Sweet Corn

One of the most labor-intensive crops to grow organically is corn.  Corn ear worms (those little worms that you occasionally find on the top of an ear) are preventable if you treat every single ear individually.  I recall going to our local organic farmers' market and finding a sign on the pile of corn that stated "Not Organic".  When I questioned the farmer, he explained that customers were so turned off by the worms (which are actually moth larvae) that he stopped growing it because no one would buy it.  He purchased his corn from a conventional farmer and sold it at his stand.

We have gotten lots of corn from Fort Hill Farm this year; a real treat for us.  The boys especially love sweet corn.  The first few ears were perfect...not a worm on them.  As the season continued, we found more critters crawling on our corn.  There was a little bit of revulsion from the troops, but my way of thinking is this:  Evidence of worms is proof that Monsanto and other bullying chemical giants did not have their tentacles on my dinner.

As for cooking corn, my favorite method is from the Joy of Cooking:  Bring a pot of salted water to a rapid boil.  Add the corn, put a tight fitting lid on top, and remove it from the heat.  Time for 5 minutes and serve.  If the corn is young and fresh, you can't beat it!

I Finally Have a New Grill

After much debate, we finally bought ourselves a grill.  You may recall our tragic grill story.  Many family members and friends insisted that Weber was the way to go, and I don't doubt their judgement, but our finances just don't justify the cost of a Weber.  Even though Rich only grills when there is an audience, I allowed him to make the choice.  He was the one who labored year after year keeping our old grill in operating condition, so he chose a Brinkmann, which has a great website that allows you to buy replacement parts cheaply and easily.    Plus, the grill was only $200 including tax.  Rich assembled it for me and even bought a cover. 

It is a bit overbuilt, I think, but it's really hard to find something simple these days. 

Here is a picture that shows part of the grill doing its magic on some Asian eggplants (notice that there is plenty of room for a glass of wine:

The eggplants were really very pretty, slender purple things, but Rich was thoroughly uninterested in eating them, so I did what I do with many of his vegetables:  I hid them.  (It occurs to me that if we stopped using the word "eggplant", and started calling them "aubergines" like the French do, eggplant might have a broader appeal.)

Rich's favorite dish in the world is Chicken Tikka Masala, the Indian restaurant mainstay.  I marinated chicken breasts overnight in yogurt and Penzey's Tandoori spice mix.  When I have more time and energy, I mix up my own spices.  It was, like, 80% humidity and 92 degrees out, so I was taking shortcuts, though.  In cooler weather I also make my masala sauce from scratch, but I used a jar of Patak's to prevent me from slitting my wrists in misery.  So anyway, I grilled the eggplant and the marinated chicken, diced both up, and tossed them in a pot of masala sauce.  I left some chicken out of the sauce for the kids, which they thought was delicious.  I also sliced some raw carrots for them.  Add some boiled white rice and homemad nan, and we had a great little meal. 

Rich ate a few chunks of the eggplant, but he was not fooled in the least.  Oh well.  I ate the aubergines, and loved them!

On Blogging

My family has been supportive and kind regarding my endeavor to write about our eating habits. They don't have to be. They could all just be resentful of the time I waste on the whole project, spilling their secrets, laughing at their food aversions, typing out crappy sentences with very little revision...

My brother, my mother and my husband are among my most faithful readers, although none of them will post any comments about my posts. I quit for awhile, in fact, believing that no one was actually reading. It's lonely to write without feedback.

I will admit that it is a bit quirky to allow my family to stand around hungrily while I photograph our food, but I think they all feel like they are a part of this project. Anyway, my darling husband was thoughtful enough to snap a shot of me snapping a shot of our dinner. My boys will be able to remember this episode clearly enough to bemoan the experience to their therapists many years from now.

Hiding the Zucchini

I know the title sounds like a 14-year-old boy's euphemism, but it isn't meant to be. I really had a lot of zucchini to eat, and had to hide it in other foods to convince my doubtful family to ingest it. If you read The Value of a Mother-In-Law, you'll understand my husband's aversion to the squash. The boys have no such excuse aside from being little boys.

Fort Hill Farm came to the rescue with a great way to hide zucchini from the zucchini-defiant: Chocolate Cake. It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Who would ruin a perfectly good chocolate cake by hiding zucchini inside?

But it worked. It was delicious. And we ate it all up.

Here is the recipe as presented by Fort Hill Farm:

Moist Chocolate Zucchini Cake
From The Cook’s Garden by Ellen Ecker Ogden

1 cup unbleached all purpose flour 2 cups sugar
1 cup whole-wheat flour 8 TBSP (1 stick) unsalted butter (room temp)
½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder ½ cup olive oil
2 tsp baking soda 3 large eggs, at room temperature
1 tsp fine sea salt 1/3 cup sour cream or yogurt
3 cups grated zucchini
*Add some Chocolate Chips for a real treat!

Position a rack in the center of your oven. Preheat the oven to 350. Butter and lightly flour a 9×13 inch rectangular pan.

Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a medium bowl. Using an electric mixer on high speed, beat the sugar, butter and oil together in another bowl until well combined. One at a time, add in the eggs, beating well after each addition. Gradually stir in the flour mixture, blending until just smooth. Stir in the sour cream or yogurt, then the zucchini. Spread evenly in the pan.

Bake until the cake springs back in the center, about 45 minutes. Cool completely over a wire rack.

Some things to note: I was staying at a rented beach house when I made this recipe. I only had white flour, I had no chocolate chips, I had no grater with which to grate the zucchini, so I chopped it very small, and the oven in the house had no discernible temperature settings- the numbers had been scrubbed off the dial, and the light did not turn on until the dial was turned to its highest setting (whatever that might have been). This recipe is very forgiving, because it was still very good, despite all the setbacks.

I did not take photos, but it looked just like a chocolate sheet cake with some very tiny flecks of green. Try frosting it to hide the green flecks. Or tell the kids they are "sprinkles".

Carrots

When I was young, my grandfather had a vegetable garden beautiful enough to be featured in magazines. It never was. My grandpa was remarkably humble and spoke with a thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent, a combined effect that made some people think he was simple. He wasn't.

Perhaps I am remembering his garden through the rosy-perfection vision of time; maybe it really was the tidy, well-organized productive plot I picture in my head. Such is memory. Grandpa didn't read much, having had a fourth grade education, but as a farmer, he knew what was good for the plants and what was good for us. I do know the garden held roses, zinnias, and marigolds that attracted beneficial insects to the beets, radishes, rhubarb, tomatoes (so many tomatoes!), cucumbers squash beans and carrots.

I remember my grandfather pulling up carrots for me. I was little, and always disappointed. They were not the Barbie-leg long carrots that we bought in the grocery store. They were short, stubby, knobby, and dirty. He would wash them with the garden hose, scrubbing them with his fingers, as knobby and dirty as the carrots themselves from all the hard work he did, and hand them to me to eat: unpeeled; greens still attached. I ate them because I loved my grandfather.

I now know that Connecticut's soil isn't meant to grow those perfect slender carrots we find at the supermarket. New England's stony soil forces the roots to bend and twist into shapes unbecoming a mass-produced carrot.

Fortunately, what seemed peculiar and repulsive to me as a little girl is a huge attraction to my little boys. Our carrots from Fort Hill Farm are gnarled and twisted. The boys have not allowed me to serve the carrot pictured here. Ironically, while it lacks the look of the long Barbie-leg carrots from the store, it reminds me of a beautiful dancer's legs: twisted and en pointe, ready to pirouette- formed by local, organic soil and a farmer who knows what is good for us.

The Value of a Mother-in-law

There are enough jokes about mothers-in-law floating around in our modern culture that one would think they have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I, however, am fortunate enough to have a mother-in-law who can really serve a purpose. She has proven her helpfulness and generosity multiple times since the day I married her younger son.

One such example was the day when we came home with the box of vegetables to find lots of zucchini, yellow squash and eggplant: none of which Rich will eat.

I understand Rich's reluctance to eat anything from the squash family. I was there on the disastrous evening when he ended his zucchini-eating career. We were not yet married, but I was already cooking for him pretty regularly. That night, I had made the Moosewood Cookbook's recipe for stuffed zucchini. It was delicious! Then we headed out to a street fair in New Haven. Not too far down Chapel Street, amidst the street stalls all smelling of ethnic foods...Indian, Thai, Middle-Eastern, Greek...Rich became violently ill. He ran down a side street and vomited profusely next to someone's car. Then he threw up in a garbage can. I started driving him home, but we had to stop at a rest area on I-95 so he could again get sick.

I ate the same thing he ate that night, so I'm quite sure that zucchini wasn't the problem. But I do know that the last thing down is the first thing up, and it can ruin your taste for that item for years. Maybe for the rest of your life. This is why I still do not drink tequila. Or bourbon, for that matter.

My mother-in-law, understanding the predicament of having too many vegetables and too few people to eat them, suggested we make ratatouille, and she promised to help eat it. As you can see from the photo, we also had a green pepper, a tomato, a sweet onion, some garlic and a head of parsley to use in this endeavor.

We looked at the recipes on the Fort Hill Farm website for some guidance, but then my mother-in-law called her sister, a former restaurateur for advice. And so, using the following recipe with some adjustments, we created a tasty ratatouille.

Ratatouille- thanks to Beth Campbell and Moosewood Cookbook
3 TBSP olive oil

2 med. cloves garlic

1 chopped onion

1 med eggplant, cubed

1 tsp salt

1 med. Zucchini and yellow squash, cubed

1 med. bell pepper, in strips

fresh black pepper

1 cup chopped fresh tomato

fresh minced parsley

Heat olive oil in a deep skillet or Dutch oven. Add onion and sauté over medium heat for about 5 minutes.

Add eggplant and salt, and stir. Cover and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for about 15-20 minutes or until the **eggplant is soft.

Add zucchini, bell peppers, black pepper, garlic and tomatoes. Cover and simmer for about 10 more minutes, or until the zucchini and bell peppers are tender.

Serve hot, warm or at room temperature- plain, or topped with parsley
**Some varieties of eggplant cook much quicker than others, check often and don’t overcook.

The leftover ratatouille made a grade sandwich on crusty bread with mozzarella cheese. Of course, I was eating those sandwiches for several days.