week 13

Cooking in Season
Week 13

I am completely exhausted. I got back at 2am last night from a fast trip down to North Carolina for their picking, crushing, pressing, and first fermentation of grapes. I spent all weekend following a master wine maker like a little puppy dog, constantly asking –what’s that- what are you doing – why does that smell – questions. My head is going to explode with everything I learned. I’m running on low sleep and high stress. The grape harvest season is impending at my vineyard up here along with apple crushing, pressing, fermenting and AGH! Why does everything happen all at once?

While down in North Carolina, I got fed incredibly well, including okra from the winery’s organic garden. I haven’t found as many okra pods as in past years as I think my grandma has been stealing it slowly and accumulating a “mess” which is the term for a bunch of okra… enough okra to mess with fixing. Small pods can be sliced and pan fried, covered in flour or corn meal and a pinch of salt with quite a bit of oil. Larger pods can be split open and as long as the seeds are still white and not terribly hard, scoop them out and add them to the top of a salad for an interesting treat. But I’m having trouble getting enough messes for all the baskets, so hopefully within the next few weeks, if you want to try it, there’ll be a basket with it in there. I do not like the slimy gumbo style okra that’s in soups. Fried is the way to go.
The eggplant is still doing well in the back garden. The tomatoes and ground cherries are collapsing in on themselves. The peppers are loving this heat and drought, but the lettuce I just seeded looks like it’s crying. The potatoes are just confused, but growing through it. Our squash is getting eaten from every pest that squash can be eaten and we’ve lost 75% of our melon crop this year because of rabbits, squash bugs, drought, and that damn peacock taking a peck out of every melon just to make sure they’re all not ripe yet. What a jerk.

When I worked as the cook for a vegetarian restaurant, my specialty was soups and namely, my fall / winter special soup called “Sunshine Soup.” Pretty much, I would take everything the color of sunshine and put it in a pot. There’s a lot of margin for personal preference, but my mom is on a new food restriction program where she’s pretty much a vegetarian to detox and hopefully heal her condition that has her rendered pretty much vegetarian. Her dietician recommends eating winter squash and sweet potatoes, so I whipped up a batch of sunshine soup and it was gone in one day. She loved it. (Even without the copious quantities of butter I used to use for the restaurant.)

Anyway, start with the acorn squash in your baskets. Take a meat cleaver and a mallet, rubber or wood is fine. Press the cleaver down a bit into the squash and then start tapping the back of the cleaver with the mallet. That’s the easiest way I’ve found to open up winter squash without really hurting your hands or almost losing a finger.Scoop out the seeds and put in the oven set to medium heat to soften the squash. While that’s in the oven, put on a pot of water and cut a couple of onions in half with some lentils (optional) and start them boiling. In another skillet, sauté up some diced onions with garlic and anything else yellow or orange such as just a few apples, pears, or shredded carrots, corn or red or yellow peppers. Meat eaters could throw in some ham chunks or brown some sausage with your onions. Next, move onto the sweet potatoes, cutting them into one inch slices. Put them on a cookie sheet with a bit of a rim and drizzle with vegetable oil and put them in the oven too. Take out the squash, let it cool for a bit then scoop it out. Remove the halves of onions that are probably soggy by now and put the scoops of squash in with the boiling lentils. Once the sweet potatoes have softened a bit, cut them into cubes and add them to the boiling pot as well. Add the sauté pot about 10 minutes before serving. Finish it off with a little bit of ginger, salt and pepper.

This soup turns out warm and hearty, which makes it a perfect winter soup. I prefer sautéing the vegetables separate and adding them just at the end so they don’t lose all their flavor through hours of boiling. This recipe works with any winter squash or you could add red potatoes instead of sweet potatoes.

This week I am going to a bunch of local orchards to pick up apples for our cider at work, so I’m sure the apple pies will start getting put up in the freezer very soon. So delicious. I don’t remember seeing too many orchards in North Carolina. Score one for Ohio! - Janee