Originally—back when I gathered these chestnuts in October—this was going to be the sort of spot-on, autumnal af post that you’ve come to expect from this establishment. But the thing about fermentation is that it proceeds at its own pace. We can goose it by raising the ambient temperature (within reason) but any food that relies on the metabolic processes of a complex microbial ecosystem AND concurrent enzymatic chemical reactions is going to need some time to achieve the magical flavors we expect it to deliver. This is more true of miso than just about anything else.
Category: Fruit
This summer, a farmer I know had a box of these little plums on sale. They made for good fresh eating, but their size and rusty purple color made me think instantly of umeboshi. They’re not the same fruit—ume plums are more like apricots, and are picked yellow-green and not fully ripe—but I figured it would be worth giving them the same treatment.
I’ve got a post brewing about early green things, but since it snowed that’s going to have to wait a bit. As winter begins to loosen its grip, there are all sorts of exciting developments to celebrate, most of them involving the garden, but this is also a time of year when fruit is revealed to be the great locavoracious challenge in this climate.
Last week I got a gift from my friends at Dorsch Gallery in Miami. They have a huge and prolific mango tree next to the gallery, and summer is their season. These three fat beauties arrived in three distinct stages of ripeness: firm, just shy of ripe, and ready to eat, so I got to admire them on the counter for a few days until they were all just where I wanted them. Then I used them to make a pretty terrific chutney. To celebrate their foreignness (and compensate for it), I used nothing but homegrown or homemade ingredients for the rest of it.
I reread my France posts recently, and it already feels sort of like if it happened to someone else, especially the early ones (since I was so jetlagged). And there are still so many photos and so much information left to process. Since the freshness of the experience fades in inverse proportion to said processing, future posts in the “Things What I Learned In France” department are likely to be less literal and more an organic assimilation of the information I absorbed while there. This post is about an homage to Gascony that popped into my head as I unwrapped the many goodies I had stashed in my luggage, including a sampler of the Chapolards’ charcuterie–saucisson sec, saucisse sèche, and noix de jambon–which Dominique graciously gave me and which somehow ended up swaddled in plastic bags and dirty laundry and buried deep in the recesses of my suitcase for the trip home.
I kid, of course; bringing those things home would have been illegal. Also, there was the Armagnac. And the prunes, and the Tarbais bean and Espelette pepper seeds, and pistachio oil and truffle salt and other items that would be at the top of your must-have list if your plane happened to disappear into the Bermuda Triangle and leave you stranded on some desert island somewhere like in a certain TV show that actually managed to be more annoying than Twin Peaks. I’m all about the pragmatism.
We ended up owning a vast cooler full of fruit pursuant to an under-attended neighborhood function recently, and the poor fridge was jammed to the rafters with watermelon and bowls of grapes and such. This highly non-local windfall was begging to have its volume consolidated, since the arrival of fruit fly season meant that keeping any of it outside the fridge for any length of time was a non-starter. I figured that the quickest way to compact it all would be to purée it (juicing not being an option since we haven’t replaced the broken juicer yet). And then there was all that gelatin in the cupboard.
We were away for the weekend, blowing what was shaping up to be a pretty good posting streak, but the 25th high school reunion would not be denied. It’s always fun to go back to Massachusetts, and in this case seeing a wider variety of old friends than usual was an added bonus. Bringing the family made for an even better time; everyone got to see what a fuckup I didn’t turn out to be (probably a surprise) and my lovely wife made some new friends. Having said that, though, a few days of adequate but not homemade food meant that by the time we got home, I was seriously ready for some homegrown fare.
There’s a perpetual struggle between the ideas one might have for a dish or a meal and the realities that impose themselves on the execution thereof. Time, ingredients, fatigue, kids home from school with a fever–life has a limitless array of obstacles that can undermine our vast ambitions and bring them right back down to everyday dimensions. The trick is to retain some shreds of the original glory of the ideas before they got all sullied by the laws of physics and still get the food on the table with a minimum of delay.
An inauguration, of sorts, for the new kitchen, in that I actually took a few minutes to plan and think through a whole meal for the first time in a month. I had been to the store to get a few things, and as I always do at this time of year I grabbed winter veggies: leeks, fennel, turnips, and kale. I knew we had a duck breast in the freezer, and there were some…
Funny how my prediction came true and today was completely- and I mean all the way- devoted to dealing with Fruit Mountain. 18 quarts of applesauce (ingredients: apples) and 21 pints of wicked hot spicy peach-habañero chutney that also included lime basil, red onion, and cider vinegar that I infused with cinnamon, pepper (pink & black,) cardamom, star anise, bay, fenugreek, and mustard seeds. I also added some honey to balance the vinegar and let…