We eat veggies for breakfast a lot.  Quite a few people have looked at me like I’ve got a third eye in the middle of my forehead when I suggest having veggies and protein for breakfast, instead of carbs and sugar.  Thought I’d post a few pictures about how to do it.

Not shown - I make hashbrowns first that cook while chopping the rest of the veggies:  grate up a few potatoes, fry in olive oil in a cast iron pan with salt and pepper.  Set aside/keep warm while finishing the veggies.  If I’m in a hurry, I just start adding veg to the hash browns as they are nearing doneness.

The usual vegetable mix is onion or shallot, zucchini, pepper, and tomato, plus whatever else is available.  This time I added broccoli and the first 2 pods of okra of the season.  I chop the veggies in the order that they should cook in - onion and green pepper get the most time, then zucchini. Then greens or broccoli, tomato, or basil get just a quick cook at the end.  Start adding them to a hot cast iron pan in that order, with a little olive oil.  This can be spiced up with some hot pepper if desired, seasoned with salt and pepper.  Cooking is usually pretty quick - 5-10 minutes maybe, and ideally things stay colorful and a little crunchy, not soggy. It comes out of the hot pan, and fried eggs go into the hot pan.  Mix the hashbrowns and the veggies on the plates, top with eggs a few minutes later.  Yum. The only thing here we didn’t grow at home is the salt, pepper, and olive oil.  This is also really delicious with a little feta cheese topping it.

And the idea is that the eggs are somewhat runny, and the yolks run all over the mix deliciously.  In fact, there is little to compare at this time of year with the flavor of salty fresh tomato, basil, and egg yolk mopped up with toast or hash browns.

Yes, those words were chosen to conjure up Margaret Hamburg.

Margaret Hamburg, the Food and Drug Administration chief, was recently featured on NPR as follows, talking about the giant egg recall:

“She also had some practical advice for consumers: Reject over-easy eggs. She said that as federal investigators continue their work with the companies involved, consumers should strictly avoid ‘runny egg yolks for mopping up with toast.’ “  (National Public Radio, August 23, 2010)

Now, I’m an odd bird when it comes to runny eggs.  I’ve gotten nauseous at the idea of eating a soft-boiled egg before… when it was someone else’s eggs.  I won’t touch raw cookie dough because of an experience with getting food poisoning from eating it as a teenager.  But our own eggs, that we know the history of, we know the health of the chickens, and every detail about the eggs every step of the way, are another story.  Instinctively, I prefer them more softly cooked than I ever have any eggs with an unknown history.  And on occasion, I make ice cream, caesar salad dressing, or pasta carbonara with our raw eggs.

It’s a pity that all eggs are castigated in one fell swoop - after all, we can’t hurt the giant factory farms’ feelings by singling them out for criticism in comparison to the health of backyard and small producers’ chickens.  I am wondering what the fallout of this situation will be.  Legislation that punishes the small producers?

Well, time will tell, but in the meantime, I purposely cooked our homegrown eggs even just a little runnier than usual the morning after I heard that NPR report.  Must be that third eye that makes me so contrary.

Coffee is just one of those things for me.  I can (do) drink it pretty much all day, and even a bit in the evening, and not feel too much effect.  I like a good cup, but am not much a snob about it.  Well, not true… I don’t like bad convenience store coffee and dislike styrofoam-like cups (some are truly evil, especially some of the newer fine-grained foam ones).

But this isn’t about dislikes, its about what I like right now.  What I am liking right now.  Here is a photo of this morning’s Joe… Mandyrose’s cup is on the right, mine on the left, presspot by Bodum above, maple syrup from 2008 above left.  Our blend du jour is 2/3 ground beans of French Roast by Coffee Express here in Michigan, and 1/3 Irish Creme Decaf from By The Pound in A2.

Grind it medium-fine, add near boiling water halfway up the presspot and stir well, then add the rest of the water and set the top on.  Wait a couple minutes for just the right combination of caffeine and other goodies to move out of the beans and into the water (and perhaps even some of the ions in our well water to adsorb onto the coffee grounds) and then give it a slow, 30-second press to the bottom of the pot.

Meanwhile, the rest of the hot water has been warming our coffee cups.  Pour those off into the dishwater, and pour Mandyrose’s coffee first (she likes it hot).  Add maple syrup to sweeten a bit, pour in a dose of good (really good, fresh, non-homogenated) whole milk (shake a bit first so it’s not all cream), stir once and serve.  Then pour mine and sweeten, sans milk (ok, sometimes I add the milk too).

Creamy, a little bit Irish, mmmmm.

Now about presspots… there’s just something wonderful and clean about this coffee’s taste that I don’t get anywhere else.  I think it’s because no matter how fancy the machine, you just can’t get access to fully clean every part and hose and pipe that the water touches… or if you can, you don’t often do so.  Hot water with ions leaves residues when it evaporates away… period.  You can’t avoid it.  Distilled water? Maybe.  But not once it gets coffee in it.

But a presspot is glass and steel, with perhaps a bit of plastic near the top for a final strain (but my next one won’t have that plastic), but basically you’ve got hot water and coffee in an easily cleaned vessel, pure and simple.  And the taste of the coffee is all coffee, no residue.

My mother and I have discussed coffee over the years.  I had bought her some better beans a few times, and made my best for her, but she didn’t really like any of them.  Each time I visited I would try some different things to see what she liked, and finally one day she said, regarding a cup of joe I had not made, “Now this is what I’m talking about!”  The common denominator, after all these years, was the taste of the residue from coffee makers.  The particular coffee in question was from one of those enormous church percolator pots, with the big coffee basket on top.  The crew in charge had (fortunately) not over percolated this brew, so it was as good as such coffee gets, but was full of the unmistakable taste of years of hard water + ordinary coffee grounds with a simple rinse instead of cleaning.  Those big church-hall coffee makers are something else in that regard, building a patina of taste that lingers with me from my earliest coffee tasting attempts at church functions when I was 7 or 8 (lots of cream and sugar).  But that’s what Mom likes!  It’s that residue taste that is missing from all my other attempts to introduce her to coffee bliss.  So I just use her coffee in her coffee maker when I visit her, and all is well.

Ordinary coffee makers (of the Mr. Coffee variety) do the same thing, more or less.  Mostly less, of course, but unless you clean the heck out of them, with hot vinegar washes and the works, they gradually build up the same types of residue and produce the same types of extra tastes for you to get accustomed to.  I spent a week recently with a friend who makes espresso in a beautiful machine, a machine fastidiously cleaned… except of course it isn’t.  There are innards that get residue built up, and I could detect something like a residue buildup taste, or at least I believed I could.

But my presspot, it’s just coffee and the glass.  Pure and simple, and repeatable.  Our coffee always tastes the same.  Mom doesn’t like it much, but she doesn’t have to.  She knows what she likes.  We do too.  And with my third little cup finished, so is this post.  Have a good day.  Oh, and Hi Mom! :-)

Here’s the recipe, to go with the post!  :)

This started as a recipe from The Zucchini Cookbook, by Paula Simmons.  I have modified it to my own tastes quite a bit.

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup olive oil, or less
• 1 1/4 cup sugar, or less
• 2 T blackstrap molasses
• 2 eggs
• 1 t vanilla
• 1/2 cup sour milk (Or 1/2 c milk w/ 2 t lemon juice or vinegar added.  Or 1/2 c yogurt.)
• 1 c white flour
• 1 c whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/2 c barley flour             (So, 2 1/2 c flour total - you can experiment)
• 5 heaping T good quality unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2 t baking powder
• 1 t baking soda
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/4 t nutmeg
• scant 1/4 t cardamom
• 2 1/2 packed cups grated green zucchini (original recipe called for 2 c, cubed)
• 1/2 cups dark chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9×12″ square cake pan. (if desired, “flour” the pan w/ more cocoa powder.) Cream the butter, olive oil, sugar, and molasses together.  Add eggs, vanilla, and sour milk, and beat until smooth. Fold in the grated zucchini.  Sift together the dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients with dry ingredients, stirring just until combined well.  Pour into pan, and smooth with spatula to evenly fill pan.  Sprinkle the top with chocholate chips, using as many as preferred.  Bake about 30 minutes (?) until toothpick comes out clean.  (Original recipe says bake 40-45 min at 325.  I tend to not watch the time, but

go by smell and the toothpick test.  Sometimes I turn the temp down to 325 halfway through the cooking.)

This cake is really soft and crumbly.  Barley flour gives it a soft heavy density that’s really delectable.

You can just use regular flour, but it will be a different cake.  I like the zucchini grated in it much better (than cubed), and can get more in that way.  If I’m using a big overgrown zucchini, I only grate up the outer portions, not the seedy inside.  Don’t use a zucchini so big its skin is getting tough.

I think I overdid it in the heat a bit today.  I wouldn’t usually work out in the hottest part of a hot day, but several sources told me that severe thunderstorms were on the way for the afternoon.  And I so wanted to get the last of the onions in!  It was a perfect moment for harvesting - after some dry days without much rain on them, a very hot dry sunny day.  Onions have to be cured (dried) carefully in order to last into the winter months.  I’m not planning to buy any onions, so I’m pretty invested in curing ours carefully.  Rain on them in the afternoon would have seriously interfered.   So I went and pulled the rest of the onions, laid them out in the sun to dry, and then didn’t stop there, because there was so much else to do, clearing beds, weeding, harvesting…  It’s amazing how fast you can overheat - working fast so you can be done sooner, feeling the sun on your skin and the sweat dripping everywhere feels kindof good, if you keep moving, keep distracted.  Before I knew it, I was pretty tired, headache starting up, face beet red, vague nausea.  It’s taken several hours of fluids and cooling down again to start to feel better.  And then it never did rain - blue sky all day.

But this post is supposed to be about onions.  Onions are one one of those magical things to grow, to me.  When the bulbs start to fatten up, and you can store them and use them months later, it just seems amazing, when I think of them coming from tiny little seeds, and the most impossibly thin frail little stems.  I grow all my onions from seed now, after years of disappointment with the little bulb onion sets.  I never got decent onions from those, and many of them went to seed and made no bulbs at all.  It made a lot more sense after I learned about what impacts onions’ growth in one of my favorite gardening books - The Book of Garden Secrets, by Dorothy Patent and Diane Bilderback.  When you buy the bulbs, you don’t have any idea how they’ve been stored, and it turns out that exposure to certain amounts of light and temperatures will influence whether the onions that grow from the bulbs go to seed, or produce a food onion.  I can be more sure of what happens to them when I grow them myself, and that has resulted in astronomically better onion success.

We grew 3 varieties this year:  Copra, Redwing, and Varsity.  Redwing did beautifully last year when Copra failed; this year is vice-versa.  Varsity is new to me, and I’m very happy with it - huge perfectly round yellow onions that are gorgeous.  The final test will be to see how they store.

To cure onions well for storage, you are supposed to wait until their tops fall over, and stop watering them at this point.  (This is where the unpredictability of rain comes in.)  When they have been in the ground under these conditions for 10 days or so, you pull them, hopefully on a hot dry sunny day.  Lay them out on the ground in the sun to dry, but only for a day or two.  Next, they are brought indoors and laid out on a screen for finishing drying.  When their stems have no wetness left at all, I braid them into onion ropes and hang them for storage.  And that is our onion supply for the year! If we are lucky, they may last into early March, when the first chives and green onions come in, and the cycle starts again.

So, I just had to post our lunch today, or is it dinner.  Our tomatoes have been SO incredibly good.  They’ve also been bursting at the seams, the rains have been so frequent and the humidity high.  Our horizontal tomato bushes (hardly ‘plants’) are going nuts, and it’s way hard to keep up.

BLT w/ S4L in the making

With tomatoes, we’ve had so many split fruit this year that we have only been able to take a small fraction to the Westside Farmers Market.  The best go to market, and the rest stay here for canning and eating.  But today, we made BLT’s from two of the nicest tomatoes we took to market… and nobody bought.  The crazy thing is, these are just incredibly good eating tomatoes, the kind everyone says “Oh, I wish I could find tomatoes like I remember from the garden when I was a kid.  Now THOSE were tomatoes!”  Well that’s what these are.

But the thing is, they don’t look like we remember them.  And I think it’s a problem of implanted memories, like the ones they worry about in criminal trials where witnesses try to remember details of something that happened years ago, but they include details and ideas that they may believe are actual memories, but are really just implanted ideas that have insinuated themselves over the years.

In the case of tomatoes, we’ve become conditioned to believe that these mystical tomatoes are red.  Perfectly red.  Uniformly and gorgeously consistently red.  Because that’s what line we are being fed by the grocery stores.  We can’t help it… Agribusiness has bred red tomatoes with long shelf life for decades now, and that’s what we see in the store shelves.  These tomatoes get red before they’re really ripe, so that they can be picked early when they’re hard and can be transported easily.  They’ve got tough skins so that they hold up to transport from big farm to distributor warehouse and warehouse to big box grocery produce section.  They treat them with ethylene gas to help ripen them up.  And the message is not just in front of us everytime we go to the produce section… and who (besides us) doesn’t go to the produce section?

These damn perfect red hard skinned tasteless bastards of agribusiness are sold to us with every TV commercial touting “Fresh!”.  Pizza commercials, restaurant commercials, pasta commercials, and in countless magazine articles.  Red.  All red, consistently red, inside and out red.

But it’s not where the really good tomatoes are.  It’s not what we grow to eat at Dragonwood, and it’s not what we sell (at least not very much).  We grow the tomatoes we want most to eat, and they’re not very red typically, they’re not very consistent, they’re just not usually “beautiful” to the modern consumer’s eye.  I’m not going to list off all the varieties we grow… and I certainly can’t pick every tomato out of the garden basket and tell you which it is (Mandy can, mostly).  They’re yellow and orange, purple and green, and usually inconsistent.  Some have green shoulders even when they’re perfectly ripe, and some have such deep purple insides that they look a bit rotten from the outside!  But I’ve learned the difference between conventional (red!) beauty and tomatoes prized for their taste.  I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this tomato season.  In fact, I want to thank all those customers at the market this week who didn’t pick the best tomatoes so that they could go into my lunch sandwich today.  But I do hope they (some of them) might read this, and at their next market go to the vendors who prize their tomatoes for flavor, who have mostly tomatoes that look funny (less than perfect red), and talk tomato with the growers, and take home a variety of funny looking tomatoes to relish.  Vive la différence!

Oh, I got off topic didn’t I?  We have no (capital L) lettuce these days, so our sandwiches had green bean slaw, which you can see in the photo.  It’s fantastic stuff… beans + non-iodized salt + time, and bingo, what a delish relish.  With a side of tomato wedges, all colors.  Mmmm.

Zucchini Chocolate Chip Yum

How much can I say about this healthy breakfast treat?  A cup of coffee and a nice piece of Zucchini Chocolate Chip Yum.  Ahhh.  Oh, and that’s my favorite coffee cup, a DaRo design original… Mandy has a handle free DaRo cup with a similar glaze pattern, our morning coffee ritual cups.  Too bad we don’t have zucchini all year round to start the day like this during all our Dragonwood seasons.

One of the interesting parts about doing the farmers market has been observing people, and their funny interactions with produce.

Sometimes it involves little experiments with human nature.  For example, last year, I noticed that as the garlic basket became picked over, people had left one very large bulb of garlic, and were choosing smaller ones instead.  I picked it up to see why - was it broken up?  Was it moldy?  Was there a crushed clove on it?  Nope.  The stem on top that the plant grows out of was twisted around the bulb at an unusual angle.  When we planted it, we probably got the clove headed the wrong direction in the soil, and the plant grew around itself a bit it compensate.  Do people eat the stem?  No!  It’s part of the dry papery coverings that get peeled and (hopefully) composted.  The rest of the bulb was enormous and perfect, but people were scared off by a kinked stem at the top.

So, out of curiosity, as the season wore on I left that bulb of garlic in the mix, and didn’t cut off its funny stem.   The garlic options became fewer and  fewer, smaller and smaller, but still, everyone rejected the bulb with the kinked stem. People were seriously buying garlic half its size, for the same price, instead of settling for a large but slightly unusual shape.  It never sold!  We took it home, and just to complete the experiment, I opened it up and peeled some cloves.  The largest ones were big enough to save as seed garlic, so I kept them for planting.  The rest was perfect - larger than the garlic we usually get to use.  We save the best for seed, sell the next best, and use the smalls for everyday ourselves.

Tomatoes always get a lot of debate and commentary.  We are growing Roman Candle sauce-type tomatoes this year.  One source description reads “… pure yellow banana shaped tomatoes…. very flavorful and have very few seeds. Excellent for making salsa, sauce, and gourmet dishes…”  They are lovely!  Bright yellow, they really do look just like a big strong candle flame.  Wonderful flavor.  Didn’t sell a single one at the market so far!  People ask about them.  They pick them up, exclaim, talk about them, and then say things like the person who asked in a woeful tone, “But what do you DOoooo with a YELLOW TOMATO???”  Or, “Well, my husband would never eat a YELLOW tomato.”

How I feel about all this depends on my mood, and most of the time my reaction is a jovial desire to educate people, tell them about what they could try, how good something is, encourage experimentation, etc.  There’s a bit of suppressing a laugh, grin, or teasing remark.  Sometimes though, I try not to wonder at their families eating FD&C yellow 5-colored cakes, candy, pickles, popcorn, jello, etc….but not, OMG, a YELLOW TOMATO.

To my delight, though, every now and then these sorts of interactions are offset by the really satisifying ones.  The woman who hurried up to the table and excitedly pulled the beautiful white-and-lavender unusually-shaped eggplants out and set them on the scale in a towering pile, for example.  She knew what she was getting.    She wasn’t among the crowd who “just can’t even think of it as an eggplant if it’s not dark-skinned”.

I think maybe I grow for these individuals.  We’re not big producers, and part of the reason I grow my own food is to get interesting produce I can’t afford to buy, or that can’t be mass produced:  The gourmet types, the thin delicate-skinned varieties, the colorful nutrient-rich varieties, the skinny flavorful beans, the finely textured baby veggies, chemical-free.  Not the mainstream.  The mainstream makes the money, I suppose.  But recognizing quality and uniqueness brings an incomparable satisfaction.

On a lighter note, the funniest overheard quote of the day?  Next door to us, the Humane Society had a table display set up.  Behind them was one of Zingerman’s permanent lunch menu advertising signs.  A woman came up to the Humane Society’s table, eyeing the Zingerman’s sign behind them, and asked, “So - What’s your Soup-of-the-Day?”  Grin.

Short list of what we’ll be bringing to The WestSide Farmer’s Market tomorrow!

Eggs - reserved egg orders will be held for pickup until 6pm, and  unreserved eggs available on demand, while they last!

Bagged mixed baby lettuces

Bagged “Wild Baby Greens” mix

Lamb’s quarters -  amazingly delicious-nutritious right now!

Arugula

Head lettuce

Herbs

Rhubarb

Potted tomato plants

The greens are *really good* right now.  They grew fast in the heat, then have gotten juicy and crunchy in the rain.  They won’t last like this for very many weeks.  I have a theory that most people who think they don’t like greens haven’t gotten to taste really fresh, really good, really well-prepared greens.  Give them a try!

We’re so excited to be heading back, and we look forward to seeing you there!  Please come and visit us at the market!!

A little-known fresh spring delicacy we love is chive blossoms.  Chives themselves are greeted with great enthusiasm for about a month in the early spring, when we’ve generally run out of onions, gotten sick of dried herbs, and the new onion greens haven’t appeared yet.  Chives find their way into a lot of our cooking and salads in April and May, but by the end of May (especially if it’s been hot like this year) the greens can get a little boring.  And then - the blossoms arrive!

Chive blossoms can be used in any way that regular chopped chives are.  They are subtler on flavor, and beautiful to behold.  They’re especially nice as a garnish on top of salads, noodles, potato or egg salad, sushi, scrambled eggs, etc.

They come as cut flowers, (we’ll have them at Market) and are really easy to use in cooking:  just take the clump of blossoms between thumb and fingers and gently pull them off the stem.  Then scatter over a dish!

Today’s chive blossom recipe for us:

Cold Udon noodles with Baby Greens & Chive Blossoms

Cook the udon in boiling water, drain, and soak briefly in icewater to cool.  Meanwhile, chop green onions, a few radishes, a handful of fresh cilantro, and pull the blossoms off about 5 chive stems.  Make a dressing by combining olive oil, sesame oil, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, a dash of maple syrup, and a bit of hot pepper oil, if desired.  I never measure - just add and experiment.  Lime juice is good here too.  When the noodles are cooled, drain them well, pour enough dressing over them to coat, and toss with the chopped onion, radish, cilantro, and chive blossom.  Prepare a  bed of greens on the plate, dress it lightly with a stream of the same dressing, and put a helping of the noodles on top.  Today we added an little cold leftover grilled steak and asparagus from last night.  Sprinkle on a few more chive blossoms for garnish, and enjoy!

Learning to overwinter greens was one of those lifechanging events for me, when I first started about 6 or 7 years ago.  This year we’ve been eating out of the garden since February, when the hoop tunnels started to yield the first spinach and mache.  A lot of the first salads are as much foraged as cultivated.  In March, our greens featured the spinach & mache, a little overwintered lettuce, violet leaves, a little overwintered kale & chard putting out tiny new leaves, overwintered radiccio, early-emerging sorrel, chervil, parsley, and dandelion greens. A couple planters sown with spindly lettuce and mache, grown on the porch, filled it out.

Dandelions allowed to grow and covered with mulch give blanched tender leaf sprouts with a flavor very similar to Belgian endive, their close relative.  Rather than weed them out, I leave many of them be in the fall, cover them with leaves, and harvest in March and April.

Our banner above, for this season, shows our overwintered “wild baby greens” salad mix.  Lettuce is being planted now, to come in for May and start off at the Westside Farmers Market in June.  :)