WYSIWYG Jenny

Turnips: the sweet, buttery underdogs of the root vegetables. Seriously, get some well grown ones and give ‘em a try. Sooooo goooood.

Turnip faux-sotto

Ingredients
4 small-medium turnips, with greens
2 T butter
1/2 t paprika
Salt
2 C leftover brown rice
1/3 C white wine
1/4 cup grated aged manchego or gran pecorino or some other yummy mildish cheese

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.

Cut tops from turnips. Remove stems from greens.

Cut turnips into quarter-inch bite-sized slices.

Place greens in boiling water, cover, and set timer for 10 minutes.

Melt butter in a large skillet. Add turnips, paprika, and salt, and toss to coat. Continue to cook, tossing occasionally.

When timer goes off, drain the turnip greens well and add to the skillet. Also add brown rice and wine. Stir until excess liquid from wine has evaporated.

Remove from heat, and stir in cheese. Serve with a drizzle of olive oil, and be sure to tell your guests about how long you slaved away, constantly stirring this creamy risotto.

Pecan pie is one of the few dishes my mom’s family serves at every single holiday dinner. It was also one of the first recipes I got to help with; when I was little, my mom and I would arrange the pecan halfs on the empty pie shell, carefully resisting the temptation to press them in, so they would rise to the top during baking. As a teenager, I made the pie myself a few times, and was always so proud of my contribution.

We’ve only ever used one recipe for pecan pie, and that’s Grandma’s recipe. I’m not sure if she actually wrote it herself, or if we call it that because she made it for so many years. The thing is, Grandma’s recipe uses corn syrup. In fact, it uses more corn syrup than anything else.

I did a wee bit of research online before last year’s holidays, trying to find a “real” pecan pie recipe that didn’t call for corn. I figured there would be an original recipe that people used before the advent of corn syrup.

As far as I can tell, I was wrong. Pecan pie was an invention of the processed food age, and the original recipe was printed on a bottle of Karo syrup! Yikes.

Luckily, I did find an alternative recipe by John Thorne. In place of corn syrup, he uses golden syrup, a British product that I can’t find around here. I’ve been using agave nectar instead, but I think any inverted sugar syrup — like honey or maple sugar — would work.

With dishes like this, the final product relies more on the quality of the ingredients than how you cook it. If you go out of your way to get truly full-flavored brown sugar, high quality butter (Straus!), and tasty little pecans, the pie will be exceptional.

I made this pie for Thanksgiving this year, and a couple family members dared to call it, “Better than Grandma’s.” Sorry Grandma, but it’s true. It’s unapologeticly untraditional, and it’s reaaaaaally yummy.

Pecan Pie

Ingredients

• 1 packed cup full-flavored brown sugar
• scant 2/3 cup agave nectar
• 3 tablespoons Meyer’s dark rum
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 3 eggs
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups broken pecan meats
• 9″ unbaked pie shell

1. Heat the brown sugar, butter, and agave nectar to boiling, stirring constantly and scraping foam from sides.
2. Boil for about 1 minute. Remove from heat and cool.
3. Beat eggs until creamy.
4. Temper eggs with sugar mixture, then combine along with salt, pecans, and rum.
5. Pour into shell and bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes. Cool before serving.

From Boys Own Book of Outdoor Sports

A wild turkey trap is made by first digging a ditch; then over one end is built a rude structure of logs, covered at the top. The structure should not be tight, but, of course, sufficiently close not to let the birds through. Indian corn is scattered about and in the ditch, and inside of the pen. The turkeys follow up corn in the ditch, and emerge from it on the inside. Once there, the silly birds never think of descending into the ditch, but walk round and round the pen, looking through the chinks of the logs for escape that way. To make all sure, the ditch should end about the center of the pen, and a bridge of sticks, grass and earth should be built over the ditch, just inside of the pen, and close to the logs; otherwise, in going around the bird might step inside the ditch, and once there it would follow the light and thereby reach the outside of the pen.

I have a hard time believing that there are people in the world who don’t like beets. BEETS ARE AMAZING.

Recently I’ve been braising beets, and it always turns out so goddamn good. I’m guessing it’s the high sugar content of these precious roots that makes it so special — when you reduce the cooking liquid, it turns into a glaze. Yummers.

Braised/Glazed Beets

Serves 4

• 4 T butter
• 1 onion, diced
• plenty of salt and pepper
• 1-2 T sherry vinegar
• 6 giganto leaves of Swiss chard, chopped
• 6 medium beets, cut into thin, bite-size pieces
• vegetable broth or water to cover

1. In a wide skillet, melt the butter. Add the onion and salt and cook until soft and translucent.
2. Add pepper, vinegar, and chard. Cook over medium heat for a couple minutes, until chard is wilted.
3. Add beets and pour in just enough water to almost cover the beets. Clamp on the lid and cook at a simmer, stirring ocassionally, until the beets are almost tender — you should be able to pierce it with a knife or fork, but feel a bit of resistance. (How long this takes depends largely on how thinly your beets are sliced.)
4. Remove the lid and continue to cook, stirring every couple minutes, until the cooking liquid has reduced to a thick glaze. Adjust seasoning and serve — it goes nicely with couscous.

I just made seven pints of spicy pickled carrots with wild fennel, and I’ve got a box of rhubarb waiting to be preserved in syrup tomorrow. Setting aside some of the harvest is a big part of eating locally, and it’s fun! I’ve hardly done any preserving before, but now that we’re past the peak of summer production, it suddenly seems too important to put off.

I’m hoping to get a pressure canner in the next couple weeks so I can get low-acid goodies canned in addition to the pickles and jams. Just thinking about it has got me day-dreaming of a winter full of colorful jars.

A list to ease my excitement:

• pickled beets
• raspberry jelly
• pickled artichokes
• tomato jam
• preserved winter squash
• preserved green beans
• crushed tomatoes
• diced tomatoes
• tomato sauce
• tomato juice
• apple sauce
• apple butter
• pears in syrup
• dill pickles
• pickled watermelon rind
• plum jam
• grape jelly
• pickled lemon cucumbers
• preserved sweet corn
• pear juice
• hot sauce
• ketchup

Yum. What else?

I registered for imdb.com just so I could share my comments on Elizabethtown — the worst movie I’ve seen since Demon Strike, maybe worse.

It won’t be on the site for 2 or 3 days, but I can’t wait that long to share it with the world.

My friend and I went to Blockbusters last night with the express purpose of renting a crappy rom-com. We were up for some cheesiness, but neither of us was prepared for the absurdity and stupidity of this movie.

A couple minutes in — around the time that Orlando Bloom said “I’m fine,” for the tenth time — we began to see that we had brought home a true turd of a movie. The 123-minute label on the case was worrying.

It started out ridiculous and uninteresting, but just unraveled from there. Individual scenes were unbelievable, and strung together they make up an unfathomable whole. The writing is so terrible that the question of whether the actors were good or bad is moot.

“Trainwreck” is definitely the word for it.

I have a couple theories:

1) Cameron Crowe was under the influence of horse tranqulizers while writing the script. The disjointed scenes, the odd combination of dull scenes that go on insanely long, and potentially juicy moments that are truncated, abridged, or turned into musical montages (for instance, phrases from relatives’ eulogies are spliced together in about 30 seconds, shortly followed by Susan Sarandon’s truly horrible and drawn-out stand-up/tap-dancing number). It doesn’t seem his brain was functioning properly when he wrote this one down.

2) Does he have a 12-year-old daughter who may have written large parts of the script for him? Reflecting on the supposedly romantic parts of the film, it ocurred to me that they’re in line with what I understood of love and life as a seventh-grader: all-night phone conversations when what you say isn’t as important as the fact that you’re talking, spontaneous declarations of love (and demands for such declarations), laughing at jokes that aren’t funny because you’re riding high on infatuation, and the almighty mix-tape. If Drew and Claire have any chemistry, it’s because they’re both completely embracing the middle school concept of love and life.

3) Finally, perhaps this film is actually a genius artistic masterpiece. Maybe if you removed every other scene and mashed the remainder into a 1-hour film, it would transcend the genre of crappy romcoms and enter the realm of theatre of the absurd.

Our farm is underway.

Just about a year ago, Chris and I left San Francisco to begin our farming adventure. It amazes me to think of our mindset back then; we were sick and tired of working crappy jobs that barely paid the rent for our equally crappy basement apartment, so we took off. We had heard of WWOOF through several friends, and figured we’d travel around and do farm work just to get by.

At that point it seemed like something we could handle, and maybe even something we’d enjoy, but I don’t think either of us expected to be totally sucked in by it. But halfway through our first semester at Green String interns, before the winter was over, it became clear that farming was IT for us.

Since we finished our internships in May, we’ve been f’real farm employees, working long hours six or seven days a week, and fantasizing about having our own little farm someday. We’re living on one of our boss’s properties, and part of his offer to us was that we’d set up a little market garden here, and get a mini-incubator farm going. But between our long hours (and resulting exhaustion) and a couple broken rototillers, it just hasn’t happened.

Well, it *hadn’t* happened. Now…

Now it’s happening! I can’t tell you how excited I am. We picked out the garden spot (maybe about an acre out of the 110 of the property) almost as soon as we moved in, and Chris has been watering it ocassionally to soften up the hard soil.

We’re going to get the rototiller out here next week (finally!), but I’m also doing a little experiment. I’ve planted part of the space this week with turnips (Chinese red round, Japanese shogoin, and French navet des vertus marteau, ho ho) and Italian sugarloaf chicory, because I have it on good authority that turnips and chicory plants will not only thrive in hard soil, they’ll actually bust it up! I’m going to plant another section with cover-crop varieties of daikon radish and chicory, which will probably do a lot more work on the soil but also won’t be particularly edible. The remainder of the garden will be tilled and planted with non-experimental crops — lots of brassicas, greens, root veggies, and herbs — and we’ll go from there.

If all goes well, we’ll start showing up at the Sonoma farmers market on Friday mornings with some goodies to sell. If it goes really well, we may start up a CSA by spring. Whatever form our little garden takes, we’ll be calling it Lazy Fox Farm, in honor of the adorable little bastards who ate our roosters — and probably watch our every move from the shadows.

It’s difficult to find the time to work on our own project when we’re so immersed in our jobs, but heading out there at sunset to rake, seed, and water doesn’t feel like work. Right now, those 8 rows of seed sitting in our beautiful, sweet-smelling soil feel likes new world of possibilities.

I’ve been put in charge of getting our growing library at work organized. I used librarything.com to catalog the books, one ISBN at a time. Originally I was going to use the Dewey Decimal system for sorting, but I soon realized it’s not great for small libraries — especially collections that have many books on only a couple topics.

I have this slight personality problem, where I reinvent the wheel whenever possible.

So now I have a new library system, loosely based on Melvil Dewey’s. It’s the Farmy Decimal system.

000 Spirituality etc.
	00 General Spirituality
	10 Philosophy
	20 Religion
	30 Energy
	40 Plants

100	Agriculture
	00 theory & science
		0 schools of thought
			.0 biodynamics
			.1 permaculture
			.2 agroecology
		3 botany & plant science
			.0 diseases & pests
		4 soil science
			.0 minerals
			.1 compost
				.10 compost tea
				.11 vermiculture
	10 agricultural settings
		1 landscaping
		2 greenhouses
		3 urban/small home gardens
	20 crops
		1 vegetables
		2 trees, vines, and shrubs
			.0 fruit trees
				.00 olives
				.01 apples
			.1 nut trees
			.2 vines
				.20 viticulture & wine
			.3 silviculture & forestry
		3 herbs
			.0 medicinal
			.1 culinary
		4 flowers
		5 mushrooms
			.0 medicinal
			.1 culinary
		6 animals
			.0 bees
			.1 chickens
		7 grass & pasture
	30 techniques
		1 pruning
		2 propagation
			.0 seeds
			.1 asexual
		3 grafting
		4 irrigation

200 Sustainable Living
	10 Health
		1 Alternative Medicine
			.0 herbs
		2 Food
	20 Food Preparation
	30 Crafts
		1 Building
			.0 Carpentry
			.1 adobe, cobb, and earth
			.2 strawbail
		2 Tool-making

300 Issues
	10 food and farm
	20 environmental

400 Business & Economics
	10 farm

500 History
	10 Biographies

600 Literature
	10 Essays
	20 Poetry
	30 Children's Books

700 Language
	10 Spanish

When the summer veggies are plentiful, every meal can be a treat. Recently, I’ve been making myself some really fantastic breakfasts, using a formula simple enough to manage before the coffee’s ready.

1. Set a small skillet over low to medium heat. Chop up whatever veggies look good, and throw them in with a little salt and some good butter or olive oil. Herbs are nice too, or a bit of a flavorful liquid.
2. Cook until it’s almost done. Scoot everything to the outside and crack an egg in the middle.
3. When the white is mostly set, clamp on a lid and let it cook another minute or so. The steam from the veggies will cook the top off the egg.
4. Remove lid, admire, and eat it with a nice crunchy piece of toast.

I’ve mostly been doing this with zucchinis (½ smallish green zucchini, grated or sliced – use lots of pepper!), mushrooms (a few nice crimini mushrooms sliced thin, cooked in butter, and finished off with some sherry vinegar or red wine), and tomatoes (6 small wedges of any kind of tomato, cooked with olive oil, basil, and balsamic vinegar) — but I think it’d work for just about anything, as long as the veggies are top-notch.

This morning I made the best one yet:

Sunny-side-up egg with wine-poached heirloom tomato

• ¼ large heirloom tomato (like brandywine or purple Cherokee), cut into wedges
• 1 tablespoon butter
• generous splash – maybe ¼ cup? – white wine, something bright and snappy
• salt, lots of salt
• 1 perfect little egg

1. Place the tomato, butter, and white wine in a small skillet set over low heat. Salt liberally.
2. After a minute or two, flip the tomato wedges. They should be barely cooked on the first side.
3. Let cook briefly, then move tomato wedges to outside of pan. Crack an egg in the center. When white is mostly set, lid it up and let it steam for a minute.
4. To serve, spoon out the tomato and then the egg. Pour the juicy goodness down on the egg. Yum!

This requires a 1quart ice cream maker.

Mango-Lemon Sherbet

• 2 cups whole milk
• 2 cups Trader Joe’s mango lemonade (I know, it’s almost cheating)
• ¾ cup sugar

1. Mix all that shit up. Make sure it’s nice and chilly, or it won’t work!
2. Pour the mixture into your ice cream machine.
3. Let it churn for about 20 minutes, or until it’s all nice and creamy and mostly frozen.
4. Scoop it into a couple mason jars and put in the freezer for a couple hours to harden it.

Yum!