The Quarter-Acre Farm Page 17

  • 2 cups warm water

  • ¼ cup (1/8 cup chopped) pitted olives

  • 2 TB olive oil (plus a little extra for brushing on the focaccia)

  • 1 TB fresh rosemary

  • salt

  • 1 tablespoon each of flour and sugar for proofing

  1. Proof the yeast by mixing it with the water.

  2. When it is foaming, add the olive oil and as much flour as it takes to make a slightly sticky wad of dough.

  3. Dust the dough with flour and knead the dough for around 10 to 15 minutes. (If you’ve got a mixer with a dough hook it makes it easier, though lots of people like kneading the dough by hand.)

  4. After the dough is kneaded, put it into a bowl, cover it with a towel, and let it expand for up to two hours. It will enlarge faster in the summer than the winter, especially if you live in a house in which the builders apparently forgot to install insulation, like mine.

  5. When the dough is all puffed up with itself, it’s time to take charge and impress upon it your own desires. Punch the dough down and knead it a bit, then roll/press it into any shape you think fit, but about an inch thick. I do my rolling/pressing on a sheet of parchment paper, which I can then transfer, paper and all, to a cookie sheet when I’m ready to bake.

  6. After your dough is pressed, cut your pitted olives in half and press them into the dough. You can use any kind of pitted olives, even green ones.

  7. I also chop fresh rosemary and press that into dimples in the dough, then generously brush the top of the rapidly rising focaccia with olive oil and sprinkle with flaked sea salt.

  8. Allow to rise until double, then put the focaccia into the 350 degree oven until it is golden brown (about 25 to 30 minutes).

  This is great as is or dipped in balsamic vinegar and olive oil)—or try inside out sandwiches, as follows: 1. Slice the cooled bread into sandwich-sized pieces, and then cut the pieces horizontally into a top and a bottom.

  2. Butter the inside surfaces of the bread and heat your panini grill. The inside buttered pieces will now be facing out, touching the grill, so that the evenly cut soft bread will get toasted.

  3. On the bumpy inside (with the olives) put slices of cheese, such as havarti, and perhaps some sliced chicken or salami or hard boiled egg, and some roasted red pepper. Grill.

  4. After the sandwich is browned and the cheese melted, remove the sandwich to a plate and put a leaf of fresh lettuce and even a slab of peppered tomato inside.

  Beauteous. Fabulous. Glorious. Ravenous?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE HISTORY OF FOOD PRESERVATION, INCLUDING MY OWN

  “Of course I can!”

  —U.S. FOOD ADMINISTRATION POSTER, 1944

  Pre-history: A frozen seal on the ice. It’s simple to see where the idea of using cold as a preservative came from; some prehistoric someone noticed that frozen seal didn’t smell unpalatable like the one they’d dragged inside by the fire.

  As well as being the most straightforward method of preserving food, freezing also has the most documented success. In 1984, paleontologists Bjorn Kurten and Dale Guthrie actually ate Bison priscus meat after it had been frozen in Alaska for 36,000 years. Bjorn wrote that the meat, when thawed, “gave off an unmistakable beef aroma, not unpleasantly mixed with a faint smell of the earth in which it was found, with a touch of mushroom . . . the taste was delicious.” Dale Guthrie, however, intimated that it wasn’t entirely wonderful when he described his meal as giving off a strong Pleistocene aroma, which I can’t imagine would be terribly appetizing.

  Freezing food has its limits. The water molecules in the food form ice crystals as they freeze, but these water molecules try to find the best environment in which to den up for their frozen winter. That best environment for an ice crystal wanna-be is the coldest place available, which is often outside of the food. (The side of the freezer seems to be the Club Med for ice crystals.) Once enough water molecules have abandoned ship, the food becomes somewhat dehydrated, or “freezer burned.” As if that isn’t bad enough, the dearth of water molecules provides opportunity for oxygen molecules to sneak in, which also change the appearance and taste of the food.

  Beyond freezer burn, there are plenty of bacteria that act on foods at temperatures below freezing as well. In short, if you happen to come across a frozen mastodon, I wouldn’t recommend eating it. Of course, I may worry overmuch about such things.

  When I was in junior high I used to go to my best friend’s house and feel great trepidation at the fact that they used their screened porch as a freezer. It was Wyoming and Thanksgiving-time, but it just seemed dangerous to cart the turkey, gravy, stuffing, and cranberry sauce out to the picnic table and leave it there until someone got a hankering for a sandwich and carted it all back in again. For one thing, I knew the temperature must fluctuate out there from well below freezing to a sunny 45 degrees, but also my friend had a big tomcat named McGregor.

  One might think a cat wouldn’t be interested in frozen food, and to them I offer the story of the mule deer that a hunter hung in a tree a hundred yards from the trailer I lived in during my early twenties. The hunter had skinned the carcass and hung it to cool, intending to cut it up later. The hunter procrastinated, the deer froze, and over the next two months I watched as ranch cats clung to the swaying venison popsicle, gnawing on the flesh.

  One trouble with freezing food in most parts of the world, preartificial-cold era, was that the weather wasn’t likely to be cold enough to freeze food when much food was available to freeze. And once the weather did get cold, there was no certainty that it would stay cold. To combat this problem, ice was packed into cellars and insulated with straw to keep things cold for as long as the ice lasted. In a small step forward, or maybe sideways, people in China, circa the fourth century, noticed that evaporating salt water was cold and that containers with food in them placed in the brine would keep things chilled.

  Some centuries later, a Glaswegian by the name of William Cullen figured out the theory of artificial refrigeration, followed by an American inventor who figured out how to make a refrigeration machine in 1834. John Gorrie, an American physician, took things another step forward and made a refrigerator in order to make ice to cool his yellow-fever patients.

  How does refrigeration work? Liquid is compressed, and compressed liquids evaporate into vapor. The rapidly expanding vapor requires energy to expand and so draws the energy from the immediate area—in our case, the inside of the refrigerator box. The refrigerator box loses energy and so grows cooler.

  To understand all this, it helps to remember that there isn’t really any cold. What we call cold is merely the absence of heat. This is a difficult idea for me as I imagine cold like a stalker, always breathing down my neck, waiting for me around the corner, lingering in between the sheets, and coiling around my feet. Cold isn’t an entity, however. Cold doesn’t grow; heat escapes. Therefore, I am not being stalked, I am merely being abandoned.

  Clarence Birdseye brought one of the next big inventions in refrigeration history into the world. He found that metal plates soaked in calcium chloride brine and chilled (shades of fourth-century China) could quickly freeze foods sandwiched between those plates. Thereafter frozen food became increasingly popular, to the point that many children and even adults believed that corn kernels, peas, and cubed carrots all grew on the same plant.

  At the Quarter-Acre Farm, while I have no flash-freezing capabilities, I rely on freezing to preserve much of the food I grow for later. We freeze our food in the small chest-freezer our neighbors lent us. It is big enough that (in theory) a full-grown man could be folded inside with some effort, if (creepily) necessary. It holds just enough produce for our family of three to get us through the winter, and once again I get by with a little help from my friends.

  I freeze roasted tomato sauce, roasted tomatoes, fresh cherry tomatoes, roasted eggplant, figs, fig puree, chopped fruit, pesto, green chile, and sweet peppers. I also use the freezer to store dried food
stuffs, especially the dried tomatoes that I like a little chewy rather than entirely desiccated. Freezing nuts keeps them from becoming rancid or a target for mealy worms.

  What might be more important than what I do freeze is what I don’t freeze. I try never to freeze fruit juice. Not because it doesn’t freeze well, but because it does. I’ve had grape juice taunt me for well over a year. “You lazy excuse for a farmer, I thought you were going to make jelly last month. But no, you were too busy. Too busy now as well after all the energy that it’s taken to keep me frozen for an eternity? Yeah, too busy checking Facebook maybe.” It’s misery, and if you let it get to you, the shame of eventually throwing it away could keep you from farming altogether.

  I also try not to freeze large amounts in one bag. A giant peach boulder is so difficult to work with it is likely to become garbage before it has a chance to be made into pie. Therefore I have learned to make everything I put in the freezer (immediately) user friendly. Sauce is frozen in one-meal servings. Enough chiles are frozen per bag to make one pot of green-chile stew. I roast cubes of eggplant, spread them on a cookie sheet to freeze, then put them into bags so I can sprinkle eggplant on pizza or pour it into stew or between sheets of noodles for lasagna. Fruit is frozen in the same way so that a cup of peaches can easily be put into smoothies or four cups into pies. Zucchini is grated, then pressed with a potato ricer to get rid of excess water. I put the resulting pucks on the cookie sheet to freeze, and the frozen pucks are bagged and put in the chest freezer until I need a couple for mid-December zucchini fritters or to puree with tomato soup. Cherry tomatoes are picked straight into a bag and tossed into the freezer.

  Interestingly enough, the freezer seems the realm of summer produce. Winter fruit and vegetables do not seem to come ready all at once, and when they are ready they can bide their time a bit better out in the cold garden waiting to be picked.

  I try to have the freezer empty by the time the first tomatoes are coming on and full by the time the last tomatoes are finishing up. If I manage that, I know I will be able to eat well all winter long and into the spring.

  Like freezing, dehydrating is a naturally occurring event. Drying as a means of preservation has been practiced at least since 12,000 BC, first in the Middle East. Initially, it only required people to notice that, “Hey, those dried grapes never even molded and they taste pretty darn good.” Later, Vikings air dried their fish in the riggings of their ships. Many Native American tribes took it a step further and pounded dried meat with fat and fruit resulting in a food called pemmican.

  Drying was such a good idea that in the Middle Ages people in places that didn’t have an environment conducive to dehydrating food set up “still houses,” where the heat from fires (and likely the smoke as well) dried and preserved meat, fruit, and vegetables.

  Dehydrating food, as the name suggests, removes the moisture needed for decomposition. Food without moisture is also lighter in weight, smaller, and so requires less storage space. It intensifies the taste of foods, and even changes the character of the taste. The change in taste is the primary reason I can be found on most summer mornings slicing fruits and vegetables onto the trays of my dehydrator.

  Dried tomatoes are so good. So good on pizza, in stews, tossed in pasta. Adding boiling water to dried tomatoes then pureeing makes for the most delicious tomato paste ever. A little more water and it becomes the most delicious tomato sauce ever. Take that sauce and add chopped dried tomatoes for a wonderful double-tomato tomato sauce. To that add some of those frozen cubes of roasted eggplant, and some onions, and you’re about to enter the state of nirvana. You will remember summer even in mid-January.

  My mother once dehydrated watermelon. It is worth doing once (on a silicone mat or parchment paper) just for the sense of how much of watermelon is water. The resulting leather is not as good as watermelon, so I wouldn’t do it twice. My mother also dehydrates other fruits, most notably the Prairie Spy apples she tosses with cinnamon and sugar and sends me every year for Christmas. They are better than chocolate. Really.

  Pears are the most changed of the dehydrated fruits. I don’t care for fresh pears. They are grainy and have an unpleasant, oddly leathery skin. But dehydrated pears are transformed into a lush, chewy deliciousness. I didn’t believe that could happen to a pear, but my friend Joannie convinced me to give it a try and I am forever grateful.

  Fermentation is the next on our food preservation time-line. Fermentation utilizes microorganisms to preserve food such as grains, hops, and cabbage. Beer has been made since 10,000 BC. Kimchi and sauerkraut, which are the Korean and German variations on cabbage, are two more examples of fermented foods. I have not delved into this. I had a friend who made kimchi in her refrigerator once and while I dearly love kimchi, I would have to have a dedicated kimchi refrigerator (which Samsung does make, by the way), or perhaps a dedicated kimchi room, to attempt making it due to the sinus-clearing pungency of the fermenting cabbage.

  Though I don’t ferment on the Quarter-Acre Farm (not on purpose, anyway), I do pickle. Pickling is preserving food through the use of acid. When I was a kid, a pickle meant a dill pickle. The best pickle was the elusive “dill teeny” (out of Wyoming such a pickle is known as a cornichon), which only seemed available during the holiday season. The second-best pickle was on the other end of the pickle spectrum: a gigantic pickle in a gigantic jar on the counters of family-owned grocery stores. My Grandma Streeter would take us to one such market where I couldn’t understand how everyone seemed to know her name. My parents shopped at Safeway, where everyone wore the same corporate smock and to whom we were absolutely anonymous.

  At the family market my Grandma would treat us to pickles wrapped in a sheet of translucent paper that we’d peel like a banana. We’d bite the top off the salty, sharp-tasting pickle, and suck the soft-seeded insides out until the pickle “husk” was wrinkled as dog lips. I couldn’t always finish such a monumental pickle, so the vinegary remnants were sadly tossed in the trash.

  My mother made watermelon pickles, which looked, smelled, and tasted nothing like pickles or watermelon. I didn’t like them much. For one thing, pickles should be vinegary/salty, not sweet, and it ruined the watermelon eating experience as well. While it’s only the rind that’s pickled, my mother felt it was important to leave a layer of red watermelon on the rind to make the “pickles” look pretty. With regular watermelon, we kids liked to eat the rind all the way to the green, the tangy pale crunchiness a pleasant counterpoint to the sweet red flesh, and we certainly didn’t want to miss any of the red flesh.

  But my mother would hover, nagging us about the correct amount of fruit to leave. It was worse when she trimmed the rind off the watermelon before giving us the fruit, for while that saved us from her hovering, we’d have to use a fork and plate to eat watermelon, and that just isn’t right.

  I don’t make watermelon pickles at the Quarter-Acre Farm, though I think I’d enjoy them now. All my watermelon rinds go to the geese. It would be impossible for us to enjoy watermelon pickles even half as much as Jeannette and Goosteau enjoy those rinds. When we throw the rinds over the goose fence, Jeannette runs so fast she hovers on airborne. Goosteau brings up the rear with a little more dignity, reflecting a sad bout of bumblefoot that has made him more cautious about tripping and injuring his feet. Once they’ve put beak to rind, however, both of them burst into delightful burbling that we refer to as “the pleasure noise.” It is so gratifying to elicit such a tickled response in our rather ill-tempered geese that we have been known to buy them an entire watermelon for special events, like Goosteau’s birthday or summer solstice.

  I have pickled plums at the Quarter Acre Farm, but since I don’t like pickled plums it wasn’t such a good idea. On the other hand, I love fresh cucumbers so much there are never enough of them to pickle. At the end of the season, however, there are always plenty of green tomatoes. The green cherry tomatoes are especially nice when pickled. They’re also quite pretty speared and floating in a mar
tini, and they are chewier than cucumber pickles. I often eat an entire jar full just for the fun of biting them (and then am sorry for it; a jar of vinegary/salty pickles is at least half a jar too much). They are the spherical equivalent of dill teenies.

  Most pickles are not only pickled but canned. Which brings us to 1790, when a French confectioner discovered that applying heat to sealed containers discouraged the contamination of food. It was thought that the exclusion of air was responsible for the good effects, and it wasn’t until 1864, when Louis Pasteur figured out the relationship between microorganisms and food spoilage, that the full truth was known.

  Canning, as the name suggests, was originally done in cans—hand-made wrought-iron tin cans, to be exact. The cans were so expensive to make and the canning so laborious that canned food became a status symbol among middle-class people in Europe. Imagine a dinner party, the best china and your mother’s silver on the table. With all the guests seated, you . . . open a can of Beanie Weenies.

  Cost wasn’t the only problem. The seams of the cans, as well as the lids, were soldered with lead, leading to some disastrous consequences. The 1847 Franklin Expedition to the Canadian Arctic took thousands of canned goods with them on their journey. The ill-fated crew never returned, and it took over a hundred years before modern toxicology reports on the victims’ hair and bone samples revealed levels of lead in their systems a hundred times higher than is considered acceptable.