The politics of arugula

Remember when then-candidate Obama was pilloried because he ate arugula? What a snob! Who eats that stuff? What is it, anyway? A leafy green that only shows up at name-chef restaurants where food was carefully “plated” and presented with swirls of exotic sauces and 100-word entrees describing the food’s provenance. For many people, arugula still sits in this precious space of privilege, eaten only by the elite. The opposite of iceberg, which a lot of people just call “lettuce.” But not at my house. Arugula has become for me what potatoes were for the Irish. A staple. And, the cheapest food I put on my table. Which means, I eat a lot of it. That’s because if you plant a little arugula in your garden, it will grow like a weed. And when I’ve snipped all my own, it grows across the street in such proliferation that my neighbors beg me to take most of it away. And it grows at Joseph’s house, also in profusion. This is not the delicate baby arugula you buy in a clam shell package at Whole Foods (which, actually, isn’t as tasty). No, this arugula, which wintered over from last season, grows in big bushes. Big leaves and small. When it gets this big, it takes a lot more work to pick and trim from the stems, and I guess it’s a little more bitter than the variety you can buy – but I still love its spicy, green flavor. Good thing. Even so, I don’t want to eat salads all the time, so I’ve learned to cook arugula. Today, I wilted it with some olive oil in a pan (allowing the water still clinging to the just-washed leaves to steam it slightly), and slid it into my cheese sandwich before I grilled it. (I usually use tomatoes in grilled cheese, but they’re running $3.99 a pound at the Farmer’s Market, and I can’t bring myself to buy the hard, greenish, grocery store variety bred for California-to-Maryland truck rides. So I’ll wait until they’re in season). I also love arugula mixed into whatever soup I’m having – it adds a healthy, and tasty, kick to lentil, or black bean, or minestrone, and it’s such a delicate leaf (even when it gets big) that you don’t have to cook it first. Just float a handful of arugula in your soup bowl, and the heat of the soup cooks it for you. For a quick, light lunch, some wilted arugula with a soft boiled egg broken on top, salt, pepper and a thick slab of homemade toast is also hard to beat. I even mimic those “fancy” restaurants—I actually love a beautifully plated meal—and wilt my arugula (again, just quickly sautéed in a little olive oil, maybe with a squeeze of fresh garlic from the garlic press) to use as a bed for a salmon filet. Arugula, snobby? Not so much. On a more serious note, food does, in some ways, continue to brand us as one class, or another. Not that we don’t cross those boundaries all the time, but to pretend they are not there is ignorant, whether you shop at Whole Foods, Shoppers Food Warehouse, or harvest from your own garden. Here, in the Huffington Post, are some interesting reflections on arugula vs. iceberg, Dunkin’ Donuts vs. Starbucks, from the last election, in 2008—worth considering, as we approach 2012. And in case anyone had any doubts, I’m voting for Obama for many reasons, among them the organic vegetable garden his wife planted on the White House lawn. I bet they have arugula back there.

Take back the meat

Used to be, everything “lard” was evil. When I first began paying attention to ingredients labels, trying to choose the most healthy options for my table, lard was the worst offender, the most backward, artery-clogging, irresponsible ingredient imaginable.

Now, lard is the new granola.

An entire, alternative, take-back-the-meat movement has sanctioned not only meat eating, but saturated-fat meat eating. The way to rationalize this is that the meat is now what my son likes to call, “righteous,” that is, free-range, grass-fed and humanely raised. (check out Nourishing Traditions, not exactly new but, for Moosewood devotees, still radical-feeling).

I have been embracing this notion of modified meat eating for a while now – I bought a whole lamb from a friend’s brother who is a farmer. I eat Bright’s Farm bacon every chance I get, when I’m in Floyd County. I like to buy the occasional roast or steak at the Takoma Park Farmer’s Market. And I am thrilled when our friends serve up the beef from the cow I saw grazing last season.

Now I’ve even learned to embrace fatback – the mother of lard.

I first met fatback on menus, at roadside “Kountry Kitchens” in the South, at soul food joints in D.C., and I think I remember it at the school cafeteria way back when: it would be floating bits of white, adding flavor to soggy dishes of collard greens, or green beans, or anything formerly green, now cooked to death to a sort of olive-grey color. At the time, I thought, too bad to ruin a great dish like collards with the worst part of meat. And, hey, don’t cook ‘em to death, let them retain some green so you get a couple vitamins in there.

Then I met fatback again, this time in the frig at Misty Mountain. It looked like a hunk of white pig fat wrapped in plastic, like bacon without the meat part, only the fat. Which it is.

I figured it was good, since Katie (who’d left it in the frig), is a devotee of Nourishing Traditions – and it was from Bright’s Farm. But how to cook it up? Most recipes talk about cooking it into greens, but I decided to try it solo. I fried it up like bacon.

Wow. This is so good. Better than bacon. Rich but crispy at the same time, redolent with smokey flavor and a thick, smooth feeling in your mouth.

I knew this was a familiar food, even though I wasn’t sure exactly where I’d had it before. Then I remembered: when I was a kid in East Florida, I got to go to “the Lake” (was it Lake Okeechobee?) with my friend, Jeanne Drawdy and her family for the weekend. Her dad took us frog gigging in the airboat at night, and we had frog legs cooked over a fire for breakfast the next morning. And he slaughtered a pig that weekend.

I was wide-eyed over the carcass, and remember puzzling over how it was covered with thick, white fat. The fat was cut off and – yep – made into cracklins. Gotta love Google: I found this, and what I fried up in the pan is something similar, if not exactly the same (I think this woman’s fatback was not cured, the way mine had been – the clue is that the guy cooking it up adds salt, which mine most definitely did not need).
This link is worth checking out even if you’re not going to cook up cracklins – it is the most unpretentious cooking blog I’ve ever encountered. Much closer to real life, I’d say – at least when you’re cooking up fatback.

Which is among my new favorite things.

Country cooking

When we come to Misty Mountain, we never know what we’ll find. It’s always a rush to get out of the city, and I throw a bunch of stuff in the cooler and hope we won’t be missing something essential. Like, butter. But I hope there will be enough in the frig where the caretakers live, so we can poach a few essentials, in exchange for sharing the yogurt, or the bread, or fruit we brought.

This usually works out in a loaves and fishes sort of way – with a little innovation and an open heart, there is always plenty.

This weekend we cruised in as the caretakers cruised out, so we have the place to ourselves. A little background: this is a dome-shaped home built in the 1970s when all the groovy people came to Misty Mountain to try out homesteading and/or community living. It is set in the southwest part of Virginia near the Blue Ridge Parkway, and now is home to a young family and occasional weekend retreat for Joseph and lucky me.

One of my favorite things to do here is forage around to see what’s growing. It’s Easter weekend, the beginning of spring, and though the daffodils have faded, the azaleas are hanging on. That makes a cheery vase of blooms for the kitchen table.

Even better is when I find something edible. It might be blackberries, which grow along the pond; or grapes growing like weedy vines up a dead cherry tree (see what I did with them here); or three thin spears of asparagus that have survived multiples mowing and years of neglect and still push their little heads out of the earth. Once, I dug up sassafras root to chew.

This time, it was dandelions and violets.

So, lunch today was:
Grilled cheese on garlic-asiago bread we bought at the Roanoke co-op, with cheddar and old camembert we brought from home and accented with arugula from the Takoma Park garden; there was no butter, so I used fatback to grease the pan – that would be fatback from the local Bright’s Farm, where they raise their pigs on pasture.

I ate the sandwich with a salad of spinach from the frig and chopped dandelion greens I gathered in front of the Dome, with a sprinkle of violets.

About those dandelions: among my very favorite flowers when I was small, their bright yellow heads such a cheery summer marker, the leaves are edible (sort of bitter, but in an arugula sort of way, lends a nice bite to a bowl of mixed greens) and full of vitamins A, B complex, C, and D, as well as minerals such as iron, potassium, and zinc. The flower can be made into wine, and the root can be made into a coffee substitute or a tea, which is purported to treat just about every ailment there is – much like the tonics peddled by 19th-century carpet baggers. I learned from Clara, who is digging dandelions on a farm in France,that you can dig up the whole plant, wash it and trim the roots and flowers to make an attractive bunch of greens to sell at the farmer’s market. Much less tedious than snipping individual leaves, as I had done. More proof that we can learn so much from our children.

And violets, did you know you can eat these lovely flowers? They are tiny little purple punctuations spots in the lawn; you’ve probably seen them candied, on top of fancy cakes. I found if I picked them in a miniature bouquet, then cut off the stems all at once, the gathering goes faster. They don’t actually taste like much, but they were lovely in the salad, helping to make a beautiful meal in the country.

Happy Easter

“Welcome happy morning, age to age shall say!”
This was my mother’s favorite Easter hymn, and it is one of mine as well. Its message of hope transfers regardless of your religion – or lack thereof. Spring is such a time of renewal and promise, a refreshing re-start for the earth, when all things once dormant and tired begin to wake with new energy.
Although this is the first year I’ve not put together Easter baskets for the kids (though Tyler did get a care package with chocolate eggs! and Clara got a card, far away in France), I am celebrating the day nonetheless, and in one of the most beautiful places, the mountains of southwest Virginia. It is a gift of a day, with bright sunshine and cool temperatures. A walk in the woods this morning revealed dogwood blossoms, fiddlehead ferns and barely budding trees everywhere. This afternoon, we’ll dig into the earth to help friends start their garden, then celebrate the rebirth of the season with a meal. I expect lots of locally grown food, excellent company, and live music from whoever remembers to bring a guitar or a banjo along.
Happy Easter, everyone!