Red!

Among the items in our first CSA box was a mixed bag of potatoes with skins ranging in color from light brown to red. The list that accompanied our second box included the line “All Red Potatoes,” and we assumed that simply meant that we’d gotten all red-skinned ones that time. Imagine our surprise when we quartered a few of these potatoes to boil and discovered that they’re red all the way through! And what’s more, the color doesn’t fade during boiling (like the gorgeous deep lavender skin of the Purple Viking potato); if anything, it becomes more intense.

Cabbage Leaf With Stuffing

After our initial experience with the All Red potatoes we knew we wanted to try them mashed, but got distracted finding ways to use up our CSA items with short shelf lives. So the potatoes just sat around until this past weekend, when we decided to try them with some items from our most recent box. We’ve been inundated with cucumbers, so we made a simple cucumber salad with dill, mint, feta, and a bit of red wine vinegar. We also had a gorgeous head of savoy cabbage, the large leaves of which we decided to stuff for a main course.

Stuffed Cabbage Leaves

The recipe we used for the cabbage came from here (I’ll give you the basics of the recipe, but follow the link if you want more explanation). First, blanch a few of the big leaves then set them aside to dry. Saute some diced onion (we used a cipollini), then add some of the inner cabbage leaves, roughly chopped. Once the leaves have reduced somewhat, add diced carrot. Cook covered for fifteen minutes or so, then stir in some chopped cooked bacon (the recipe actually calls for speck, a Tyrolean ham, but we had bacon that needed to be used up). Spoon stuffing into the leaves, fold them up, grate some Parmesan on top, and bake for 15 minutes at 200°.

Red Mashed Potatoes!

The stuffed cabbage was quite delicious, and the leaves turned out a gorgeous bright green. But, the visual stunner of our meal was unquestionably the mashed potatoes. The crimson flesh, flecked with deep red skin and the green of fresh Italian parsley was simply astonishing. And they tasted great, too. The flavor is more complex than your standard potato, but I don’t have a good way to describe it. Suffice it to say that mashed with parsley, garlic, cheese, butter, and a bit of milk, they delight three of the senses. If you ever see All Red potatoes for sale, buy them!

This past weekend, Veronica and I took a quick overnight trip to Milwaukee. We went for a variety of reasons: to visit her family, to see some of her friends, and to go to the big annual book sale at All Saints’ Cathedral downtown. Those plans left us some free time on Saturday, so we decided to take a tour of the Sprecher Brewing Company in Glendale, a Milwaukee suburb. Sprecher is best known for their root beer and seven other varieties of soda. And with good reason — the New York Times rated Sprecher root beer the best out of 25 brands from around the country. Indeed, soda was the only product I associated with them until last week. But Randall Sprecher started the company as a beer brewery, and they brew a wide variety of beers.

The tour was short (due to the small size of the brewery, but pretty good. Since it was the weekend, no one was there actually brewing or bottling, but our guide gave detailed descriptions of both processes, along with some of the company’s history. At the end of the tour of course comes the requisite tasting session — four samples of your choice from a selection of ten beers on tap. But we, along with about ten other people, bypassed the normal tasting in favor of a special Reserve Tasting. This tasting included samples of ten different Sprecher beers (including some premium varieties not available in the regular tasting), each paired with a different cheese.

We tried, in order, their Hefe Weiss, Extra Pale Ale, Mai Bock, Pub Brown Ale, IPA², Abbey Triple, Pipers Scotch Ale, Black Bavarian, Barley Wine, and Bourbon Scotch Ale. The various cheeses came mostly from Wisconsin cheese makers, including Sartori, Maple Leaf, Carr Valley, and others. The only cheese from outside the state was the delicious Kerrygold Dubliner, which was paired with Sprecher’s oak bourbon barrel-aged Bourbon Scotch Ale. Matt, the guy running the tasting, did a great job telling us about each cheese and each beer as we went along, and we were provided with tasting sheets with more detailed information (IBUs, degrees Plato, types of hops, etc.) and space for taking notes as we went.

It was nice to sample so many beers at once; the process gave not only an overview of Sprecher’s beers, but a good side-by-side comparison of different beer styles. I think Veronica and I agreed that the Abbey Triple was our favorite, followed closely by the Hefe Weiss. From there our individual rankings diverged somewhat. The cheeses were all quite delicious. Whoever selected the pairings knew what they were doing; some cheeses complemented their respective beers, other provided delightful contrasts. This sort of thing seems to be catching on — the New Glarus Brewing Company (which I’ve now toured three times) near Madison just announced their own Hard Hat Tours, which are behind-the-scenes guided tours culminating in a beer and cheese tasting session. Perhaps it’s time for a fourth trip to New Glarus…

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan sets out to trace the origins of three meals, each the product of a different food chain. These food chains — the industrial, the pastoral, and the personal, as he calls them — basically represent in reverse order the various human relationships with food. In doing this, he hopes to shed light on what he terms America’s “national eating disorder:” we lack national food traditions, and are often so far removed from our food’s origins that we have to rely on food companies and nutritionists to tell us what to eat. For Pollan, this disorder reached its height with the Atkins diet craze, that fad that sought to suck the soul (bread, pasta, even fruit!) out of American meals and replace it with large quantities of meat.

In America’s industrial food chain, everything seems to revolve around corn. Government subsidies encourage farms to produce far more Zea mays than the American people can eat. It falls to food scientists to figure out what to do with the surplus (and successful corn-based products only lead to a demand for more corn). Today, corn is processed by so-called “wet mills” into dozens of diverse substances: vitamins, corn oil, adhesives, stabilizers, acids, ethanol, emulsifiers, and sweeteners (including the sneakily ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup). These various “fractions” of corn are the building blocks of the processed foods industry.

Besides providing the raw materials for such Frankenfoods as Cool Whip and Cheez Whiz, corn fuels the industrial production of beef. A far cry from the pastoral stereotype of cows lazily munching grass in an open field, the purpose of industrial feedlots is to cram cows full of cheap calories (largely from corn), fattening them up as quickly as possible. Cows on a corn diet must also be medicated, as their digestive systems have evolved to process grass, not corn (antibiotics are also necessary to deal with the cramped and squalid living conditions on a feedlot).

The first meal that Pollan and his family eat comes from McDonald’s, and they consume it — appropriately — in their car. The meal’s constituent parts are known (corn products are used to cook the fries, thicken the shake, sweeten the soda, construct the chicken nuggets, feed the chickens and cows, and partially fuel the car), but their origins are totally obscured by the industrial food chain. Pollan asks the question “Where does [this food] come from?” and provides the only viable answer: “It comes from McDonald’s.”

Pollan approaches the pastoral food chain with the intention of once again tracing the origins of a single meal. But he soon realizes that “organic” food runs the gamut from that produced by industrial farms that carefully adhere to government standards to that frown on very small farms that follow more traditional methods. Thus, he splits his time in this section of the book between the “supermarket pastoral” (think Whole Foods) and the “beyond organic” (think Amish farm stand).

Behind the flowery descriptions of produce and meat at Whole Foods, Pollan discovers huge factory farms that resemble those he visited in pursuit of industrial food. The only difference, in most cases, is that small changes have been made to fit government definitions of “organic,” “free range,” or “all natural.” He finds that often what’s being sold is a nice story, not necessarily more sustainable or more friendly food.

At the other end of the spectrum lie much smaller operations, like Polyface Farm in Virginia, that adhere to the spirit of the organic movement rather than to the letter of organic law. Polyface is in many ways a traditional family farm, raising cows, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and a variety of produce on about a hundred acres of open land. But Joel Salatin, the farm’s owner, practices a very complex form of rotational grazing that keeps the pasture healthy and vibrat, produces an astounding quantity of meat, and requires but a single outside input: chicken food — no fertilizers, no antibiotics, no pariciticides. Paradoxically, Salatin’s farm is not certified “organic,” although it certainly is among the most sustainable and truly pastoral farms anywhere.

The final food chain that Pollan follows is certainly the shortest and in many ways the oldest of the three. The task he sets for himself is to personally hunt, gather, or grow all the ingredients for a four-course meal for ten people (the last action, “grow,” keeps his food chain from being totally primal). He also intends to serve representatives of the three edible kingdoms: animal, plant, and fungus. To do this, city-raised Pollan must first learn to hunt and butcher game as well as to find mushrooms and distinguish the delicious from the deadly. Luckily, he befriends a Sicilian expat who introduces him to the floral, faunal, and fungal riches of the forests of Northern California. Pollan basically achieves his goal, although he ends up using for his diner party a couple of store-bought ingredients and a few things provided by friends. But in the process of assembling the meal he accomplishes a more abstract aim: being cognizant of everything that went into his dinner.

Reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma (more than a year ago, actually) was for me an eye-opening experience. It made me start really reading food labels and trying to eliminate artificial additives from my diet. I went on a crusade against high-fructose corn syrup, eliminating it from my apartment entirely — not for health reasons, but in moral opposition to the policies and processes that have made highly processed HFCS cheaper than natural cane sugar in the U.S. I changed my grocery shopping habits, and reading this book influenced, at least indirectly, Veronica’s and my decision to join a CSA farm this summer.

Aside from being very interesting and informative, Pollan’s writing is clear and his style is enjoyable. My only complaint about the book relates to his discussions of evolution early in the text. He writes of corn’s “act of evolutionary faith,” plants “hav[ing] always known… one of the surest paths to evolutionary success,” and recasts agriculture as “a brilliant (if unconscious) evolutionary strategy on the part of the plants and animals involved to get us to advance their interests.” Evolution doesn’t work that way; there is no planning, and there are no evolutionary goals as such, beyond the propagation of genetic material. That quibble aside, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a great thought-provoking book, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

The Contents of Our Third Box

This morning, we picked up our third CSA box of the summer. This box was the biggest yet — 3/4 bushel, whereas our previous boxes were only 5/9 bushel. Plus, this time our farm offered basil as an ‘option’ crop, meaning that they left a huge box full of it at our pickup location and said “take as much as you want.” Since I neglected to bring a bag, I literally stuffed my pockets full of basil. Tomorrow, we’ll make a big batch of pesto and freeze it in single-meal portions with the help of a couple of ice cube trays. Our goal is to make enough while basil is in season to make it through the winter (we eat lots of pasta).

While we have no doubt what to do with the basil, we’re not so sure about some of the other items. What, if anything, can you do with pickling cucumbers other than pickle them? Can the two of us possibly make it through four regular cucumbers before they go bad? What should we do with beets? Can we find a way to prepare our cauliflower that we’ll actually like? What’s special about Cippolini onions? But, we’ve done pretty well with unfamiliar veggies so far, so I’m sure we’ll have some interesting culinary adventures this week!