to step up to the plate could make Stoner’s decision a lot easier.

“If we could get shoppers to buy beef at the peak of the season and freeze it themselves, or buy frozen product off-peak that was harvested at peak season, all these problems would be solved,” Ruedlinger says.

But that’s a big if. “We tried putting together frozen value packs, which offered an assortment of burgers, sausages and steaks for a discounted price,” he says. “The program met limited success.”

This is a shame. Stoner and his cowboys would like nothing better than to keep working their tails off to keep America’s freezers full of good meat. But as they say on the range, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

Dogs bury bones. Squirrels hide acorns. Farmers make hay when the sun shines. Seasonal rhythms of scarcity and abundance are responsible for many such animal behaviors and human clichés, because stashing food when the stashing’s good is as natural as sleep, love, and running from wild animals. A stockpile of grub provides a sense of security like having money in the bank.

Over the years, storing food has become as much about art as survival, as people figured out ways to maximize flavor and beauty as well as nutrition. Thus we can thank winter for pickles, prosciutto, kimchi, jam, jerky, sausage, fruit leather, and many other examples of delicious foods with long shelf-lives.

Now that the growing season is on, these farsighted gastronomic opportunities are available by the bushel. But most of the herd tends to wait until the traditional end-of-summer harvest season to make their pesto, salsa, and chili paste. In some respects this makes sense: The great supply of food during harvest season can saturate the market and push down prices. And sometimes the product is better having waited-kale and collards boast more sweetness after a frost or two have fallen, for example.

But if you’re serious about stocking your pantry with an abundance and diversity of food, it pays to follow a season-wide strategy rather than put off your stashing until the end. Stocking up early and often will save you from being overwhelmed during harvest season, while ensuring a select group of short-season produce makes it into your winter diet. Peas, corn, apricots and cherries, for example, are long-gone by the time the frost is on the pumpkins, so you lose if you snooze on these treasures.

A fun way to put away cherries, apricots and other fruits and berries is to make fruit leather. This technique has a special place in my heart because I remember watching my parents make it from apricots during some formative years we spent in northern Utah. The image of our Mormon neighbors’ pickle-packed pantry is nearly as vivid as the memory of their three cute blonde daughters as I followed them to school in my four-year-old birthday suit. But the sight of our backyard table full of cheesecloth-draped trays of sun-drying leather seared itself even more deeply into this dog’s bone-burying soul.

Fruit leather is fun, tasty, space-efficient, and can last longer than a Twinkie without spoiling. One misplaced sheet of mine was lost for years, having found its way behind a filing cabinet until I did a deep cleaning. I gave my long-lost leather a thorough inspection, found no mold, picked out some dust and dog hairs, and gave it a taste. It hadn’t changed a bit.

This is partly due to the fruit’s concentrated sugars-it’s counterintuitive, but sugar discourages food spoilage-as well as the presence of honey, a potent antibiotic. Honey might seem like a surprising addition to something that’s already sweet, but fruits that carry a sour element, like apricots, cherries and even raspberries, tend to concentrate their tartness.

Wash, pit, core, cut and otherwise prepare whatever fruit or combination of fruit you like. Put the prepared fruit in a big pot with two inches of water on low heat and cover. Add more water as necessary until the fruit is obliterated into mush.

Stir often to prevent scalding. If it does scald, do not pretend it didn’t happen. Do not convince yourself you nipped it in the bud as you scrape the burnt bottom bits into your fruit. Don’t scrape, don’t stir, just pour the pot’s contents to an alternate vessel, clean your pot, and continue.

When it’s fully cooked to mush, let the fruit cool and run it through a food mill. If you don’t have a food mill you can use a blender or food processor, which will produce a chunkier leather because those machines don’t filter.

Stir in a cup of honey per gallon of fruit puree. Pour the mixture onto wax paper, or the shiny side of freezer paper, or plastic wrap. Let the leather dry outside in the sun over a few days, draped in cheesecloth to keep the flies off, and bringing the trays in at night. Or you can do it in a dehydrator, especially if you have one with sliding trays.

Another early-season crop worth inserting into your winter diet is peas, both snap and shelling varieties. You can scatter a handful of shelled peas into a potato salad like a magician saying “alacazam!” Snap peas will add flashes of green to a winter stir-fry, and you can almost taste the sunshine. The method of choice for preserving peas is to blanch and then freeze them.

Like leather-making, this technique requires no special gear, and is one that you can use again and again, as the season unfolds, to put away zucchini, corn, leeks, broccoli, collard greens and kale.

Blanching, or briefly boiling, denatures plant enzymes that would otherwise spoil your frozen food. Blanching also softens and shrinks the food, making it easier to pack, kills bacteria on the food surface, and gives it a final rinse. Each vegetable will have a different blanch time, which you can find at The National Center for Home Food Preservation (http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/freeze/blanching.html).

Peas should be blanched for two minutes, a pound at a time, in at least two gallons of boiling water. After blanching, immediately plunge them into ice water, which halts the cooking process and fixes the bright green color. After a few minutes in the ice bath, drain and pack the peas into quart bags, squeezing out as much air as you can before freezing.

This method, also called parboiling, is used in many recipes, like stir-fry. In these cases, the parboiling step is already out of the way when you thaw the peas.

As summer spins away on the seasonal carousel, salting away some sweet and savory stash is like grabbing a few brass rings along the way. If you start working on it soon, it will feel less like a chore and more like fun. You’ll enjoy the ride all winter long.

]]> http://www.flashinthepan.net/?feed=rss2&p=321 0 http://www.flashinthepan.net/?p=317 http://www.flashinthepan.net/?p=317#comments Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:30:05 +0000 Ari http://www.flashinthepan.net/?p=317 Many restaurant salads these days seem designed for people who don’t like salad. They’re essentially meat entrées served on a bed of leaves, minus the baked potato. And if you watch a server removing plates from the table, you’ll see they usually aren’t empty. The cold cuts, cheese, croutons, shrimp or chicken is gone, but the greenery is left behind like an abandoned garnish. The very fact that the proteins and fat are presented on top, rather than mixed in, seems to ensure an errant leaf won’t be inadvertently consumed.

This isn’t to say that animal products have no place in a good pile of greens. According to Larousse Gastronomique, long an authoritative encyclopedia of food, a salad is “made up of herbs, plants, vegetables, eggs, meat and fish.” Today’s gluttonous Atkins-friendly compositions certainly qualify for the salad banner under this definition, but they don’t wear it gracefully.

For a meaty salad to work, animal and vegetable should bring out the best in each other, rather than simply share the same plate. Here are two meat salads that work together like oil and vinegar, playing harmoniously off of their differences.

–Pea Mutton Salad–

Exhibit A comes from a farmer friend who spits out the word “Mutton!” with the same pleasure a fifth grader takes from four-letter words. To him, saying “Mutton!” corrects a terrible error in the world.

“Nobody wants to say ‘Mutton!’ anymore,” he once complained to me. “As a society, we’ve shunned the eating of grown-up sheep in favor of young lambs to the point where even saying the word ‘mutton!’ is like talking filth in some circles.”

In fact, mutton is so frowned upon in our culture that it’s difficult to find. If you can get it and have any say in the way it’s processed, make sure the fat is well-trimmed when the sheep is butchered. This will temper the meat’s famously strong flavor. While this may appease some finicky palates, the pea/mutton salad this farmer and his family make in the height of summer uses that strong taste as an asset, the way crumbles from a gamy piece of blue cheese absorb the spiciness of raw onion.

The salad’s components are bonded together by a family dressing known simply as “Creamy.” For enough Creamy to dress a family-sized bowl of salad, mix 2/3 cup of mayo, 1/3 cup of yogurt, 3 to 6 cloves of shredded garlic, 1 to 2 tablespoons of horseradish, a tablespoon of curry powder, 1/2 cup of grated cheddar cheese, a teaspoon of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of black pepper. This will dress a salad of two heads romaine, two cucumbers, an onion, 1/2 pound of shelled peas and a pound of mutton (or another red meat of your choice). The strong-flavored mutton, the spicy and creamy Creamy, the crisp textures of the romaine and peas, and the earthy sweetness of the onions come together into a salad of meaty leafy, creamy majesty.

Because sheep becomes chewy with age, mutton should be braised at 300 degrees in a covered vessel with water and wine. Season with salt and bay leaves, adding additional fluids as necessary until it’s falling-apart soft. Remove from the oven and let the meat cool to room temperature. Meanwhile, chop the romaine into bite-sized chunks, thin-slice the cucumber and onion, and shell the peas. Cut or shred the meat and toss it all together with fresh dill and Creamy. Stand on your chair, yell “MUTTON!” and dig in.

–Salmon Jerky Vinaigrette–

I first served this next salad—tossed with a simple vinaigrette and salmon jerky—at a bachelorette party I catered. After warming them up by lowering chocolate-dipped cherries into their mouths while their salad was being tossed, we served the bachelorette and her entourage my meat salad. The bachelorette, her mouth full, protested the calories in the fish, feta, olives, and olive oil. “We’re fattening you up for the slaughter,” we told her.

The salmon is prepared two days ahead of time in roughly twice the quantity you intend to add to the salad, because jerky sampling is inevitable. A smoker or dehydrator with sliding trays is ideal, but the oven on the lowest setting with the door ajar will also work.

Squeeze lime on the salmon, and marinate in the fridge for a half-hour. Then rub it with fresh, chopped dill. Covered the fish in a mixture of equal parts soy sauce, liquid amino acids and brown sugar, and leave overnight.  The next day jerk it in the dehydrator, smoker or oven until it’s hard and dry.

The salad itself is a mixture of romaine and green leaf lettuce (four parts) watercress and endive (1 part combined). Cut the leaves coarsely and toss them with two or more cloves of pressed garlic. Add a medium onion, chopped, and dress with a mixture of equal parts safflower oil, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Then toss in two medium tomatoes, sliced, and chunks of salmon jerky, and serve with olives and feta cheese on the side. The vinaigrette cuts through the sweet oily fish and builds a bridge between the salad’s plant and animal components, as the Creamy does in the pea and mutton salad.

Larousse Gastronomique says a good salad “freshens without enfeebling and fortifies without irritating,” and my marvelous meat salads do justice to that statement. They’ll give you healthy doses of quality nutrients and fill you up without weighing you down.

Whole Foods describes its non-organic chicken, produced in Pennsylvania by Bell & Evans, as “barn roaming.” This pretty term invokes images of frolicking chickens, but all we really know for sure is they’re stuck inside some kind of structure.

According to a Bell & Evans representative, that company doesn’t use “barn roaming” to describe its chickens, so I asked Whole Foods what the phrase means. A representative told me, “There is currently no clear regulatory definition of the term ‘barn roaming.’ We expect our suppliers who use this claim on their products to use a reasonable definition and we expect the claim to be truthful.”

Unfortunately, opportunistic ambiguity is typical with poultry and eggs labeling, where the number of loosely defined marketing terms dwarfs the number of legal terms. Terms like “happy chickens,” “ethical eggs,” “pasture raised,” “naturally nested,” “free roaming,” and my personal favorite, “wild hens,” mean whatever the producer or vendor wants them to mean – which is to say they’re meaningless.

It’s tempting to assume “barn roaming” means something like “cage-free,” meaning the chickens are stuck in a barn, but not locked in cages within the barn. This would be something worth bragging about if some commercial meat birds, somewhere, were in fact raised in cages. Laying hens are often caged, but meat birds aren’t, even in worst cases of confinement farming. They are, however, often crammed together in a structure, which could be construed as “barn roaming.” If so, KFC and Perdue could use “barn roaming” to describe their chickens as well. In fact, Perdue does label its meat “cage-free.” This is like calling it “chicken meat, from chickens.”

A similar bit of marketing word-play is the all-too common claim that chickens or eggs are produced “with no added hormones*.” The asterisk, mandated by USDA in such claims, calls out a footnote explaining that no hormones are USDA-approved for chickens. Since eggs and meat from hormone-pumped chickens essentially doesn’t exist, the hormone-free claim is pure smoke and mirrors.

Leslie Kline owns Good Egg Farm in western Montana. Her eggs, packaged in reused cartons with her label affixed, show an American flag’s worth of red, white, and blue hues thanks to the diverse breeds she raises. Her chickens have access to a rotating series of green pastures full of plants and bugs, and spend their days scratching and pecking.

Despite her birds’ constant access to pasture, Kline doesn’t use “pastured” to describe their eggs, “because when they step out their door in the morning they are on bare dirt, and have to make the effort, which not all of them do, to find the pasture.”

Charlotte Vallaeys of the organic food watchdog group Cornucopia believes Kline is being too hard on herself. “There’s no legal definition [for pastured eggs], as with most labels for eggs other than organic. However, I don’t agree that it wouldn’t be accurate to call [Kline's eggs] pastured.”

Unlike Kline, most commercial producers use any good-sounding label they can possibly justify – an easy task given the plethora of ill-defined poultry and egg labels. But there are a few terms with specific, legal meanings:

Organic means the animals are fed organic grain free of animal products, have access to a rooster (or vice versa, if you’ve ever witnessed chicken sex), and have unspecified access to unspecified outdoor conditions. Beak trimming, in which the point of the beak is cut off so the chickens won’t peck each other, is allowed. If done properly, beak trimming won’t prevent chickens from hunting in the dirt, but if the chickens are given enough personal space there wouldn’t even be a pecking problem.

Natural is a USDA term meaning no extra ingredients or colorants are added, and indicates nothing about the bird’s life.

Chemical-Free is a term prohibited by USDA in this context.

Free-range legally applies only to meat birds, meaning they have unspecified access to unspecified outdoor conditions. In the context of eggs, “free-range” has no legal meaning.

100% vegetarian doesn’t mean the chickens are vegetarian, only that their feed has no animal products. Chickens will eat insects, worms, and any other form of meat they can.  And if they’re allowed outside, they will.

United Egg Producer Certified could be called “Certified Caged.” Each chicken is guaranteed 67 square inches of cage space (an 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper, by comparison, is 93.5 square inches).

Humanely Raised, a National Chicken Council label for meat birds, presumes that anything short of waterboarding is humane. The chickens can be crowded into dim warehouses with less than a square foot per bird. (See “barn roaming.”)

Certified Humane, American Humane Association Certified, and Animal Welfare Approved are all third-party certifiers with no links to industry. They do an earnest job of protecting the well-being of commercial chickens. Flock density is considered in square feet per bird, rather than birds per square foot. Of these, Animal Welfare Approved has the most rigorous standards for guaranteeing chicken happiness.

In 2008 California passed Proposition 2, which restricts egg production from caged hens. A similar law was passed in the European Union. Many California egg factories are considering moves to more cage-friendly states – Nevada, Idaho, and Georgia are all wooing them. Kline thinks it’s only a matter of time before the cage ban goes nationwide.

Meanwhile, those Whole Foods “barn roaming” meat birds are still locked inside Pennsylvania warehouse barns. For a factory farm, Bell & Evans has established baseline living conditions that are relatively stress-free and humane. The feed is domestically grown and free of hexane-extracted soy. Consumer Reports named Bell & Evans chickens some of the cleanest in the industry. For a factory-farmed bird, those barn-roamers may be as good as it gets.They may not be living the dream, but aren’t living the nightmare either.

But if you want meat or eggs from bug and plant-eating chickens that lived some semblance of a natural life, you probably won’t find them at Whole Foods or almost any other supermarket. Try the farmers market, your local hippy co-op, or seek out family farmers in your area.

Chlorophyll is considered a “blood building” nutrient because it’s freakishly similar in structure to hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying molecule in blood. Other healthful properties attributed to chlorophyll include enhanced healing of wounds (and suppression of foul odors coming from wounds), cancer-fighting qualities, protection from radiation, and speeding of bone healing and tissue regeneration.

Small baby spinach leaves are the rage, but they don’t pack the same wallop as a big leaf of savoy spinach, also known as crinkled or curly leaf, like Tyee or Bloomsdale. The leaves are bigger, thicker, and make a bold and juicy mouthful.

Unfortunately, most of what’s available in stores are the flat, smooth-leaf varieties that lend themselves to mass cultivation. The whole plant is harvested, bunched with other plants, packed into crates, and delivered to your store.

Savoy is generally sold loose-leaf, or picked as needed if it’s growing outside. In keeping with the sushi-like feeling that raw spinach imparts, I like to dress my spinach leaves in a mixture of soy sauce, wasabi, rice vinegar, and a few drops each of limejuice and sesame oil. Or, for a fun appetizer, dip the leaves into the dressing like chips into salsa; the crinkly folds grip the sauce.

If you have a lot of spinach, saag paneer is a great option. This classic Indian dish is made with homemade cheese, though some people make it with tofu instead of cheese, which is totally weak – if you don’t want cheese, fine, but don’t bother searching for some other chunky white protein.

Other spring greens can be used in addition to or instead of spinach, including turnip greens, kale, wild nettles, overwintering mustard greens, dandelion, lambs quarter and other edible weeds. Some aficionados swear that saag paneer isn’t right if it doesn’t contain mustard greens as well as spinach.

The dish needs tomatoes in order to taste right. You can use fresh tomatoes, and I’ll do so when I make saag paneer with fall spinach, but I think homemade catsup is the best. It has a sweet, clove flavor that goes beautifully with the spices, and its perfect smoothness gives body to the green mush.

The process begins with the making of the cheese, aka paneer. Heat half a gallon of whole milk on med/high in a thick-bottomed pan, stirring often with a rubber spatula or similar implement to prevent scalding the milk. You have to be vigilant, because mere seconds will pass between when the milk is almost boiling and when it’s boiling over into a frothy, foamy mess.

As soon as it begins to boil, turn off the heat and add four tablespoons of lemon juice, stirring steadily. The milk should separate into watery whey with thick curds floating on top. If the whey still appears creamy, add another tablespoon of lemon juice. Lay at least four layers of cheesecloth into a colander set inside a big bowl and pour the curdled milk through the cheesecloth. The whey can be used for other cooking purposes or fed to animals. Tie the corners of the cheesecloth together and hang over the whey bowl so it continues draining and the curds settle into a hard cheese. Squeeze the curds to get more whey out.

Now wash your spinach and/or other greens. While spinach stems are tender enough to leave in, tougher stems like from kale, nettles or mustard greens should be removed. For each half-pound of greens, chop one or two serrano or jalapeno peppers and a teaspoon of ginger. Cook the peppers and ginger for a few minutes in a quarter-inch of water. Add a half-teaspoon of salt, then add the greens. Put a lid on and cook for five minutes, stirring occasionally and being careful not to let the water evaporate. Let the greens cool, then puree in a blender.

Cut your cheese into cubes and lightly brown them in a hot pan with oil or ghee. The browning brings out a nutty flavor. Set aside the browned cheese. In a pan with oil or ghee (or mustard oil) on medium heat, add a pinch of fenugreek seeds, a pinch of cumin powder, and a pinch or more of coriander, and cook for 30 seconds. Add an onion, chopped, and your tomato product: either a fresh tomato, minced, or a quarter cup catsup or half a cup canned tomatoes, and one or two chopped garlic cloves. Cook until it’s integrated and soupy. Then add the cheese and stir-fry until the cheese heats up. Then add the pureed greens.

Let it cook together for a few minutes, and it’s done.

Saag paneer is typically served with an aromatic rice, like basmati or jasmine. And the green, chlorophyll cream can also be made in bulk, when spinach is plentiful, and frozen in meal-sized portions for later use. It ages nicely. Which is more than you can say about sushi.