Young radicchio starting to head

Last week’s bounty we took to the market included what were - to us - exciting additions of puntarelle, endive, and radicchio.  People bought the puntarelle, to some extent, often because it sounded unique and they were looking for something new to try.  But the beautiful heads of radicchio and frisée endive with its pretty blanched center, stayed on the table with the exception of one sale each.  So we have been eating a lot of both of them, and loving it so much that I’m not sorry they didn’t sell at market.  Except, I’m sad for how much people don’t know about greens and what they are missing in flavor, variety, and nutrition.

So I thought I’d do a series of posts about my experiences with these more unusual greens, and what delicious things to do with them.  The bitter greens I am talking about are just that - the bitter ones, from the chicory family.  These are different from the mustards - arugula, mustard greens, etc.  Mustards are all degrees of peppery, hot, and spicy, but not really bitter, while chicories are all degrees of bitter, but really not spicy.   I am not as much of a fan of the mustards as I am of the chicories.  This first post is devoted to Chicorium intybus, the radicchio.

Radicchio beside young leeks

This one isn't forming a head - just loose leaves

I have a lot of radicchio this year.  Two kinds - Palla Rossa, and Palla di Fuoco Rossa. I have finally learned that to have a lot of heads of radicchio, you have to grow a lot of it.  About every third plant is forming a really good head.  Some of the others have gone straight to a bolt - sending up a flower stalk, and some have turned into a ridiculous loose fluffy clump of leaves that should be in a head, but didn’t quite manage it.  Fortunately, the chickens love them, and can eat their fill of the unusable plants.

Chicken family happily feasting on outer leaves of radicchio

The delicate way the Fedco seed catalogue describes this unpredictable unreliability of radiccio amuses me:  “These radicchios are easy to raise from transplants although they have not yet been refined to absolute uniformity…”

That’s okay.  I like it.  I like the imperfection, and the wildness of it.  Our heads of radicchio are often a little bigger, softer, and looser than the rock-hard, small, dry grocery store radicchio heads.  If you are buying radicchio from me at the market, I’ve left some of the larger outer leaves on to keep them fresher - you can strip these off and find more of a head inside.

Beautifully headed and ready for picking

These things are as gorgeous as a rose, to me.

Two of our favorite ways to eat radicchio are cooked lightly with bacon, vinegar, and maple syrup, or mixed with frisée endive and tossed with a garlic-anchovy dressing and parmesan cheese.  Ohhhh, deliciousness.  I think that people often don’t know how to work with the bitter element in bitter greens and cooking, and therefore avoid it.  If you don’t think you like bitter greens, the key is to either cook it, which softens the bitterness, or to mix it with other greens or other foods to dilute the bitterness, or to dress it with flavors that compliment and change the bitterness.  (Or all three!)

Vinegar and acid flavors work magic on bitter chicories.  It seems like the bite of the acidity covers, or cuts, or changes the bitter flavor, and somehow, leaves it tasting sweet in the aftertaste.  All kinds of vinegar, and lemon can be used.  I also like a sour-sweet combination, like the vinegar-maple syrup dressings we often make.  Strong flavors - parmesan cheese, anchovies, garlic, good olive oil, and salty meats all also complement the bitters and work to the improvement of both tastes.

Dragonwood Radicchio with Bacon, Maple, and Vinegar:

pink and white hearts of radicchio, being shredded for sautée

Slice up a head of radicchio, or two (it cooks down to a fraction of its raw size) into fettuccini-like ribbons. While you’re slicing, start a skillet heating, and fry some diced bacon.  Slice up an onion or some shallots.  When the bacon is done, toss in the shallots, then the cut-up radicchio, into the pan with the bacon, and toss and turn it to coat it with the oil.  Add a tablespoon or so of red wine, or apple cider, or balsamic vinegar, and a splash of maple syrup, and salt and pepper as desired.  The heat should be high enough to cook away most of the juices as they form.  Keep tossing and stirring while the radicchio wilts down and cooks - just a few minutes is all it takes, and then it is done.  We like this topped with a fried egg and toast on the side, for breakfast.

If you like to grill, there are all kinds of grilling recipes for radicchio - here is a delicious-sounding example.

It’s a great irony of being a blogging farmer, that when there is the most going on to write about, there is simply no time to write.  The days are growing long enough that I’m frequently working outside until 9pm.  Work is intense enough that it’s hard to carry a camera to document it.  It is such a race to get the little plants and seeds into the ground at good times - at the right time for their planting, before a good rain, before the days get too long…so much to think about and plan for.

And it changes so quickly; in the other job as a midwife, I went to three births last week and at the end of the busy time spent away, I realized the trees had leaves!  When did that happen?  So much has changed in three weeks…

Kitchen garden less than a month ago...

Kitchen garden yesterday.

Yesterday was a perfect planting day.  Cool but comfortable temperature, cloudy threatening to rain but holding off.  It was fabulous, and we really worked.  44 celeriac, 48 celery, 200 leeks, 80-ish spinach, 40 radicchio, onions I didn’t count, 2 kinds of potatoes, and long rows of radish, beet, chard, arugula, and other greens - all joined the hundreds already in the ground.  Weeded everything, moved tomatoes and peppers through hardening off rotations, mowed, rototilled, mulched, helped family with other planting projects.  It’s odd to mention numbers, as I know this is nothing compared to big farms and seriously rocking CSAs.   It’s new to me to even count - I don’t usually, but yesterday I was getting curious about the numbers.  We have just the two of us working this farm, around two other jobs, and we’ll take to market whatever we end up having.

We are harvesting enormous amounts of gorgeous salad greens. Two meals out of the day are usually a European-bistro-style greens mix with egg and good dressing to top it.  After a long winter, there is nothing so satisfying as a strong salad mix of dandelion, spinach, baby kale, and young lettuce leaves, with a green-garlic and anchovy vinaigrette and an egg on top.  We celebrated the first few spears of asparagus on this salad, sprinkled with chives!

We spent most of yesterday in the gardens, digging out grasses, planting out lettuces, readying other beds for more of the same. Two tables in the living room are taken up with sprouts under grow lights, and the porch overflows. Conservatively Mandy has 5000 plants growing in pots and/or already planted out.

It is so nice now to be eating fresh greens every day, and sometimes at two meals a day already. Fried eggs on a bed of baby greens, mmmm.

Coldframe littuces getting some fresh air. Missing ones in the middle have been planted out in the new bed, top left.

Two days ago I found Mandy planting out some rows of 3-4″ tall deer’s tongue lettuce… I didn’t recognize them from the sprouts she’d been growing. Instead, these had been planted as seed last fall outside and then covered with a cold frame… a small garden spot about 3′ by 3′ with a hay bale back end, bricks and hay sides, and a south-facing 50-year old wooden window frame to make a tiny greenhouse. All winter the lettuces sat there mulling things over, and in the past two months of slow spring they came out of hibernation. Now they’re so crowded that she took out just two handfuls and filled rows of lettuce sprouts ready to grow big and strong.

And much more to do in the garden.  Mmmmm.  Recently we’ve been doing a lot, as is our wont in April, weather and circumstances permitting.

Red, red newbarb.

There’s rhubarb to discover under the leaves, to expose and (for some of them) to cover under ceramic pots.  We get nice long juicy stalks with less energy going into making big big leaves.  The first of the season though (the newbarbs) are just so red and beautiful and luscious.  Rhubarb custard does not last long around here.  Very nice with coffee for first breakfast (before the eggs and greens).

Last week, not in our gardens but a few steps away in the hens’ free-range territory, I found a patch of white tucked away in the barbs of the black raspberry patch.  We hadn’t seen it before, but there it was, a nice patch of Bloodroot flowers.  I haven’t tried breaking off a stem to see the reddish juices inside.  They’re just too nice.  And the hens have completely ignored them, it seems to me.  They might know something I don’t about bloodroot’s flavor (or perhaps the aftereffects).

And finally, inside, we find Sassy expressing her innermost desire for the high diving board.  Nearly every day she finds a comfy spot and assumes a near-10 quality tuck position in her sleep, dreaming of her splash-free pool entry at the bottom.  May we all have such dreams to tuck into as we sleep.

Diver cat, tuck position.

This week, I was struck by two moments that made me think about egg yolks.  The first was a lovely salad in a nice restaurant.  This very unique local restaurant continually champions local farmers and local products, and uses these in their meals to a great extent.  So I was particularly surprised to note the color of the hard-boiled, halved egg on my plate.  I couldn’t eat it - I realized I’d grown accustomed to our eggs and their healthy-looking, brightly-colored yolks.  I used to have many egg aversions - utter nausea at the sight of a runny soft-boiled egg, distaste for other people’s scrambled eggs, complete avoidance of anything with a raw egg in it. Many of these feelings have changed a lot with using our own eggs. This egg, though, brought those aversions back to me suddenly.  It was pale, kind of beige.  It looked unappealing.  I brought it home in a box and photographed it to show what I’m talking about.  And then it went on the compost pile.

The other moment occurred the next day when I made our traditional springtime lemon curd.  Lemon curd is basically a pudding made out of lemon juice, sugar, and egg yolks.  I halve the sugar, at least, and increase the egg yolks and lemon.  Our homemade lemon curd is the most gorgeous bright yellow.  Again, I was struck by the comparison, and I took a photo to show it.  Lemon juice is pale or nearly clear - all the yellow color in this recipe is provided by the egg yolks. What you’re seeing is the color of egg yolks from pastured hens fed a wide variety of foods.   What this post is about is this naturally-sourced color that has gone missing from commercial foods.

When I was a kid, mustard yellow or autumn harvest gold were popular colors for kitchens, appliances, and linoleum.  Probably due to this oversaturation, I remember declaring that yellow was my least favorite color, and I would never have a yellow kitchen.

I find it fascinating now that this color fad of the late ’60s and early ’70s happened to be timed to coordinate with about the time that eggs were beginning to be castigated, and healthy yellow yolks systematically eliminated from Americans’ diets.  Americans were encouraged to remove and discard egg yolks and scramble the whites only (have you ever tried this? eww…), to use low-cholesterol egg “substitutes”, and to use boxed mixes for cakes, muffins, and puddings, brilliantly tinged with artificial yellow color that you mixed with zero to two pale supermarket eggs, rather than make a “high cholesterol” nourishing homemade pudding, custard, or dessert out of 6 or 8 farm eggs.  Our kitchens looked bright and nutritious, but the food?  Not so much.

I wish people asked themselves more often why there is any need for artificial yellow color.  I mean, if it doesn’t add anything to flavor, consistency, recipe performance… why should you care if your “yellow cake” is yellow or not?  The answer is, “Yellow just looks better - it’s supposed to be yellow”…  and this leads to the next question of why?  Why are people attracted to “golden” in their food?  Why was I averse to eating the pale egg?

In my opinion, at least, the answer is that our bodies are trying to tell us what’s good for us nutritionally. Naturally occurring golden yellow is a visual signal telling us that the food contains important nutrients, like carotenoids.  But we’ve allowed ourselves to be duped - we’ve taken out the natural food sources that make things yellow, and replaced them with an artificial color to fool our eyes and brains into being drawn to it because it looks like nutrition.  Or, in the case of the egg straight-up itself, we’ve gotten used to the pallor and forgotten how to think about what it means.  How outrageous that people have done this to themselves, and fallen for it.  I wonder sometimes if part of why so many of us are driven to blog about food, to marvel at what we grow and produce ourselves, is because it is so astonishing, so difficult to assimilate, the extent of the deterioration of quality we’ve allowed in our food.  Rediscovering the colors and flavors and nutrition of real food is a revelation, and shows up the sad state mainstream food is in.  Check out this site, sporting a sick-looking egg, that insists color has nothing to do with nutrition, even as it discusses the fact that pale yolks are associated with feed problems.  Strange disconnect, eh?  And here’s info about pastured egg nutrition from a source we trust more.

Before we started keeping chickens and making sure that their diets contained enough greens, berries, bugs, and vegetables to produce nice eggs, I never thought about the color of yolks and how that affects the foods that you make out of eggs.  I made lemon curd with commercial eggs, and never gave its weak pallor a thought.  I actually wondered why there was such a thing as “yellow cake” and why  it should need to be yellow.  My first baking projects with our own eggs were almost a shock - we couldn’t stop admiring the golden color of batters and the products.

This is a really interesting link to a European egg information site.  I have somewhat mixed feelings about it because if you follow the links, it’s done by a manufacturer of supplements - promoting feeding hens supplements to improve the nutrition of the egg.  I agree with improving the nutrition of the egg, but I think it should be done by the vegetable-and-bug approach if possible, instead of synthesizing the nutrients.  It’s not so hard to raise a pumpkin patch and some extra kale, and feed the hens from that well into or through the winter.  Still, regardless, I love that European site because it talks about things that just aren’t “significant” mainstream considerations here in the U.S., like how important the color of the yolk of an egg is to your nutrition.

Feeding hens bright fruits and veggies even in winter

A truly pastured hen on summer forage

Sugar Snow Last Week

The maple sap is running, and we are having adventures with the various forms of maple sugar!

It’s been pretty stop-n-start for the past two weeks.  For a couple days of warmer weather the sap will run, then it stops for the longer freezes again.  So the batches have been smaller, and more conducive to experimenting with going beyond the maple syrup stage.

Maple Cream

Maple Cream, fruit, and pound cake

With the very first boiling down, we made maple cream.  We haven’t had this since 2009, when we discovered this delicacy, and that it can be accomplished in your own kitchen.  We got the temperature wrong though, and didn’t take it quite high enough, so the maple cream was runnier than last time…. no problem!  That just made it easier to drizzle over things like fruit and homemade pound cake…

Maple syrup boiling

When you make maple cream, you take it up to a certain temperature above the boiling point, then cool it rapidly in an ice bath.  We didn’t pour quite all the hot syrup into the ice bath, but returned a little bit of it to the stove top, and while the part that would become maple cream was cooling, we boiled the rest some more, to a higher temperature.

pouring maple sugar over snow

When this was ready, we poured it over a bowlful of the incredible light beautiful clean snow that had fallen that evening - creating maple taffy/the original sno-cone.  Yes, it means eating yellow snow, and it’s exquisite.

The next maple sugar project was actually a complete mistake.  We had a couple days of a slow, small sap run, and just kept adding the small amounts to the big reducing pan that sat atop the woodstove.  The pan ever so slowly evaporated away, and we actually forgot about it, until I checked it finally and found a crust of hardened sugar around the edge of some very reduced syrup.  I knew that if you got the syrup to a certain temperature,

granulated maple sugar

it will granulate as it cools if you start stirring it, so I tried stirring it.  It was like magic - suddenly from dark syrup color, the whole thing turned light yellow, and began turning into grains.  It didn’t take much stirring, just another turn here and there as it cooled - and right before us we had two-thirds of a quart of our first homemade granulated sugar!  It’s amazing:  like a maple-flavored cross between turbinado and brown sugar.  It is much lighter than we thought it would be - likely being early in the season it’s a high grade syrup with a lighter color.

Wow, we sound like sugar fiends.  All this, after every day in my other job, I counsel people about how and why to avoid sugar.  I guess my bottom line is, if you’re going to have some sugar, have some GOOD sugar.  We have some processed white sugar in the house, but it is used

unrefined homemade granulated sugar

almost exclusively for certain baking projects and making jams and fruit preserves.  Nearly everything else we do is based around maple, or local honey, including sweetening coffee. And maple sugar candy and cream are special treats that only happen once a year or less!

Here’s my favorite reference page for temperatures and recipes for maple sugar products.