Knowing Goodness

“A taste for better stuff is cultivated only through experience.”

     -Barbara Kingsolver

“The baguettes don’t take long to bake in the hot stone oven. After about fifteen minutes we take them out and cut them open. The smell is enough to make you give up on cooking a gourmet meal and just eat bread instead.”

     -Camille Kingsolver

These two quotes are much more related than seems at first glance. Okay, maybe first glance is enough. It’s pretty obvious.

I’ve long been perplexed those willing to eat supermarket tomatoes in the winter. I suppose I’ve been one of those people myself at times, but that was less about ignorance and more about desperation, and a futile attempt in denial to have what I wanted when I wanted it. Perhaps it was also a sort of personal food Rumspringa. (I’ve mentioned my upbringing before, our kitchen at times more closely resembling that of an Amish household than its typical American counterpart.) I have a vivid memory of being in the Jewel-Osco (grocery chain in Chicago) on Ashland and Wellington in the winter of 2003-2004 with the ill-fated intention of buying tomatoes. (This probably happened more than once.) I wanted that magical July-August experience. A pesto pasta punctuated by bright, warm bursts of acidic-sweet cherry tomato sublimity. I knew in my heart of hearts that it was an empty pursuit, but like I said, I was in denial. I know I bought romas, brandywines, or whatever the hell variety supermarkets refer to as “vine-ripened tomatoes,” (as though there should be any other kind). “Insipid imports...anemic wedges that taste like slightly sour water with a mealy texture.” That’s actually a rather nice way of putting it. And if these insipid imports are all you know of as “tomatoes,” I can see why your feelings about tomatoes in general would be rather lukewarm at best, or even negative.

One of 2012's prized gems

But if you’ve ever had a fresh garden tomato, if you’ve walked up to a tall, gangly cherry tomato vine stretching its limbs like a yawning cat, unabashedly sunning itself in your backyard, and picked one of those warm, red jewels hanging from its crowned blossoms, popped it into your mouth, bit down with your front teeth, and received an explosion of flavor (and texture) that you forgot or never knew was possible, I don’t know how you would ever trust one of those insipid imports again.

I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life realizing just how bad a lot of the food we eat is, and wondering why so many people are okay with eating it. And I think it’s because they haven’t had enough experiences such as those described above. If a taste for better stuff is cultivated only through experience, does a good experience guarantee a taste for better stuff? I think we know that it doesn’t. The words “only” and “cultivated” in that statement are powerful words, accounting for the people who are mysteriously unaffected by such experiences, as well as for those who don’t have the experiences frequently enough, allowing appreciation and love for quality to grow. What’s the missing link? Surely there is some reason that someone experiences a truly superior tomato, India Pale Ale, or slice of artisanal cheese, but for whatever reason registers no more of a reaction than the “meh” that is normally elicited by the impostor immigrant counterparts.

Homegrown Yugoslavian heirloom variety - 2012

Was it a good enough experience? Walking into a good bakery and eating freshly baked bread is one thing, but when you were in the kitchen when it was in dough form, smelled it baking, cut into it and saw the steam rise from the crack like a volcanic fissure, and bit down on what was the freshest baked bread that any human has ever tasted, is that enough to make the difference? To never want to eat another slice of the double-wrapped, fisher-price resembling, aisle 3 stand-by again? I would think so, but then again, I know of people who have uttered a facial “meh” at such experiences, leaving me to wonder, how could you be so blinded to the truth that just jumped up and smacked you right in the face?

Admittedly, I don’t know many people who have denied such a tastebud affirming experience. Most of the dinner guests at my parent’s house in my youth frequently gasped at the sight of our vegetable garden, uttering laments of you’re so lucky and to eat like this every day...

I’ll just have to go on being like one of those charmingly obnoxious Pink Floyd fans, who upon discovering that you don’t really like Pink Floyd, confidently declare that you just haven’t heard the right album yet. It’s the only way I can reconcile the fact that for you and tomatoes, “‘kinda reddish’ is qualification enough.”

-Br. Thelonious

*Quotes taken from Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Some of our 2012 deck garden's production

Fresher produce

Mrs. Absalom's done a fair bit of gardening over the last couple summers in the limited space we had in our former domicile in Chicago.  Every last tomato fell prey to the neighbourhood squirrels, but the basil fared much better, producing plenty of pesto, caprese salads, and pizza toppings.  This spring she embarked on an ambitious program of growing a wide variety of vegetables from seeds, starting them inside.  Unfortunately, they did none too well when they were moved outside; we were forced to scrap them all and regroup.  Our new plants - including basil, bell peppers, hot peppers, strawberries, and several varieties of tomatoes - are sprouting happily and showing prodigious progress every day.

In the meantime, our friends Craig and Caitlyn, who've done a lot of planting on their property last year and this spring (including a few fruit trees), gifted us an ample bag of mint leaves they harvested.  We love having great, fresh produce from our friends' garden, but we've really had to dig for ideas on how to use all of this mint.  We're not big mixed drink fans normally, so I don't foresee a lot of mint juleps or mojitos in our future.  After a bit of online research, Mrs. Absalom decided to candy a few of the leaves, then use them as a garnish on toasted graham crackers with quality chocolate and organic strawberries and blueberries.  To say this turned out well would be an understatement.

More ideas for getting the most out of the rest of this crop would be greatly welcomed.  If nothing else, I'll make a tincture with it to give brewing a mint stout another shot next winter.

This has brought me back to thinking on the issue of eating organic versus local foods.  Much as Brs. Abelard and Thelonious have mentioned here recently, we've really come to value knowing the origins and treatment of what we eat in the last few years.  Mrs. Absalom and I usually select as much certified organic food, especially produce, as possible; avoiding extra chemicals is certainly better for our personal health.  Ideally, we'd like to be able to buy organic and local - reducing the distance our food travels and supporting local businesses would definitely be our preference - but it seems like it's difficult to have it both ways at this point, especially in a climate that's less than ideal for farming of even moderate scale.

Fortunately, we're not without options altogether here, most notably Wyomatoes (their basil is also great) and Creminelli Meats; in addition, our local Whole Foods occasionally offers locally raised heritage meats.  The Order has discussed recently what it would take to find locally produced organic brewing ingredients; Dave Logsdon of Logsdon Farmhouse Ales (and founder of Wyeast) just spoke of his own work on this in a Q&A on sour beer blog Embrace the Funk.  And on the East Coast there's Valley Malt, whose Malt of the Month Club makes me wish I were back in New England.  At this point, it's tough to be a year-round organic locavore in many areas; for now, though, we'll keep growing in our small space and making the best-informed choices we can.


- Br. Absalom

A Garden Meal

Okay, so it wasn't precisely a garden meal; after all, there was actually only one ingredient from the garden which actually was ready to be in the meal, but still, it was the first harvest from our garden, so I thought I'd write up a post about it...especially considering Br. Thelonious and I were recently lamenting about the lack of cooking/food posts on the site.

There was a time, in the not-so-distant past (6 years ago), in which I would not have batted an eye at eating a meal where all of the offerings had come already prepared from a box, tube, jar, or some other container. Add water, heat, and "enjoy". Fortunately I've traveled a long way since then, to the point where it's highly unlikely that anything in a meal has been pre-prepared, pre-made, etc. For the vast percentage of Americans, however, this is not their reality, and it hurts my soul to think about. Wendell Berry sums it up best when he writes:

"The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous, substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality."

Yes, it can take time to make a meal from scratch (though it doesn't always have to), but the reward of knowing every ingredient that is in the meal, and hopefully from where it came and how it was produced, far outweighs the reward of convenience.

This meal consisted of two offerings: a Spring garden salad with goat cheese, and oven-baked macaroni and cheese. For the salad, Katherine and I harvested radishes from our garden and to them added carrots which we had peeled into thin slices. "But where are the greens!?", I hear you asking frantically. Worry not: we simply cut off the tops of the radishes, chopped them up, and used those as the greens. To that we added goat cheese, then combined lemon juice, melted butter, salt, and pepper and tossed it all together. The result, of course, was delicious:

 

The macaroni and cheese was also fairly simple (Katherine suggested this), which required neither a bechamel sauce nor par-boiling the pasta: combine the liquid with the pasta and the cheese; bake it, and you're good to go. I ended up blending milk, yogurt, butter, spices (I used salt, pepper, nutmeg, and habanero powder), then mixing in the pasta with some smoked cheddar and provolone, and baking for an hour in the oven. Again, the result, paired with Sierra Nevada Torpedo (seen in background):

It was a fantastic meal, made even more so because it utilized our first garden harvest. I look forward to the day when we can harvest multiple things at once, and make an entire meal from them all. 

~Br. Abelard