Refreshing commute

I have a new game I play, when I am slogging up the steep hills out of my neighborhood, bicycling to the train that takes me into the city for work. I pretend I am just out for a bike ride.

Well, I am, out for a bike ride -- to work.

Take away “work,” and “bike ride” opens up to blue spring skies and that robin chasing a moth; the bank of tiger lilies on Westmoreland Avenue; the smiling face at the hardware store, where the manager is setting up plants for sale on the sidewalk. On the steep inclines, I think about the spinning class I took once, and how people pay to have an instructor help them muscle their way through the higher resistance settings on a stationary bike, when I have that resistance built right into the hill on Elm Avenue. On the downhill, I revel in that giddy feeling I get when the first sleeveless tops of the season come out of the closet and the warmth of late spring hits my bare arms.

This works anywhere.

On metro, climbing the escalator, I notice the patterns the escalator makes, and think what a beautiful photograph that would make. I see the shoes on the woman in front me, sensible but stylish flats, perfect with the skirt, and I think how fresh it all would seem if I were on, say, the Paris metro. Those shoes would be Parisian, that face so very French. And I remember that even standing in line at a drugstore is exciting, when you’re in a foreign country.

Why not here?

So I pretend I am on vacation and feel the rhythm of the train on the tracks, notice the spray of dreadlocks sprouting from a ponytail on a young man’s head, the years etched on a Latina woman’s face, how some riders are absorbed in their iPhones and others are drifting in and out of sleep.

I look forward to running the gauntlet of homeless men who sit like a brotherhood of ruffians just outside Union Station, the one in the wheelchair beaming, “hello,” shiny bald pate gleaming in the sun.

That purple shirt, those orange curls, the symmetry of the brick sidewalk, that perfectly framed view of the Capitol building.

And then, I’m at work, and the tour is over – unless the weather holds, and then I’ll be back out on the sidewalk on my way to the park for lunch.

Feather to plate

Last weekend, researching an article about Charlottesville, Virginia, I got to visit Polyface Farm. Like so many other true believers in the locavore movement –those who believe that eating food that is grown and raised locally is better for the environment, better for the local economy, and better for your body (including taste buds!) -- I had read about Polyface in one of the seminal tomes of the concept, Michael Polan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma.” The book describes the sustainable methods of pig, cattle and chicken farming practiced at Polyface, which is about 50 miles from Charlottesville, detailing how farmer Joel Salatin rotates his animals on pasture land, re-uses manure to nurture the soil, and follows the animals’ natural habits in order to keep them healthy, to maintain some semblance of natural balance, and for eventual harvest. This, the premise goes, makes for a better planet as well as a better drumstick (or pork chop) on your plate.

The book also portrays Salatin as a sort of radical folk hero, a forget-about-the-rules-and-do-what-you-know-is-right kind of guy.

So going to Polyface was a bit like a pilgrimage.

To get there, I followed windy, country roads past other farms (I wonder what Salatin’s neighbors think of all the hoopla) and on to a picturesque site dotted with plastic hoop-house greenhouses, barns and sheds, plus a market building where Polyface sells its wares (besides the meat, also produce and eggs). There was one other car in the small parking area. This is a working farm, not a showcase. And, when I went in to see if there might be a map in the market building (there was) the woman behind the counter told me they were slaughtering out back if I wanted to watch.

Um, yes. If you can get a first-hand look at where your food comes from, I think you should. Even when it involves slaughter.

Out back, a sort of mechanical humming was the only sound – it was the spinner that de-feathers the birds, sort of like a clothes-washing machine set on “spin,” but without the water. Just birds.

Besides the water spraying from the spinner (and the water on the floor and everywhere else in this open-air shed, keeping thing clean throughout the process), slaughtering at Polyface is a surprisingly neat operation, everything moving efficiently down an assembly line of family members, starting with 6-year-old Andrew, who minds the crates of fluffy white, live birds and then stacks the crates once they’re empty.

His dad, Daniel, grabs the birds one by one, and tucks them head first into metal cones arranged in a circle on a contraption hanging from the ceiling.

Then he slits their throats, an action so quick you hardly know it’s happened. There is no squawking, no protest, the chickens simply wait their turn in their crates (from which they could fly, if they had a notion, but they don’t), then succumb.

It doesn’t feel like death, in a bad way. It feels like dressing them, somehow – adding some necessary accoutrement, a necklace of thick blood, and they never blink, they just take it in stride and then they are no longer the kind of bird you interact with, maybe talk to, or shoo away from the lettuce, they are the kind of bird you find in your frig, the kind of bird you will eat.

Yes, there are slicks of dark blood under the cones with chickens hanging upside down. There are spatters of blood on Daniel’s cheeks, and on the yellow slicker aprons and overalls some of the other processors wear. But it is all part and parcel of the process. Part of the circle of life – as corny as that sounds, it is actually what I am witnessing. We nurture the animal. The animal nurtures us. Life goes on. And then there’s death. We get a much longer stay on earth, it is true – these birds got a total of eight weeks. They are small, Daniel explained, because they are spring chickens, not yet enjoying the more bountiful feast of insects and grasses available to later flocks.

The birds go from the slaughtering machine into a bin that flips them into boiling water, to loosen their feathers. Then, into the washing machine contraption, which spits out bits of water, as if the birds are being wrung out. Everything smells faintly of boiled chicken, and I wonder if my jeans, which I’m sure have been spattered by this spinning machine (I’m that close!), will stink by the end of the day. They don’t.

From there, the chicken gets passed down the line, with unwanted bits cut away or gathered into buckets – feet, gizzards, livers, hearts, I’m not sure what all the farmers are doing but by the end these birds are ready for the oven.

I take all this in from inches away, being careful to stay out of the way. Daniel answers my questions, and talks about the buying clubs that make up 45 percent of the business. He listens as his son carefully spells out his name for me, A-N-D-R-E-W. The boy tells me that’s his brother over there, helping cut up the chickens – Travis. He’s eight.

Then his dad helps spell out the last name,: S-A-L-A-T-I-N and I realize this is family. Daniel tells me Joel, Andrew’s grandfather, is standing in the assembly line, along with Andrew’s grandmother and great-grandmother. There are four generations here today, the first day of chicken harvesting. They are all friendly, listening politely and grinning slightly as I blather about how really pleased I am to meet them, I’ve never seen anything like this, it’s a wonderful place, etc.

My pilgrimage is complete.

And later, when I order a curried chicken salad at Revolutionary Soup in Charlottesville, I appreciate chicken in a whole new way.
Though I must say, the eggs I brought home from Polyface and ate hard-boiled today for lunch were even better. Brilliant orange yolks, rich but not heavy flavor. And, no slaughter required.

Sailing on staples

I ran out of milk today, so I went to the cupboard for my back-up box of powdered, instant milk. I keep this on hand for when I really want to make macaroni and cheese, or quiche, or muffins, and I have all the ingredients but milk. Who wants to run out to the store? Mix up some dried milk and throw it in, you can't really taste the difference.

Today, I put it in my iced coffee (actually this morning’s leftover coffee with a few ice cubes thrown in, but it really can be dolled up to taste like a coffeehouse treat). This was an entirely different proposition than substituting it in baked dishes, where it is masked by a variety of other ingredients. This time with just the milk, and the coffee, that clinging flavor of dried milk came right through.

It immediately made me think of The Boat. When I was eight years old, my family took off from Long Island, New York on a 40-foot sailboat, which we lived aboard for a year: me, my three older sisters and my parents. Yes, it was tight quarters. And there are many things I remember about it – but food, memory trigger that it is, calls forth the culinary details.

There wasn’t a lot of storage room on the boat, and the icebox, as I recall it, was an on-again-off-again hole in the galley counter with a hatch-type lid that lifted up. You had to reach into its depths and re-arrange everything in order to find whatever it was you were looking for. It was also dependent on The Generator which seemed to be a subject of conversation pretty frequently -- I think it must have been broken a lot. At eight years old that sort of thing was not my concern. I only knew that our “frig” was pretty limited. And we often bought ice, in blocks, at the marinas where we stayed. Maybe it wasn’t an electric refrigerator at all, maybe it really was just an ice box? At any rate, we didn’t get fresh milk, but we drank a lot of the dried variety, along with Tang (remember that orange-flavored powder touted to be the drink of astronauts?), and occasionally those tin cans of orange juice with Donald Duck smiling on the front, trying to conceal the fact that the juice tastes like metal. On special occasions, like birthdays, we would have cans of Coke, which we cooled by placing in a net and hanging in the water.

We had a few staples that we made over and over: the ones I remember were molasses sugar cookies, which were my specialty (except the one time I added a cup instead of a teaspoon of salt, and we had to throw the entire batch overboard); and “bathroom cookies,” which were a variation on the recipe from the Bran Flakes box. I’m sure there were other stand-bys my mother used to feed us all, but I only remember that she stowed cans of – what? – tuna? meats? – under the floorboards in the bilge, and we all had to clear out when she was retrieving them to make dinner. I also remember her trying to cook rice in seawater, to conserve our limited water supply – that, too, went overboard.

Along with the staples – which we tried to replenish when we were in port, a good trick when half the dry goods stores in the Caribbean circa 1970 featured bloated, dusty cans and nothing remotely like an expiration dates – we sometimes tried out the produce from the docks. I remember sampling knobby-looking breadfruit, and little tiny bananas called finger bananas, super sweet and delicious. We must have had pineapple and citrus as well, as they’d have been more familiar to my pretty conventional-cook mother.

And we ate the fish we caught, trolling a couple of lines at the stern whenver we were underway. The favorite was dolphin, a rainbow-colored beauty when it’s swimming in its iridescent school, but which fades the minute you pull up your line and expose it to the air. We also caught a lot of Spanish mackerel, a severe, torpedoe-shaped fish that looks like an angry character from a Roald Dahl book, all sharp fins and pointy tail; and albacore tuna, a sweetly round-shaped fish with metallically shiny skin that we once pulled up after it had been attacked by a shark. We got the head of the fish, the rest had already been devoured.

If I lived on a boat again, I think I’d rely most on the fresh fish and the fruits and veggies available in the markets, sampling the tropical fare that any native would make their own staples. Except, of course, for the dried milk I’d have on hand for my afternoon coffee. The photo is of the sort of boat we lived on, a 40-foot Newporter ketch. Ours was called "Glad Tidings." I wonder where she is now.

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!