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Seed Sowing 2011

Sunday afternoon I started my garden!

I’ve been thinking about it for a while now (ever since my seeds arrived), and finally found some time to devote to beginning the garden for this year. I chose to go with seeds from Seed Savers Exchange this season; last year I went with seeds from the Hudson Valley Seed Library.  I loved my seeds last year, but wanted to try out another vendor.  I also love what Seed Savers is all about.  Their work is very important.

This early in the season it’s still pretty cold in the Northeast – in fact, it’s been downright frigid here. 20-something degrees in the mornings, highs only in the low 40s. I wore a hat, scarf, and gloves all weekend!  I checked my plot downstairs in the yard, and that dirt is frozen solid right now. So, my solution to getting the garden going while it’s like this is to start my seeds inside, where it’s warm and comfy.

Sprouting Containers and Potting Soil

This year I decided to start all my seeds in cardboard egg cartons.  I considered buying a seed starting system, but the containers are plastic and the little seed starting environment is often made of peat, which is not sustainable. The egg cartons – which I saved up over several months – are biodegradable and compostable, so I can chop them up and dump them in the composter in the yard when I’m through with them. For ease of use, I cut off the egg carton top and security flap in the front of the carton. I’ll compost them this week.

Later on I’ll “pot up” to newspaper pots, which are also compostable.  I found a method that creates a paper pot without a seam (origami!), meaning I won’t have to use tape (two page sheets from the Daily News are a perfect size).  I found tape to be problematic last year – when the paper pots got wet, and the tape just fell of, risking the pot coming apart. Not fun and kind of stressful.

I also chose to use the potting soil from the Lower East Side Ecology Center. “New York Pay Dirt”, as it’s called, is what I used last year to start my seeds in.  It’s well aerated – light and fluffy. It contains coconut coir as an alternative to peat and also contains worm casings made from NYC kitchen scraps. I love working with this product.

I chose to split up the distribution of seeds by giving full cartons to melons and tomatoes, and split cartons for tomatillos, gherkin, and carrots.

What I Planted

This year I’m really excited to try out growing melons, and the Mexican Sour Gherkins are really intriguing. Apparently they taste sour right off, so I think they’d be fantastic fermented.  I’m also determined to have tomatillos fruit this year (it was an epic fail last year – not one fruit from a gazillion blossoms). Here’s a list of what I planted:

  • Charentais melon
  • Eden’s Gem melon
  • Blondköpfchen tomato
  • Silver Fir tomato
  • Stupice tomato
  • Green Husk tomatillo
  • Purple de Milpa tomatillo
  • Mexican Sour gherkin
  • Danvers carrot

These seeds take anywhere between 9 and 12 weeks to fruit post-transplant, so I’ve got a lot of waiting around time ahead of me. However, I’ll also be planting herbs, arugula, lacinato kale, thyme, and some wildflowers, but those are faster growing, so I’ll be able to enjoy the garden bounty in the late spring/early summer. I’m especially excited about the lacinato kale, which I’ll use to make delicious kale chips.  Borage is in the plans, too, which will go great in homemade limeade, or perhaps even in homemade fermented gingerale!

I’ll house my sprouting system to the side and behind the sink, where I can give the plants some light (artificial and natural).

It is exciting to start the process! Stay tuned…

Seed Sowing 2011 on Punk Domestics
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Fun with Fermentation

To many of my friends, it’s no secret that I am fascinated with lacto-fermentation and fermented foods. It’s one of the coolest ways to preserve food, and requires no special equipment beyond a fermentation vessel (I’m using mason jars right now).  Fermented foods are nutritional powerhouses (high in vitamin C especially, not to mention probiotics for good gut health) , and taste delicious.

A few years ago, I took a lacto-fermentation workshop in Sunnyside, led by Andrew Faust and sponsored by Tri State Food Not Lawns (love that name).  It was my first hands-on experience with fermentation (not that I was unfamiliar with fermented foods – I’d eaten yogurt for years), and I remember being surprised at how simple it was.

I also remember getting lost while on the way, but did arrive in time, so it was all good.  I met some nice people there, some of whom I’m still connected with, which I’m really happy about.  And my fascination with fermentation has stuck.

This is one of my favorite images from that fermentation event in Sunnyside – all those gorgeous carrots and everyone working together to prepare the vegetables. It was so fun.

Everyone Grating

I’m going to be giving a talk on lacto-fermentation myself in a couple of weeks, for the Traditional Community Kitchen meetup group.  If you live in NYC and want to connect with other people who love real, traditional food, this is a great group to join.  I’ve been to a couple of meetups and they’ve been a lot of fun – friendly people and interesting subject matter for meetups.

Anyway, back to the lacto-fermentation talk.  I want to have some examples for people to try, so I’m doing some preparatory work now.  I’ve actually got some lacto-fermented salsa left over from the summer, and it’s amazing – still good and really tasty.  It tastes pretty much like it did back in August, except for being slightly fizzier now, thanks to the fermentation.  I’m so impressed.

I started a sourdough starter last week.  My first attempt was with whole wheat flour, and unfortunately it bombed… like a stink bomb.  Wow, did it have a foul odor – it smelled like overripe epoisses. I apparently captured some belligerent yeasts in there.

It’s too bad, because it had spectacular bubbles the second day and had almost doubled in size.  I was so excited to see it… until I smelled it.  My understanding is that whole grain flours are trickier to work with when creating a starter, and my nasty smelling starter confirmed that for me.  I dumped it after the second day of its existence.

So, I tried it again with regular white flour (Bob’s Red Mill unbleached flour).  What a difference – it’s behaving very much like what I’m used to seeing with sourdough starter, with bubbles increasing each day and a healthy sour odor. I’ve also got a nice warm spot for it, just above and to the left of the kitchen heater.  I’ll feed it every day for the next week, and hope that by this coming weekend I’ll be able to make a loaf of bread with it.

Eventually, I’d like to take some of this white flour starter and convert it over to a whole wheat starter.  I mean, the point of all this is to sour/ferment the wheat to disrupt the phytic acid and enzyme inhibitors, and to make it more digestable as well.  White flour has been stripped of pretty much everything, including the parts of the wheat that contains the phytic acid, so it’s unnecessary to soak or sour white flour from a nutritional standpoint. My guess is that mixing this starter with whole wheat (or spelt) flour and proofing it for at least 8 hours will assist in breaking up the phytic acid in that whole grain flour, though.  So, it’s certainly not a pointless task.

I’ve aso put together a couple pints of red cabbage-apple kraut, which is currently weighed down to extract a brine from the cabbage. By tomorrow evening, a brine should develop; if it doesn’t, I’ll create one and add it to the kraut (my cabbage may be a bit dry).  And with compression, this two pints may turn into one.  I love how it smells right now, and I am sure with the tanginess that will develop it will smell – and taste – fabulous.

It’s going to be gorgeous, taking on a rosy color from the cabbage, and should taste salty, tangy, and sweet all at the same time. Perfect for pork.

I’m really psyched about getting back into making fermented foods.  I’ve been tweeting about my fermentation projects – please feel free to follow me at @harmoniousbelly.  I’m using the hashtag #fermentation as well, so you can find me there.

Stay tuned!

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Homemade Bacon

They say bacon is a gateway meat for vegetarians, and I can totally see how that is. As a vegetarian I used to eat “Fakin Bacon”, that soy-based alternative meat product, something I wouldn’t touch now.  I enjoyed it then because the smoky, salty taste was highly appealing.  But it’s no comparison to the real thing.

Since I left vegetarianism 13 years ago, I’ve eaten a lot of legit bacon.  I’d recently heard that you could cure your own bacon, which was really intriguing, but a little daunting.  So when I caught wind of bacon curing as part of the Charcutepalooza challenge, I thought that this was the perfect time to dive in.

I looked at my main two sources for pork belly, but neither had them in stock, so I headed to The Meat Hook in Brooklyn.  They sell very high quality local, pastured meat that is extremely tasty.   When I got there, they were butchering what I think was a pig, with some hardcore knives, on a large table behind the counter.  The person that helped me brought out a whole pork belly and deboned it, and also cut off the skin.  I ended up with 2.71 pounds of belly.  It was gorgeous.

I cured it (using this bacon recipe from Michael Ruhlman) with salt and spices, plus I added some smoked paprika to the spice mix – this gave the meat a smoky flavor without having to actually smoke the meat (which I have no idea how to do anyway).  I also opted to not use pink salt.

The end result is some of the most delicious bacon I’ve ever tasted, if not the best I’ve ever had.  And the smoked paprika really worked!  The bacon is both savory and smoky at the same time.  I am just so impressed with how easy it was to cure and how well it came out.  I plan to cure bacon more often.

So, what did I do with the bacon?  Well, I cooked it on its own, in the oven, and had it with brunch. I find that cooking bacon in the oven yields a more pleasant slice of bacon, plus I don’t get spattered with hot fat like I do when I cook it on the stovetop. I also used the bacon in a braised red bean dish that I was really happy with.  I’ve also reserved the fat when cooking bacon on its own, and have used it to cook with.  I’ve been really happy with it, too – it lubricates my cast iron pan like nothing else!

I used the bacon in a dish I put together called a BST (bacon, spinach, tomato) sandwich in open-face form – it’s also a wet version because I used tomato sauce.  It was absolutely delicious – a very simple, homey, and comforting dish with lots of flavor.  Plus it’s really easy to put together.

BST (Bacon, Spinach, Tomato) Sandwich

1 slice sourdough bread (2 slices if they are small slices)
tomato sauce of your choice, hot
baby spinach (organic if possible)
bacon, cooked and broken into small pieces
parmesan cheese (optional)

Toast the sourdough bread and place on a plate. Spoon the tomato sauce over the bread. Top with a handful of spinach and the bacon. Sprinkle a little parmesan cheese over it if you like.  Eat with a fork.

More images from my bacon curing project can be found in my Charcutepalooza photoset on Flickr.

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Braised Red Beans

One morning this month I put some red beans in a bowl to soak while I was at work.  I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do with them, but I thought I’d check the internet that day for some inspiration.  Let me tell you – when you do a search on “red beans recipes” about all you’ll find are recipes – endless numbers of them – for red beans and rice.  Now, I like red beans and rice, don’t get me wrong, but I wasn’t in the mood for that dish.

So, I decided to put together flavors that I know work well together – onions and carrots as a base, some thyme and red wine for flavor, extra virgin olive oil for additional richness.  I wanted to use some of my home-cured bacon, too, as beans and bacon are a perfect match.  The following recipe is what I came up with.

I loved these beans so much – they were a fitting winter meal.  Rich and creamy – you could serve them with some kind of whole grain, but they were delicious all by themselves.  They were also extremely tasty as leftovers.

One more detail – I made these on a weeknight after work, so they are doable as a weekday dinner.

Braised Red Beans

2 slices thick cut bacon
1/2 large onion, small dice
1 medium carrot, peeled, small dice
3/4 cup red wine
1 1/2 cup cooked red beans
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup water
10 springs fresh thyme
salt and pepper
grated parmesan (optional but recommended)

Soak the red beans in water and 1 tsp baking soda for 8-10 hours. Drain and rinse, and boil in fresh water until cooked through. Lightly salt them in the water. Drain and set aside 1 1/2 cups of beans (feel free to cook extra and freeze them for future use).

Set a large saucepan over medium high heat. Dice the bacon and put it in the hot pan with a touch of olive oil. Cook the bacon until it has rendered its fat and has started to become crispy. Add the diced onion and carrot and cook until they soften a bit in the fat. Add the thyme leaves and several pinches or turns of black pepper. Cook for about 30 seconds more.

Add 1/2 cup red wine and deglaze the pan. Add the red beans, olive oil and 1/4 cup red wine. Add the remaining 5 sprigs of thyme – whole sprigs, do not take off the leaves – to the beans. Add the water. Bring everything to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cover the pot and let everything cook for 1 1/2 – 2 hours.

Remove the whole thyme sprigs and discard. Season the dish to your liking with salt and pepper.

Serve with grated parmesan.

Serves 2 as a main dish, 4 as a side.

This post is participating in Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

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HB HB! Happy Birthday Harmonious Belly!

A year ago today I published my first post, with the hope and intent to use this space to keep myself on the straight and narrow with my eating and overall health, and learn something along the way.  I feel pretty successful in those endeavors.

Happy first birthday, little blog!  Here’s to another year of real food and good eatin’.

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NYChiliFest 2011

About a week ago, T and I joined our good friend Judith for the inaugural NYChiliFest.  This incredibly festive event took place over at Chelsea Market and was a celebration of chili and beer.  While I didn’t get to drink much beer (the beer line was nuts), I did eat a lot of chili.

I was really happy that the meat was supplied by Dickson’s Farmstand Meats.  They provided each contestant with locally-raised beef from Wrighteous Organics in Schoharie, NY.

Dickson’s is a great company and I have a lot of respect for the way they work with animals that become meat and the farmers that raise them. They are purveyors of artisanal meat and meat products. They like heritage breeds, grass-fed, and organic meats.  They pay attention to how sustainably the farmers use their land, as well as how humanely they treat their animals.  On their website, they outline some “baseline criteria” for product they handle:

  • The entire supply chain (farm to slaughterhouse to point-of-sale) must be no more than 400 miles long.
  • Animal based feeds, prophylactic antibiotics or added hormones are not administered at any point of the animal’s life.
  • The animals from which our meat comes must spend their life on the farm – no CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) or feedlots.

I also like what they say here: “We only work with farmers who take pride in their product and want their name, before ours, on each package. We believe the farmer is a far more important part of this system than we are.”

On top of everything, the meat is extremely tasty. And it was so nice to taste it prepared in chili.  The three of us are big fans of chili.

Overall we had a wonderful time!  It did get really crowded at one point, and we were glad we had gotten there as early as we did. Oh, and the event sold out by the Thursday before the event, so we were smart to order tickets on line earlier in the week.

My favorite chilis were from Toloache and Telepan.  Toloache topped theirs with kimchi and crema, while Telepan made a chili with green chiles topped with a Mexican semisoft cheese, which was unique.  Toloache’s was unique because of the kimchi – and let me tell you, kimchi and chili is a stellar combination.

I also enjoyed very much the two chilis that came with an avocado crema – The Green Table and Blue Ribbon Bakery.  I am a sucker for avocado, so having that as an element in the chili pleased me to no end.

Almost all of the chilis were delicious, with only a couple of exceptions.  I was sorry to not have tasted the winner, made by Northern Spy Food Co.

Here is a selection of images from the event:

From left to right, clockwise: crowds in front of Toloache’s table; pot of Telepan chili; kimchi from Toloache; commemorative chilliest bowl with spoon; Toloache’s chili; Blue Ribbon Bakery’s chili with avocado creme; Telepan’s green chile chili with Mexican cheese.

As a result of attending this festival, I plan to check out a number of the restaurants that were there, especially The Green Table.  Toloache is definitely on my list, too.

Hooray for NYChiliFest!  Looking forward to next year’s, too.

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The Ice Storm

This morning we woke up to a city covered in ice – an ice storm had come through overnight. There was about 1/4 inch of ice everywhere, even thicker in some places.  It wrapped itself beautifully around our apricot tree, and the scene was begging for a photo shoot, so I took some pictures.  I wonder if the freezing will yield a bigger crop of fruit this year… I’d totally love that.

More images from storm can be found on my flickr page.