Usually I’m planning at least four meals ahead in the part of my brain especially reserved for such musings. However, once in awhile, I find myself sitting at my desk, starving and uninspired at 12:30 or so. On one such occasion I raided the pantry and the vegetables from my CSA box to create a light, quick, high energy springtime salad. It has plenty of protein from chickpeas and canned salmon and lots of flavorful, seasonal veggies. Brown baggers can whip up this highly portable salad the night before or early in the morning before work and forgot about relying on the local takeout. Makes two generous servings.

1-12-oz can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed

1-6-oz can of wild salmon

4 radishes, thinly sliced

1 small turnips, thinly sliced

1 spring onion, thinly sliced

1/2 of a celery rib, cut in half vertically and sliced thinly on the diagonal

1 carrot, cut into julienne or grated

Green garlic, tahini, and lemon dressing from this post

2 large handfuls of salad greens, washed and dried

1/2 an avocado, sliced

1 sheet of nori, toasted over the gas burner for 30 seconds until crispy, and cut into strips

Chopped parsley and cilantro

In a large bowl, combine the chickpeas, salmon, radishes, turnips, onion, celery, and carrot. Toss in the dressing and season to taste with salt and pepper. Pile the greens onto two plates (or shallow bowls), dividing them evenly. Top with the dressed salad. Garnish with avocado, nori, parsley, and cilantro. Serve immediately or refrigerate (separate from garnish and greens) for up to 2 days. This salad travels and keeps well.

With more rain in the forecast, I wanted to share this hearty, healthy soup that I created recently. Lately I’ve been enjoying cooking down the pantry (my version of spring cleaning) and utilizing the vegetables from my beloved Eatwell Farm CSA box to make simple meals. This one was inspired by a recipe in the Zuni Café Cookbook that used leftover farro cooked with porcinis to make a porridge-like soup. Quantities are somewhat loose as I didn’t measure. Feel free to double this, as it’s better the next day.

Keeping quarts of homemade chicken broth in the freezer (made from a mixture of roasted carcasses and fresh heads, feet, and necks from Soul Food Farm birds) makes delicious soups come together fast. Feel free to use store-brought broth or water, and you’ll still have some winter comfort in no time. I also keep guanciale in the freezer so I can cut off chunks when I need it. No need to defrost. If you don’t have it, no worries, this soup would still rich and wonderful without.

Serves 4 to 6

1 cup farro

A handful of dried porcini mushrooms

1/4 olive oil, plus more for serving

3 tablespoons diced guanciale

1/2 of a yellow onion, diced

2 celery ribs, diced

2 small carrots, diced

2 garlic cloves, chopped fine

1 quart chicken broth

1/3 cup lentils

1 bunch kale, chard, spinach, or 2 big handfuls of braising mix

Grated Parmesan at the table

Cook the farro in boiling salted water until firm but tender, about 45 minutes (can be done a day or hours ahead) Drain and set aside. Meanwhile, soak the porcinis in about a cup and a half of warm water.

In a large, heavy soup pot, warm the oil over medium heat and add the guanciale. Cook, stirring, until translucent and beginning to brown. Add the onion, celery, carrot, and garlic, lower heat, and cook until the vegetables are soft and fragrant, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes. Drain the porcinis, straining and reserving their soaking water. Add the broth, lentils, greens, drained porcinis and their soaking water, and cook until lentils are tender, about 30 minutes. Add the farro and salt and pepper to taste, and continue to cook to allow flavors to meld, about 10 minutes. Serve drizzled with olive oil and topped with grated Parmesan cheese.

Lately I’ve been into making harissas and sambals and other fiery chile-based condiments. I think the attraction is that they provide a quick and easy way for a busy cook to make rather ordinary soups, seasonal salads, and baked chicken or fish a lot more interesting. Less than an hour in the kitchen on a weekend, with a few simple ingredients and a food processor, yields a jar full of fun recipe ideas to deploy on busier days.

For the harissa I more or less riffed off of this recipe in Saveur, but I used some very special chiles, removed some ingredients, and changed the proportions. The chiles were dried piment d’espelette from Annabelle Lenderink’s La Tercera Farm. I’d been meaning to do something special with them because they have such a bright, fruity, mildly spicy flavor and are so elegant. Plus, hardly anyone grows them outside of Basque country, as far as I know, but you can use any good dried chiles you like.

Makes about 1/2 cup

12 medium sized, medium spicy, fruity dried red chiles, stemmed, seeded and soaked in hot water until soft

1⁄4 tsp. coriander seeds, toasted in adry skillet and ground in a spice grinder or with a mortar and pestle

1⁄4 tsp. cumin seeds, toasted in a dry skillet and ground in a spice grinder or with a mortar and pestle

3 cloves garlic, pounded to a paste with a pinch of salt in a mortar and pestle

Approximately 2 tablespoons olive oil

Salt to taste

Lemon juice to taste

Put the soaked chiles, toasted and ground spices, and pounded garlic in a food processor and pulse until fairly smooth, and blended, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. Drizzle in the olive oil with the motor running until you have a smooth paste. Add a little salt and lemon juice and pulse to blend. Taste for balance, adding more salt, lemon juice, or olive oil, as needed. Will keep in small jars in the refrigerator up to 2 weeks, possibly longer.

So once you have the paste, what do you do with it?

1. Stir it into a basic lemon-shallot vinaigrette and use it on potato salad studded with bacon and green onions (above) or any other seasonal vegetable salad (corn, zucchini, green bean, roasted pepper, toasted pumpkinseed salad pictured below)—I plan to post these recipes soon.

2. Whisk together with white wine, fresh chopped herbs, and olive oil and use to marinate chicken before baking.

3. Stir into hummus or baba ghanoush (I’ll post this recipe soon)

4. Stir into a brothy chicken soup with potatoes or rice

5. Use it as a sandwich spread

6. Stir it into scrambled eggs

What are your ideas? Leave a comment and share them.

There are two summer themes this year—gathering free fruit to make jam, and seeing how little sugar we can get away with using and still call it jam. Ok, sometimes its sauce. But I’m ok with that.

I’ve been obsessed with making low sugar jam ever since I served as a judge in the Good Food Awards last year. Turns out that spending the day tasting dozens of jams can leave a person with a terrible stomachache that lasts a couple days. After the first five jams, they all tasted the same…sweeeeet. So this year my goal is to preserve the flavor of the fruit, not the sugar.

The first bout of jamming took place on 4 of July weekend. We’d been visiting friends who live in a development alongside a trail that leads to the nearby delta and Port of Sacramento. Before the trail was built, backyards had extended out farther, so the area the trail runs through is lined with feral fruit trees of all sorts. Plum season!

Yellow plums, green plums, red plums. All kinds of plums were ripe and plopping off the trees all around us. Five of us filled bags and bags of them and, since nobody else wanted them, we took them home to make jam. Mixed plum jam. We used about 1 1/2 cups sugar for every four cups of cut fruit. Considering most recipes call for equal parts sugar and fruit, that’s low. The jam was tart. Almost too tart. Since low sugar jam is more perishable, we processed it for 15 minutes in the jars.

Bout two of jamming crossed state lines. We timed our camping trip up north to coincide with Oregon blackberry season. After camping in the woods for two days, and picking blackberries for two hours, we were ready for a little indoor time. A rented apartment in Ashland, a few showers and nice dinners out, a Shakespeare play, and an afternoon reading and making blackberry jam…and before we knew it we were headed home with not quite enough jars of Oregon summer.

This time, we upped the sugar ratio to account for the blackberries being somewhat under ripe.  We used two cups sugar for every four cups of blackberries. And it’s almost too sweet.

What’s next? Figs? Show me the tree!

I’m always fascinated by how ideas percolate up into the culture and become bona fide trends.

An idea is sparked, acted upon, talked about…and suddenly everyone is doing it.

The DIY trend is one example. While I was formulating the idea for DIY Delicious in early 2008, the social, economic, and political conditions that gave rise to the book were also working on other people’s psyches, but in different ways. The results: websites and businesses like Food in Jars, Punk Domestics, and Farm Curious, movements like Yes We Can, and Canning Across America, as well as countless books on DIY Dairy, canning, curing, and pickling. It’s as if these ideas are just floating out there in the ether waiting to alight on someone’s brain.

The latest activity that has captured the imagination of cooks is food bartering. A couple weeks ago my friend Ellen emailed me with a full-blown plan for a barter market in which everyone would bring “lots” of homemade food (cheese, jam, sauerkraut, pickles, or anything) worth roughly $10 ea. to trade for “lots” of equal value with other participants.

One table of “lots”

Her reasoning was that, while many of us are making many different food items, not everybody has the skills or inclination to make everything. For the price of your own expertise you can enjoy another’s artisanal, homemade goodies.

Another goal: Sharing food is like glue. It strengthens our communities and fosters friendships and civility. How can we not recognize our commonalities when we gather to swap foods we’ve spent time and thought creating for the express purpose of sharing with others?

Shortly after Ellen’s email, this article about Brooklyn food swaps appeared in the New York Times. Then, about two weeks before the event, I heard of another woman in North Oakland (where Ellen and I both live) organizing an Oakland swap the day BEFORE Ellen’s. Crazy that neither of us know this person. Then, one of our invitees was assigned to write about food swapping in the Bay Area by an editor at The Bay Citizen and before you know it, Ellen’s food swap hits the New York Times!

Curious about how to set up a swap? Here’s how it works

Somebody’s booty

Have you been bartering food formally or informally? What do you like about it? Tell me about it in the comments!

Photos courtesy of swap co-organizer Leila Khatapoush

My life and my kitchen have both been overtaken by fermenting cabbage lately. (Is there a support group for that?) Partially, it’s the season. I always want to make hearty, fattier foods when the weather turns cold and sauerkraut and curtido are the perfect accompaniments. Plus cabbage turns sweeter as the weather gets chillier, making it a tastier proposition all around.

The other reason for the abundance of fermenting cabbage is that I’ve been doing a lot of demos to promote DIY Delicious and ferments are interesting to people and lend themselves well to demoing. Fermenting is something a lot of people want to try but have maybe felt intimidated. Ferments are also quick to make in a prescribed amount of time on a stage (most of the time is passive time spent waiting for them to ferment). I always bring a finished batch with accompaniments for tasting.

What type of accompaniments? Well, you can eat curtido, sauerkraut, or other fermented vegetables with beans, in grain bowl salads, atop soup, with sausages, mashed potatoes, on sandwiches, in tacos and quesadillas and even on pizza with the right flavor profile combination.

Lately I’ve been serving curtido with simply cooked Rancho Gordo beans (gotta give the other book some love) and local queso fresco. The demo days have been cold and rainy so that dish has been working out quite nicely.

I had some leftovers the other day and created the taco you see pictured above. To make it, I sandwiched some grated cheese between two tortillas and crisped them in a cast-iron pan to make a taco dorado.  I added beans, leftover steak, avocadoes, salsa, cilantro and a big dollop of curtido. I took another batch to a friend’s birthday party where it was enjoyed with tamales by all the guests.

The only problem: My whole laundry basket smelled like fermenting cabbage because of the tea towels I’d used to cover the Mason jars. Thank goodness a double wash took care of the problem, and prevented me from having to replace all my clothing!

Wild Salvadoran Curtido from DIY Delicious

Time Required: 15 minutes active; 3 to 5 days passive

Curtido is a lightly fermented cabbage salad commonly served with pupusas. Think of it as sort of a Latin American sauerkraut.

Makes 1 quart

1 medium head green cabbage (about 1 1/2 pounds), quartered, cored, and sliced as thinly as possible

1/2 a small onion, sliced thinly

2 to 3 carrots, peeled and grated on the large holes of a box grater

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon kosher salt

2 jalapenos, cut in quarters lengthwise, seeded and sliced thinly

1/2 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano, crushed

Put the cabbage, onion, and carrots in a large bowl. Add the salt and, with clean hands, toss and squeeze the vegetables until they start to soften and release their liquid (about 5 minutes). Add the jalapenos and oregano and toss to distribute. Pack the mixture tightly into a one-quart, wide-mouthed glass Mason jar, pushing down on the vegetables with a wooden spoon or your fingertips with as much force as you can until the level of liquid rises above the vegetables. Put a smaller jar inside the glass jar to keep the vegetables submerged. Cover with a clean tea towel and secure with a rubber band. The curtido needs to breathe.

You can see the small juice glass inside the jar if you look carefully. Note how all the vegetables are submerged in liquid. Now all you need is a tea towel and a rubber band to cover.

Leave out at room temperature for about 3 to 5 days. Check once daily to be sure the vegetables stay submerged, pushing down on them if needed. If you see a frothy residue on the surface, simply skim it off. Taste daily starting on the 2nd day. The curtido is ready when it tastes good to you. When it’s to your liking, fasten the lid and transfer it to the refrigerator. It will last months in the refrigerator. It doesn’t really go bad but will soften over time.

Blackened organic persimmons for 75 cents a pound vs. around $3 a pound?

Sign me up because I’m making persimmon butter. Bought these from Kaki at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market. They told me the alarming-looking sooty skin wouldn’t affect the fruit and they were right.

This and the galette I’m using it for are the last two recipes for the book. I really wanted both recipes in the book so I’m thankful that Chronicle let me go past deadline until the persimmons came into season. I wavered between using Hachiyas or Fuyus. Fuyus are more readily available and I figured they would behave like apples when turned into butter. Whereas the Hachiyas are lovely to bake into puddings and cakes as long as they are gooey ripe, they can be very tannic when cooked on the stove. I’ve heard that if you freeze them first, that takes care of the problem.

I was also going for an interesting flavor profile so I settled on cinnamon, cardamom, rum, vanilla beans, and lime. Wow. It’s really good. Visions of holiday gifts are now dancing in my head.

Here’s the method:
Peel and cut the fruit into chunks and put it in the food processor. I used about 2 1/2 pounds of persimmons.

Process until smooth and then put it through a potato ricer or food mill if you have one. If you don’t, it won’t make that much difference.

Put the pulp in a heavy enameled cast iron pot and add 2/3 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons maple syrup, a whole cinnamon stick, a whole vanilla bean, split and scraped, and the crushed seeds from one cardamom pod. Cook it down over low heat for at least an hour until it darkens and thickens, stirring occasionally and watching carefully so it doesn’t stick and burn.

Add two tablespoons of white rum and continue to cook for 10 minutes. Add the zest of one lime grated on a microplane. Stir and taste. Cool and refrigerate. I used about 2 1/2 pounds of persimmons and it yielded about 2 cups of persimmon butter.

For the galette, I used about 3/4 of a cup of persimmon butter. I simply spread it on thinly leaving a border and then laid the apples out on top. The dough for the galette was my usual dough from this recipe but instead of all butter, I used 4 tablespoons leaf lard bought from Prather and 3 tablespoons butter. That turned out to be a very good decision. I brushed the apples and crust with a little butter halfway through baking.

This was served in the Headlands kitchen to Eduardo, his baking assistant Megan, and a few people who wandered in. It was a hit.

The rest of the butter is being eaten on toast. Yesterday, I spread a little on a piece of whole wheat toast and added thin slices of gruyere. What a sublime afternoon snack!

I wake up resigned. It’s Saturday and I feel a little depressed. I start thinking about all my friends the farmers’ market vendors. Will they wonder where I am? I sure miss them. The farmers’ market is my church, my favorite place in the world to be. I don’t know what to do with myself and keep wondering if there are persimmons in the market yet. I convince myself that they are making their debut today and I’m missing it. Then I feel like a baby.

When food is your one luxury, the only thing you spend money on and it’s also your entertainment, what do you have left?  What will I do with myself on Saturday with no shopping and cooking? I don’t feel like myself. I feel like I’m living in a world devoid of color and I start to fantasize about going shoe shopping. I snap myself out of that really quickly and make breakfast.

Breakfast: 1 egg; 1 piece of toast; 1 wedge of melon
I suddenly realize that the bread tastes really sweet. And it’s not even a really cheap brand, but it’s definitely got sugar in it. My taste buds are off or something. In Hunger Challenge land all foodstuffs contain sugar.

I spend the morning cleaning the house and then a friend comes over with some figs from her tree. I give her some cucumbers from my garden and some jam that I’ve made. I eat a couple of figs. It’s crazy to turn down free food. I’m trying to find the line between really challenging myself and being so contrived that it’s ridiculous. I’m feeling apprehensive again because it’s Saturday and there are family activities planned involving children and meals out. I’m really not sure how I will deal with it yet.

Lunch: A bowl of the emergency lentil/rice/bok choy soup and a tortilla with butter. Really good.  A lot better than those enchiladas. I also eat half of a pear with peanut butter.

In the afternoon we go bowling with family. Everybody gets popcorn. It’s easy for me to resist even though I’m hungry. Then, we go to a Mexican restaurant that I really like. Now I’m really hungry. I think about just giving in and then decide that that would definitely be crossing the line I mention above even if others pay for my dinner. I mean this is supposed to be a challenge. So I order water and sit there. And sit there. And sit there. I’m really hungry. After holding out for 30 minutes I eat some of the free chips with salsa. There’s that line again. I mean really. They are free. I’m sitting there. And I’m hungry. The bill comes and I start to automatically reach for my wallet. Then I realize I didn’t eat anything and I feel sort of crazily gleeful.

Dinner: I heat up two enchiladas and a scoop of beans. The beans taste good but I have to choke the enchiladas down. The cilantro doesn’t help. Do I really have to eat these one more time? I am relieved when dinner (and Saturday) is over.

 Curtido

Time Required: 15 minutes active; 3 to 5 days passive

The technique for making curtido is exactly like sauerkraut. Curtido is a great foil for rich, heavy, meaty, or fatty foods, which is why it’s so good on pupusas. I like it on tacos and beans too.

Makes 1 quart

1 medium head green cabbage, sliced as thinly as possible
1/2 a small onion, peeled and sliced thinly
2-3 carrots, peeled and grated on the large holes of a box grater
1-2 tablespoons kosher salt
2 jalapenos, cut in quarters lengthwise, seeded and sliced thinly
1/2 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano, crushed

Put the cabbage, onion, and carrots in a large bowl. Add the salt and, with clean hands, toss and squeeze the vegetables until they start to soften and release their liquid (about 5 minutes). Add the jalapenos and oregano and toss to distribute. Pack the mixture tightly into a one-quart, wide-mouthed glass Mason jar, pushing down on the vegetables with a wooden spoon or your fingertips with as much force as you can until the level of liquid rises above the vegetables. Put a smaller jar inside the glass jar to keep the vegetables submerged. Cover with a clean tea towel and secure with a rubber band.

Leave out at room temperature for about 3 to 5 days. Check once daily to be sure the vegetables stay submerged, pushing down on them if needed. Taste daily starting on the 2nd day. The curtido is ready when it tastes good to you. When it’s to your liking, fasten the lid and transfer it to the refrigerator. It will last months in the refrigerator. It doesn’t really go bad but will soften over time.

Nishanga's Blog

Me and fill-in MC, Michelle Fuerst, having a good time in the Scratch Kitchen.

Photo Credits: Susan Fleming

You may have noticed that my recent posts have had a distinctly DIY character (and been somewhat irregular). That's because the focus of the book is resourceful, no waste, make-it-yourself deliciousness. Restoring the lost arts, building blocks for the kitchen and all that. Publication is scheduled for fall 2010 with Chronicle Books (with photos by the talented Sara Remington, who also did the photos for Heirloom Beans). The manuscript is due in exactly a month!

We're still settling on the final title but in the book you'll find plenty of pickles as well as basic dairy products, homemade beverages, all manner of grain-based goodness, condiments for your pantry and fridge, and meal building ideas utilizing all your homemade products.

I hope you find this as exciting as I do. I will tell you this: I've been having a lot of fun in the kitchen and am really starting to see the book take shape. I hope to help people avoid unnecessary packaging and additives, save money, have a lot of fun, and gain confidence in the kitchen arts and sciences. I don't want this book to be aspirational. Large sections of the book will be tips and ideas to demonstrate how to use and combine the different homemade items to make quick, healthy, everyday meals.

Pickle Key

Clockwise from upper left:
Wild fermented half-sour dills
Spicy table pickles
Lacto-fermented baby beets
Bread & butter pickles
Spicy pickled green beans
Cucumber garlic relish (center)