Author: Ari LeVaux

In my old neighborhood, doors were locked only during zucchini season. This forced would-be zucchini donors to leave their boxes on the porch, like abandoned babies on church steps. The growers feel a sense of responsibility not to let their food go to waste but become so sick of zucchini they couldn’t possible eat them all.

As the zucchini pile up, they begin acting like zombies. Granted, they’re zombies that can’t walk toward you with their arms out in front of them, but they keep coming nonetheless, no matter how many stir-fries, fritters, pizzas, and tamales you throw them at.

The relationship between man and zucchini can get so adversarial that the concept “know your enemy” from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War becomes apropos. If you hope to weather a sustained zucchini attack, it helps to understand your foe. So here are three burning questions about zucchini, followed by my answers, that will help you appreciate, utilize, and understand this crop that, as we speak, is taking over gardens across the northern hemisphere.

Big or Small?

While any size zucchini is edible, the quality starts to decline practically as soon as they’re big enough to see with the naked eye, and any zucchini larger than the average cucumber should be avoided. The seeds get bigger, the skin gets thicker, and the flesh starts to dry out. Many European shoppers won’t buy a zucchini that doesn’t still have a flower attached.

Speaking of zucchini blossoms, harvesting and eating them is a great way to keep your zucchini supply under control, as you’re literally nipping future zucchini in the bud. Maxime Bouneou, a French chef in New Mexico, makes wonderful stuffed zucchini flowers. He prefers the blossoms that have a little pinky of new fruit growing from them, as if there is extra pleasure to be had in cradle-robbing. Or maybe he’s been traumatized by zombies.

A final note on the big vs. small dichotomy: The difference between summer squash, of which the zucchini is a member, and winter squashes like acorn or butternut, is that summer squashes are eaten while young and tender during summer, and winter squash varieties are consumed after they harden in fall.

Fresh or Frozen?

Like most food, zucchini is better fresh. But before you allow a pile of zucchini to guilt-trip you into eating more than your body is designed to appreciate, remember: It’s quick and easy to put that zucchini in frozen storage for later.

The University of Missouri extension recommends steam-blanching unpeeled grated zucchini for 1 to 2 minutes until translucent. Drain well and pack in containers sized to fit your favorite recipes. Cool by placing the containers in cold water. Seal and freeze. If watery when thawed, drain the liquid before using the grated zucchini.

Frozen grated zucchini can be a commodity in winter, successfully assimilating in a surprising number of dishes, from tomato sauce to stuffing to chocolate zucchini mayonnaise cake. When added to most dishes, grated zucchini keeps a low profile, quietly adding body, moisture, and nutrients to the dish.

So next time the zucchini logjam of summer turns into a pile-up, calmly grate, blanch, and freeze your extra zucchini and get back to enjoying the summer.

Sweet or Savory?

Clotilde Dusoulier, Parisian foodie and author of the blog Chocolate & Zucchini, writes that she hadn’t even tried the two together when she chose that name. She simply liked the contrast between earthy, healthy zucchini and decadent chocolate. It turns out, she says (and I agree), that chocolate and zucchini play well together in both sweet and savory applications.

On her blog, Dusoulier shares an adaptation of a family chocolate cake recipe that she’s modified to include zucchini. It’s very involved but worth checking out. Alas, my family doesn’t have its own chocolate cake recipe. But growing up we did usually have a jar of Hellmann’s mayo in the fridge, and Hellmann’s mayo always has recipes on the label, one of which was for chocolate mayonnaise cake. (You can find the recipe at Hellmanns.com.) This became the closest thing I had to a family chocolate cake recipe, and it opened the door to a realization I’ve lived by ever since: You can put mayo in practically anything and make it better.

You could almost say the same thing about zucchini, including in chocolate cake. I’ve had good luck adding grated zucchini to the Hellmann’s chocolate mayonnaise cake, as well as many other chocolate cake recipes, including boxed mixes. The shreds of zucchini melt into the batter and don’t interfere with the baking process, while adding moisture, fiber, and bulk to the finished product, even as it remains in the background, virtually undetected.

And on the savory side, a great summertime zucchini option is to sauté zucchini chunks with chopped onions until soft, then add fresh cut corn, garlic, crushed chiles, black pepper, and soy sauce. It’s kind of like succotash, but there is no suffering involved. If only all zombies were so easily subdued as zucchini.

A seafood meal is the one opportunity most Americans will ever have to eat a wild animal. Eating wild fish is like a swim in the ocean, except in this case the ocean swims inside of you.

Unfortunately, wild seafood is wrought with environmental, ethical, economic, and health implications. Many fish stocks are dwindling. And prices, not surprisingly, are climbing. Certain fishing methods are damaging underwater ecosystems and creating bycatch, whereby the wrong fish are caught and all too often killed. Big carnivorous fish like tuna and swordfish are known to accumulate dangerous levels of heavy metals from the many fish, great and small, in their diets.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the food chain, the lowly sardine poses a solution to each of these problems. And all we have to do is eat them.

Sardine is a general term for the young individuals of dozens of species of the clupeid family of fish. Sardines from the North American East Coast are actually small herrings. The most-prized sardines are the brisling species of the North and Baltic seas. Sardina pilchardus, from the Mediterranean, are named after the island Sardinia where the small fish were once particularly abundant. The Pacific sardine fishery was the largest U.S. fishery from the 1920s to the 1940s, when it collapsed.

For most Americans, sardines are practically synonymous with “in a can,” but those oily little fish can rise to a whole new level when prepared fresh. Pacific sardine stocks are stronger than they’ve been in decades and appear to be on the increase.

Thanks to the current boom, fresh sardines can be had at two bucks a pound in many stores. But while popular in Europe, freshies remain a niche market in the U.S., and most Pacific sardines are ground into food for farmed fish.

Sardines are one of the healthiest fish in the sea. They feed on photosynthetic plankton and don’t accumulate heavy metals like carnivorous fish do. That diet helps make sardines rich in omega-3 oils, and they’re also rich in protein, good cholesterol, selenium, and — if you eat the soft bones — calcium and fluoride.

The first step in cooking sardines is to clean them. If the scales are still present, remove them gently with a knife. Be careful when gutting sardines, as they can be extremely delicate. As with most fish, the heads are edible, but if you’re willing to forgo that delicacy you can simply pull the heads off and the guts will come out behind them. To make that job slightly easier with strong-boned sardines, cut the spine below the head. Or leave the spine attached and pull the head forward and down toward the tail, and you can get the spine to come out too, leaving behind two beautiful flat sardine filets held together by the skin. Rinse thoroughly.

If you want to marinate sardines, simple is better, like lemon, olive oil, and parsley. And I highly recommend grilling them outdoors afterward, rather than cooking them inside the house. Grilled sardines are magnificent, and it keeps the fishy flavors out of your curtains.

In many Mediterranean countries fresh sardines are commonly breaded and deep-fried, a technique that’s both tasty and fool-proof.

Sprinkle your cleaned sardines with salt and pepper, then roll them in flour. Heat an inch or so of olive oil on low in a pan, and when a drop of water draws a splattering response, add the fish. Three minutes per side should do it, although you can cook them longer if you want a browner crisp (at the expense of moist flesh). Fried sardines are typically served with lemon wedges and little else, but the alternatives are many.

The possibilities presented by fresh sardines don’t mean you should avoid them in cans. And if you do, you might want to go for the brisling varieties from cold, northern waters and see if you notice their supposed superiority.

But when going fresh, you can hardly get more local for seafood than California. And when you buy American sardines you can be sure efforts were made to release the bycatch alive, according to Seafood Watch, which ranks sardines a “Best Choice” among seafood options. The Pacific sardine season runs January through August. Look for bright, sturdy, clean fish with clear eyes. Then take them home and rip their heads off.

Every coq au vin recipe I’ve read assumes that nobody will go to the trouble of finding a tough old bird to cook. That’s why you’ll find cooking times of 30 minutes, which is a crime against gastronomy. Even with a store-bought spoon-tender bird, that’s not enough time for the red wine sauce to fully come together and impregnate the chicken.

Rusty was a mean old rooster from a three-bird flock that also included a post-menopausal hen named Annabelle who hadn’t laid anything in years and a submissive rooster named Marco Pollo. Suffice it to say, the eggs were not flowing.

I caught Rusty, which was easy, because mean roosters run at you. I held him upside down by his feet. He fought at first but was sleepy by the time we got to the garlic patch. I laid Rusty on the ground. Before he had a chance to wake up, I swung a machete through his neck and into the dirt beneath it. I held him upside down over the garlic patch to drain the blood.

I submerged him using two sticks for 10 seconds and did a test pluck, and the feathers came out easily. I hung him by his feet and plucked every last feather and wisp and threw them on the garlic patch. (Chicken feathers are great for the soil.)

I carefully cut the skin across his gut just below the sternum and reached my hand up and in along the rib cage, taking hold of his throat and pulling it down into the gut cavity. I kept pulling that throat, through the slit and out, as the rest of the guts trailed behind.

I didn’t starve Rusty for 24 hours prior to killing him, which made the gut cavity stinky with half-digested food, so I didn’t feel like saving the heart and liver. Shame on me for letting those tasty organs go to waste.

I rinsed Rusty in cold water, then brined him overnight in saltwater. The next day I drained and rinsed him and let him rest a few days in the fridge, covered, until his rigor mortis loosened up. Do not skip this step, as a fresh-killed chicken will be rubbery and awful.

Here’s my coq au vin recipe, based on what I did to Rusty. Its simple: no bouquet garni, no butter and flour, and I often don’t use pork fat. If you want a fancy recipe, try Nigella Lawson’s, available online.

 

Coq au vin

Put the bird in a baking pan in the oven at 350 degrees. While it bakes, prepare the following: chunks of carrot, parsnip, and potato; whole garlic cloves; chopped onions; thyme, bay leaf, and pork fat (or bacon). Turn the bird once or twice for even browning.

Mix the above items with olive oil, remove the chicken from its pan, and spread the veggies into the pan. Replace the bird, lower the temp to 300 degrees, and continue cooking. Turn the bird if necessary, and stir the veggies a few times. When the veggies have developed a light brown crisp, remove the whole business from the oven and let cool. If it’s a tough old guy, remove the skin — it will probably be too tough to eat.

Pull and cut the coq into five to 10 pieces and put them in a large pot along with the roasted veggies and juice from the pan, as well as some mushrooms (I used dried morels and porcinis and fresh buttons) and a bottle of red wine. Everybody says Burgundy, so with Rusty I used Burgundy. But when I make it with deer (Buck au Franz, as I call it), I use Franzia Cabernet without issue.

Cover the contents of the pot with equal parts water and wine and simmer. Season with salt and pepper and maintain the liquid level with additional water and wine as necessary. The longer you cook it, the thicker the sauce gets, as everything merges together. Coaxed by the wine, fatty flavors leech from the cartilage and bone, reducing the need for butter and pork. Everything, especially the potatoes, begins to disintegrate, which thickens the sauce in lieu of flour. Simmer at least an hour. When in doubt, just add more wine and keep cooking.

People serve it with all kinds of filler, like bread or pasta, but I reserve all my belly space for coq au vin and perhaps a dollop of mayo.

After we ate Rusty — and, boy, was he delicious — Marco Pollo and Annabelle enjoyed a brief period of peace. Two weeks later, Annabelle died on a cold night, my first chicken to die of natural causes. Sadly, she never got to meet the new brood of chicks, chirping inside under a heat lamp the night she died. They’re all so cute now, but surely some of them will turn into tough old birds. Yum.

Carrots love garlic, and garlic doesn’t mind carrots. Those are some conclusions I reached last year, when I finally got sick of looking at all the blank space between my garlic plants and decided to do something about it. They’re planted six inches apart, and if it weren’t for the straw mulch between them, most of the patch would be bare dirt. Mulching dissuades weeds, shades soil from sun, and blocks the wind, helping to keep moisture in the soil.

 Mulch comes in many forms, including “living mulches,” which are sown among crops to provide mulch-like action. Clover planted in corn rows is one example of a living mulch, and with that image in mind, my thoughts turned to sowing a mulch between my garlic plants. But I wanted more than just a living mulch. I wanted my mulch to be edible, too.

 Searching for the best mulch crops to plant in my garlic patch, I developed a technique called “tossing seeds randomly.” I put all the seeds I didn’t get around to planting last year into a jar, shook it up, and tossed them by handfuls into the garlic patch.

 Last summer’s research identified two general categories of plants good for growing in the garlic patch — what I call “garlic patch friends.” The first includes fast-growing, quick-to-bolt greens and herbs like spinach, lettuce, endive, cilantro, and escarole. As soon as summer heats up, these plants will go to seed or “bolt.” The plant will divert all its energy into reproduction and will often grow surprisingly tall, while the leaves stop growing and turn bitter. You want to harvest and eat these plants before they bolt, when they’re sweet and tender. They can grow fast in the spring when the garlic is small, and their bolting is delayed when the garlic grows big and shades them. You get to gorge on these intra-garlic leafy greens in spring and early summer, and by the time they start to bolt, the second category of garlic patch friends will kick in.

Category two includes crops that will bide their time in the partial shade of the garlic plants early in the season and will take off in full sun after the garlic has been harvested.

 So far, carrots are this category’s champion. Their lush foliage functions awesomely as mulch, while below ground the roots mind their own business, growing straight down and keeping out of the garlic’s way. 

 I tossed a smorgasbord of carrot seeds in the garlic patch, and the variety called Hercules performed best, growing as big as beer bottles. Another good late-season living mulch crop is amaranth, a long-cultivated Mesoamerican grain with brilliant red flowers.

 Once you pull your garlic plants from the ground, the craters left behind invite air and water into the soil. This helps your late-season garlic patch friends in their pursuit of greatness and also helps stimulate the microbial environment on the soil surface, which strengthens the garden’s ecosystem.

 I was very happy with my garlic harvest last year and suffered no decrease in production due to intra-garlic crowding. I didn’t run out of carrots until halfway through winter, the chickens got some amaranth, and when you count those early-season salads, I grew a pretty good bonus out of my garlic patch. This year, I’m taking it a step further: In addition to my custom mix of tossed leafy green seeds, I also transplanted some escarole, radicchio, and endive that I’d started indoors. I’m expecting these to get the early jump and grow huge, while the garlic plants are still on the small side.

 To some extent, I’ve been reinventing the wheel here. Garlic has long been known as a good companion to other crops. Garlic contains compounds that repel aphids, so many gardeners intersperse it with their lettuce and other aphid-fearing plants. Garlic also plays well with roses and strawberries. While garlic’s pungent mix of aromatic compounds keeps some pest insects away, it attracts the white cabbage moth away from brassica plants like cabbage, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts and remains unharmed itself by the moths. But be warned: The brassicas I planted in my garlic patch didn’t do so well last summer. It’s possible that while a few garlics in the brassica patch are good, brassicas in the garlic patch may not do much.

 Diversified agricultural environments are sometimes called polycultures. The more widely accepted name for the practice is “agroecology,” which describes the ecological theory behind agricultural systems that are both productive and resource-conserving. Practitioners consider plant and insect interactions, mineral cycles, and the farm’s own socioeconomic relationships with its community, since the people who work the farm and eat from its produce are considered part of the larger ecosystem.

 While poo-pooed as nonscientific by many of those in favor of industrial-style farming, the discipline of agroecology is being taught at many universities. A report commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council examined hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers and concluded that agroecology has the potential to double food production in marginally productive areas.

In the arid interior of Bahia, Brazil, Marsha Hanzi has been using agroecology to reclaim land that has been turned into desert by years of chemical-intensive monoculture. I’ve seen with my own eyes how Hanzi’s discoveries have helped people rebuild the soil and turn the landscape from red-brown to green with edible plants.

My garlic and carrot garden might not work in the Brazilian drylands. But the take-home lesson, wherever you live, is to experiment with your home ground and mix up your garden to see what happens. Whether you approach it through book learning or the trial-and-error of randomly hurled seeds, you might be pleasantly surprised by the extra yield.

The new gardening season begins the minute you open up a seed catalog in winter.

In his book Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, Tim Cahill states, “I am a man who sits around at home reading wilderness survival books the way some people peruse seed catalogs or accounts of classic chess games.”

As a seed catalog peruser, I at first took offense at being lumped in with the chess nerds. But after giving it some thought, I realized that both gardening and chess, like wilderness survival, are strategic disciplines linked to the human journey from slime to the top of the food chain.

Situations requiring war, of which chess is an abstraction, and wilderness survival are arguably better avoided than engaged in, but gardening remains an outgrowth of evolutionary necessity you can enjoy.

This time of year, it pays to think many moves ahead and consider what you hope to accomplish, food-wise, by the end of the growing season. How many quarts of pickles do you want to put up? Which vegetables do you want to store blanched and frozen in the freezer? What do you want to eat next summer?

Not all of this food need be grown in the garden. We’re not brave pioneers eking out a living on the harsh frontier. Hitting the farmers market, coffee in hand, is one of the joys of community living, while patronizing retail stores that support local farmers is not only convenient, it’s an important contribution to the local economy.

My food plan includes growing what I want on-hand for immediate use and what I can’t find elsewhere. I go for a diverse garden that’s more broad than deep, that allows me to run outside on a whim and pick all the ingredients I need for a meal. But for my long-term storage needs, I expect to rely on some professional help.

The only crops I grow in quantity are garlic — because I’m a snob and I can usually grow bigger and better bulbs than what I can buy — and shallots, which are like extra-strong onions and awesome for cooking and ridiculously expensive to buy.

The other crops in my garden are “experimentals,” newfangled crops or obscure heirlooms that haven’t become popular enough to buy. Last year, I played around with mango melon, a small, oblong melon that tastes like an extra-sweet cucumber. They were okay but kind of neither here nor there, and they didn’t find a place in my kitchen after the novelty wore off. One experimental I was impressed with and that I’ll be planting again is a variety of purple carrot called Purple Haze. In addition to their striking dark-purple skin and bright-orange interiors, they grew large and uniform in my soil while others didn’t and had a strong, sweet flavor.

It can be challenging to contain yourself when faced with a seed catalog, because the temptation to order a whole farm’s worth of seeds is great. Be wary of buying seeds that need to be started indoors and then transplanted. It may seem like a great savings — you can get a whole packet of tomato seeds for the price of one baby tomato plant — but after years of trying to raise my own seedlings, I’ve decided to leave that to the experts. There are all kinds of “hidden costs” in gear and supplies, and it’s likely your tomato starts will look like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. So I get my starts from farmers, either farmer friends or at the market. My only exceptions to this rule are shallots, which I think grow much better from seeds than sets (sets are mini-shallot bulbs), and the occasional experimental — some cool-looking tomato, pepper, okra, or melon that I really want to try but don’t think anyone will be selling starts of.

There are plenty of seed catalogs out there to choose from. Space won’t allow me to describe all the worthy ones, but here are my top three:

Johnny’s (johnnyseeds.com) is a tight company that’s pulling ahead of the pack thanks to an ambitious breeding and testing program, a catalog loaded with photos and cultivation information, and lightning turnaround. The Fedco catalog (fedcoseeds.com) is also worth a look. It reminds me of a modern-day Whole Earth Catalog with whimsical drawings, folksy wisdom, and information-rich commentary on the current state of farming and the world. And Fedco’s seed selection is solid. Seed Savers Exchange (seedsavers.org) is dedicated exclusively to the worthy goal of preserving heirloom seed varieties and is worth considering if you want to play around with some old-school plants. Seed Savers’ tomato selection is especially impressive and intriguing. 

This year, in addition to ordering my usual spinach, peas, squash, radish, beets, kale, lettuce, corn, basil, cucumber, and melon seeds, I’m going to experiment with Indigo radicchio, Winter Density romaine, Keystone endive, and Purple Pak carrots, all direct-seeded (that is, sown directly into the garden). I’ll also be ordering seed for Ambition red shallots and Saffron yellow shallots, which will probably be the only plants I start indoors unless I get off my ass and build a greenhouse.

I’ll sow the shallot seeds evenly in non-celled trays in February, as I would with onions, and keep them near a window. When they grow to five inches, I’ll cut them down to two inches with scissors, which will cause them to fill out. I’ll do this every time they hit five inches and transplant them in April or May.

My seed order may not teach me how to amputate a limb caught by a falling rock or help me lead an army into battle, and that’s okay. This kind of armchair strategizing will help me eat well all summer long and keep me in shallots through the winter. And that’s good enough for me.

I feel sorry for tomatillos, the way I once felt bad for the last kid picked for the kickball team at recess. They languish on otherwise empty farmers market tables at the end of the morning, often destined for the compost pile, because tomatillos are nobody’s favorite fruit.

They’re so tart the only people willing to eat them are the culinary equivalents of polar-bear swimming-club members. And few people seem to know how to cook with them. The tomatillo remains an outcast, watching from the sidelines while the more popular fruits of summer twirl on the dance floor. Once in a while a bowl of green salsa gets made; more often they rot in the fridge before you get around to it.

If only more people were exposed to my chile verde recipe, tomatillos would quickly become in short supply.

Once, a batch of this spicy tomatillo stew got dumped on the floor. This wasn’t a floor that was clean enough to eat off of. But unmentionable liberties were taken with the five-second rule as we scooped it with spatulas and into bowls, from which we ate like fiends.

Tomatillos look like paper lanterns stretched around extra-large light bulbs. A member of the nightshade family, like tomatoes, some people mistakenly assume tomatillo is Spanish for “little tomato” (that would be “tomatito”). The word tomatillo comes from the Aztec “miltomatl,” which means, appropriately, “round and plump with paper.” Mesoamerican habitants have been enjoying tomatillos since at least 800 B.C., and my chile verde dates back to those early times. It’s made principally of ingredients prevalent in early Central America: tomatillos, chiles, and meat. Pork is typically used, but most any meat will do — it works great with extra-tough deer cuts, like shank, that have been braised three to four hours at 300 degrees, melting the cartilage into creamy gelatin.

The tomatillo tartness penetrates the animal parts it’s cooked with, revealing savory and tender secrets you never knew your meat even had. Meanwhile, the tomatillo becomes transformed into a surprisingly rich and edible version of itself.

To serve five people, start by browning one-and-a-half pounds of meat, cut into inch-or-smaller cubes. Most people assume meat should be browned in a pan with oil, but I prefer browning below the broiler. There’s less splatter, less pan-cleaning, and it’s easier to develop a satisfyingly golden-brown crisp. For extra-tough cuts, start by oven-browning the whole roast until it gets a shiny shell, then remove, cool, and cube. After the meat is nicely browned, braise in water and wine with bay leaves and salt, tightly covered at 300 degrees, until the meat softens, adding more water and wine as necessary.

Add these braised chunks to an oiled pan, and after it starts frying, add chopped onion and chopped garlic. Take a moment to savor the odor of hot brown meat and raw onion cooking together. Sprinkle with salt and sample.

Season the meat with 1/2 teaspoon each of salt and pepper, two teaspoons of garlic powder, and a teaspoon of cumin powder. When the onions are translucent, add a quart of chicken stock. Simmer for half an hour.

With the meat under control, it’s time for the peppers. Any and all varieties should be considered for this task, and the more variety the better. Poblanos, jalapeños, bell peppers, dried red chile, Jimmy Nardellos, senoritas, concha de toros, Bulgarian fish peppers … whatever capsicum you’ve got, chop or crumble (in the case of dried) into the mix, removing the seeds and membranes of the hot ones as you see fit, given your audience.

Slice a pound of tomatillos in half and liquefy, adding a cup of cilantro and two garlic cloves. Add this potent puree to the meat and peppers. (Both should be half-dissolved by now.) Simmer for another hour or two on low heat, seasoning with salt and pepper, stirring frequently, and adding water or stock as necessary. When you’re ready to be done cooking, stop adding water and allow to thicken a bit. Serve with tortillas or rice.

There’s no way around the fact that a good pot of chile verde takes time. But while the cooking time is long, the prep time is short. Once it’s cooking it’s easy to keep it cooking for hours more, adding water when necessary, and I’ve only noticed improvement with longer cooking.

Whether it’s used with a succulent piece of pork or on a slow-cooked shank, chile verde is a dish worth waiting for. It’s a dish worth eating off a dirty floor. And even if Microsoft applications label “tomatillo” as a misspelled word, this ancient fruit has a place in today’s kitchen.

I ordered my first mangoneada, because I thought it sounded vaguely like mango lemonade, which seemed perfect on a hot day. Better Spanish speakers may realize mangoneada refers to unscrupulous use of power, like graft or bribery. With my first slurp I began to see why. Mangoneadas are powerful and desirable. On a hot day I bet you could bribe Satan with one.

A mangoneada consists of a mango popsicle and a dipping sauce of red chili powder, salt, lime juice, and sugar. The sweet, caustic solution stays in a cup and is reapplied between slurps. Altogether, the mangoneada is at once too sweet, too spicy, too bitter, too sour, and too salty. But these intense and different flavors somehow manage to play brilliantly together. The chili demands sweetness, which is improved by sourness, which likes salt, which goes great with chili. It’s like rock, paper, scissors in your mouth, all because it’s so hot out, and the mangoneada is so cold.

As the popsicle thaws, it softens around the edges and becomes increasingly impregnated with the red syrup. Chunks break off in your mouth to expose a bright mango core. It looks like a sunset, tastes like a hot day at the beach, and makes you a little crazy.

The most authentic mangoneadas will contain chamoy, a Mexican syrup made from pickled fruit. But real chamoy is rare these days, and some bottled chamoy doesn’t even contain pickled fruit. You’ll find some alternatives in my recipe.

HOW TO MAKE A MANGONEADA

Remove the flesh from a mango, cut it into cubes, add the fruit to a blender along with a cup or two of water. The second cup makes the popsicle more hydrating and stretches your mango supply. For each cup of water, add a tablespoon each of sugar and lime. Blend and pour the puree into your popsicle cups. Insert popsicle sticks after 1 to 2 hours in the freezer and allow to freeze completely.

At serving time, remove the popsicles from the cups. For each popsicle, combine a teaspoon each of sugar and chili powder (mild to hot, depending on the person) and a big pinch of salt. Stir in a tablespoon of fresh lime juice. This sauce can be made ahead of time in large quantities or mixed individually in each popsicle cup, allowing the mangoneada maker to adjust for preferences in heat and sweetness.

Add a tablespoon or two of sauce to each cup, depending on the size of the popsicle, and, optionally, a teaspoon or two of real chamoy, if you can get it. Replace the popsicle in its cup. It is now a mangoneada.

If you can’t find real chamoy and want that acidic, fruity sourness in your mangoneada, here are some alternatives. A fine store-bought solution is the sour orange marinade you can find in Caribbean food markets. Even better, make tamarind syrup like they do in some parts of Mexico. Soak ¼ cup of dry or brick tamarind in ¾ cups of warm water for about an hour. (Heat the water to speed the process.) Stir and mash it around, and then filter out the seeds and skin. Over a low flame, reduce the tamarind water by about 80 percent, and then let it cool. Use it as you would chamoy — adding a teaspoon or so to the chili sauce.

The hot, sour, salt, and sweet flavors of a mangoneada are in good company. Asian cuisine is often described in terms of the interplay of these very flavors. The same ingredients can also be found in other good dishes, such as a bowl of freshly cut mango chunks, sprinkled with chili and salt, spritzed with lime and followed, perhaps, with a squirt of chamoy or tamarind.  Alternatively, the same ingredients can all go into the blender together with ice and perhaps tequila. If making a blended drink like this, add the chili powder last, a bit at a time, tasting as you go.

Among all such variations on this brilliant flavor equation, the mangoneada remains in a league by itself. The use of dipping to control the flavor mix, the changing conditions as the popsicle melts, and the visual spectacle of the bright colors contrasting and blending all conspire to make it a unique experience. On a hot day, a mangoneada will command your attention as it quickly disappears. It is the tension and the resolution, the problem and the solution, the bribery and the bribe, in every slurp.

Local food. Organic food. Natural food. Fair-trade food. To me, these loosely competing paradigms are useful guideposts when I’m shopping to fill the holes in a meal I’m preparing, but they don’t describe my preferred diet. If I had to describe my food in a single word, I would say “personal.”

What distinguishes food as personal is the role I play in the creation or acquisition of its ingredients. It’s food with which I have a measure of involvement, beyond just having bought it. A meal won’t be disqualified for containing store-bought ingredients, but it’s the hard-won ingredients that determine how personal it really is. If a home-cooked meal doesn’t have at least one ingredient that I grew, swapped for, preserved, hunted, gathered, bought directly from a farmer, brought home from a faraway land, or otherwise made some special effort to acquire, then it isn’t personal.

The biggest sex organ in your body, according to sex therapist Dr. Ruth, is the mind. And for similar reasons I believe the mind is one of the body’s biggest taste buds as well. The more a meal’s story is known, the more meaning it has, and being able to mentally picture where something came from adds to the experience of eating it. But personal food isn’t all head games. I’m positive that even in a blind taste test, personal food will win.

Many a dinner guest has suggested to me, “You should open a restaurant.” While I appreciate the compliment, it’s rather like a satisfied lover suggesting, “You should be a hooker.” My food is good because I obsess about my ingredients. Good broccoli, lightly blanched and quickly frozen at the peak of freshness last summer, will be more alive and flavorful than fresh broccoli shipped in from somewhere and purchased at the store. I treasure such ingredients for their quality and the work I put into them, and I make sure they are prepared to look and taste their best.

This isn’t to say that purchased food can’t be personal, but it must have a story that you are privy to, that you can play a role in. There’s nothing compelling about purchasing grass-fed organic beef at the store. But if you buy the same thing at the farmers market, directly from the producer, that’s beginning to get personal. You have a relationship, however fleeting, with the rancher who had a relationship with the animal. If you and the farmer become friendly, things can become much more personal. Maybe you buy a quarter of beef for the freezer.

Having a stash of food put up, like some cut and wrapped chunks of personal beef in the freezer, changes things. Your meal planning begins to shift from “what do we need to pick up at the store” to “what do we need to thaw out.” If your steak is cooked with homegrown garlic, that further personalizes the meal. If that package of ground beef is used for burgers you serve with homemade catsup made from homegrown tomatoes and mustard ground from the mustard seeds at the bottom of a jar of pickled peppers you made, the story gets even better. If you want a cheeseburger but don’t have your own cheese-making operation, buy some cheese from the lady at the farmers market and don’t forget to ask how her goats are doing.

Personal foodies tend to stick together, trading their canned goods, going mushroom hunting, sharing gardening tips and seedlings, and having each other over for dinner. In this way, the pursuit of personal food can bring you closer to a likeminded community.

Because long-distance relationships with ingredients are usually tricky, personal foods tend to be local, but there are exceptions. Returning from a recent trip to France, I brought home some Turkish figs and dates, five pounds of Breton sea salt, some French filet bean seeds (seized at the border, dammit), a few pounds of amazing cheese, a salami (also confiscated), some chocolate, chestnut paste, a few cartons of crème anglaise (kind of like eggnog), and two baguettes, which were crushed in my luggage. If I shave some of my stinky French cheese onto a fried egg from my backyard hens, that’s deeply personal, even though the cheese came from far away. My bags of sea salt, meanwhile, will allow me to sprinkle that personal touch onto hundreds of meals.

Eating my brutalized baguettes became a race against the clock as they quickly hardened. I ate them with cheese, with breakfast, with salad, wishing I still had that salami. And then I had an inspiration that will change my personal meal plan forever.

It started with a flashback of the North African grocers in Paris who sold a rainbow of olives, stuffed peppers, feta cheese, pickles, and many other goodies, including marinated sun-dried tomatoes.

Last summer we preserved our tomatoes as catsup, salsa, ratatouille, and pasta sauce — the usual suspects. We also experimented with sun-dried tomatoes, which turned out to be the easiest and most efficient way to process them. But we hadn’t really mastered the art of eating sun-dried tomatoes. They made great snacks but hadn’t evolved into ingredients.

I put a handful of sun-dried tomatoes in a bowl and poured balsamic and wine vinegar on them. I added a sprinkle of Breton sea salt, let them soak in the vinegar for a few minutes, poured olive oil into the bowl, mixed it up, and voilà: a very nice condiment to eat with my baguette.

Since then I’ve tried adding slivers of homegrown garlic to this marinade, as well as chunks of local feta and dried homegrown basil.

When the baguette became dangerously hard, I froze the remains. Maybe it will end up in stuffing. Maybe bread pudding. Maybe as seasoned crumbs on a piece of fried fish. Whatever ends up becoming of that half-stale baguette I bought on the way to the airport, it will be personal.

With all due respect to the potato, few roots, if any, have less flavor. Carrot, beet, turnip, radish, parsnip, celeriac, taro, and yam, to name a few, all check in with more fragrance, pungency, or sweetness. Mixing your roots also brings a diversity of nutrients to the table, adding the likes of beta-carotene, iron, calcium, potassium, and folic acid, depending on the root.

I’ve been exploring this edible subterranean spectrum with a dish I call roasted root brunoise (“broo-NWAHZ”). The word brunoise is French for “very small cubes.” As the small cubes roast, they lose water and shrink, while starch breaks down into sugars. The brunoise units become chewy with dry, crispy skins.

Munched plain, roasted root brunoise tastes like those Terra brand “exotic vegetable chips” that come in fancy bags. It can be sprinkled on salad, added to soup, and used many other ways. My favorite is to make roasted root risotto.

Any root is fair game. It can be a simple mix, like carrot and potato, or you can force the cashier to look up the codes for every obscure tuber and bring home rose turnips, chioga beets, salsify, and purple carrots.

While roasting mellows and sweetens some fiery flavors, like turnip, it will intensify others, like rutabaga, which becomes especially pungent when roasted. Radishes stay feisty. Carrot, celeriac, and parsnip are especially fragrant. Taro, yam, and potato are starchy and sweet. Beets, be they striped, yellow, or red, are intense and sweet, becoming almost raisin-like in the final risotto. 

The word brunoise, in addition to meaning finely chopped vegetables, is also a verb that refers to the series of cuts used to make it. This beautiful technique is the most efficient way to cut uniform pieces with the fewest strokes of the knife.

True brunoise is less than 1/8 inch per side, which means all cuts are exactly that far apart. In reality, you should cut as small as you safely and consistently can. A sharp knife is essential.

Peeling is optional; if you don’t peel, scrub hard.

The three main steps in making brunoise are: Cut your vegetable into sheets; cut the sheets into matchsticks (or julienne); cut your matchsticks into brunoise.

Your vegetable should always rest flat against the cutting board, so begin by cutting it in half and placing the two halves side by side, flat sides down. With several uniform, parallel cuts, slice the halves into sheets. Don’t be afraid to slice slowly. You don’t have to be all chopchopchopchop like on TV.

After cutting your sheets, turn them so they rest flat on the cutting board in little piles like stacks of plywood. With parallel and consistent knife strokes, cut these sheets into matchsticks.

Turn the knife (or cutting board) 90 degrees and cut each stack of matchsticks like you would a bunch of chives into a confetti-like pile of brunoise. Keep the brunoise of each type of root separate throughout the roasting process.

Spread each brunoise onto a baking pan or skillet and season with salt and pepper. Shape the brunoise so it’s about a half-inch thick. Bake at 350.

Keeping the brunoise separate becomes easier as it shrinks, so bake for about 15 minutes before you first stir it.

Every time you open the oven a blast of steam will escape, and as you stir, keep a close eye on moisture levels and any signs of browning in the brunoise. Stir every 10 to 15 minutes by using a spatula to carefully pull each type of brunoise into a little flat-topped pile and rearranging every pile during subsequent stirs. Remove each pile at the first sight of browning — each root cooks at a different rate. Let the other piles continue cooking until they begin to brown.

To make roasted root risotto, it’s best if the brunoise has completely cooled, preferably overnight. For every cup of brunoise you wish to use, heat two tablespoons of butter or oil in a pan on medium heat, and sauté half an onion and two cloves garlic, chopped finely, with crushed hot pepper flakes if you wish, until the onion becomes translucent. Don’t let it brown.

Choose from among your piles of roasted root brunoise. I like a mix of carrot, potato, sweet potato, celeriac, parsnip, and beet, either striped, red, and/or yellow. Add a mixed cup of roasted root brunoise to the pan and stir it around with the onions and garlic. Follow with a cup of stock, either chicken or veggie, and let it simmer uncovered until the stock almost evaporates. When the stock is almost gone, but before the pan gets at all dry, add another half-cup of stock and stir. Repeat, stirring after each half-cup addition of stock, and then let it simmer until the liquid is almost gone again. Don’t let the pan dry out between pours.

After adding 2 to 3 cups of stock, allow the pan to almost dry. Remove heat before it dries, and give it a final stir.

In the evening, roasted root risotto makes a good main or side dish. In the morning, you can fry it for breakfast, like home fries.

I like to chop some bacon into little chunks and fry them until crispy, and then stir in some roasted root risotto. When the risotto heats up, I add stock so the pan steams and crack an egg or two on top of the sizzling roasted root risotto. I then put a lid on the pan to trap the steam, which cooks the eggs. The trick is to add the right amount of stock so it evaporates away just when the eggs are done to your liking. If you add too much stock, let the egg steam with the lid off so it doesn’t overcook.

Getting the hang of roasted root brunoise is an intuitive process. You’ll quickly discover your own tricks for turning those colorful root bits into all kinds of earthy, sweet, savory, and satisfying wintertime meals.

Small-Ag activists and organic watchdog groups found themselves in terra incognita recently: cheering the USDA for tightening the definitions of organic meat and dairy. On February 12th, the agency published “Access to Pasture,” a “final rule and request for comments” regarding organic standards for livestock. It’s been called the most sweeping rewrite of federal organic standards since their inception in 2002.

The rule closes several loopholes that mega-dairies have used to exploit the organic market with milk from farms that hardly resemble the farms that inspired the now $24.6 billion organic industry.

“Access to Pasture” mandates that meat and dairy cattle branded organic must graze for a minimum of 120 days on pasture. At least 30 percent of the animals’ total annual caloric intake must come from grazing.

While definitive with regard to dairy, the rule leaves one significant question open with regard to meat production: whether beef cows should be exempt from the above grazing requirements during a four-month fattening, or “finish feeding,” period, after which they are slaughtered. A 60-day comment period closes April 19th.

The new rule is a major blow to certain mega-dairies that for years took advantage of the previous rule requiring only that organic cows have “access to pasture.” The real-life manifestation of this famously ambiguous phrase was often a warehouse door opening to a muddy side yard.

Clarifying “access to pasture” has been under discussion between the National Organic Program and the USDA since 1994, and a rule similar to the new rule was first proposed in 2005. It languished in Bush’s USDA for a variety of reasons, some of which are currently under investigation. When the draft was opened for public comment, 80,327 were lodged, of which a large majority — all but 28 — favored clarifying the phrase access to pasture.

In addition to clarifying pasturing requirements for cattle, “Access to Pasture” tightens up several other cracks in the federal definition of organic. It expands and strengthens the language prohibiting antibiotics in organic feed, requires that any edible bedding (like straw and corn cobs) be certified organic, and mandates that pasture be managed as a crop — that is, to produce abundant forage.

Much of the new 160-page rule consists of comments, which are parsed and organized into arguments for or against the rule’s measures. Of the 26,970 public comments the USDA received, 26,000 supported more pasture time for organic cattle. All but 130 of the comments arrived via three modified form letters.

Many Small-Ag types were skeptical of Obama’s appointment of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as secretary of agriculture. Vilsack’s cozy relationship with corporate agribusiness earned him “Governor of the Year” kudos from the Biotechnology Industry Organization.

One of Secretary Vilsack’s first moves was to rip up the plaza in front of the USDA building in Washington and install a certified organic garden. He then recommended that all USDA facilities around the country do the same. Then Vilsack appointed Kathleen Merrigan as deputy administrator, the USDA’s number-two spot. She’s credited with writing the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, in which Congress gave the USDA authority to oversee the organic industry.

While organic cheerleaders appear to have much to celebrate, some unfinished business will soon tell us more about which direction the USDA is really headed and how much the public’s hands are guiding it.

Public comment just ended on the USDA’s December 2009 determination that Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) alfalfa seed meets USDA standards. The determination came despite the agency’s acknowledgment that the GE alfalfa is likely to cross-contaminate with non-GE alfalfa.

Not one comment in a brief online survey of the registered comments favored approving this contagious alfalfa for planting. If the pattern holds, the response to these comments could create a showdown between Vilsack’s biotech interests and the newly comment-friendly agency he leads.

Another looming question is what will replace the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) proposal, which was recently scrapped in another victory for Small Ag. NAIS would have forced all livestock farmers to keep painstaking and expensive records of their animals.

And finally, the burning item of business that “Access to Pasture” leaves unresolved for another 60 days: “We are requesting comments on the exceptions for finish feeding of ruminant slaughter stock.”

As it stands, the USDA exempts beef cattle from the requirement that 30 percent of nutrition come from forage for a period of 120 days prior to slaughter. In practice this exemption allows organic beef cattle to be confined and fed grain for four months prior to slaughter, a practice known as feedlot finishing.  

“Access to Pasture” notes, “The sentiment among most of the commenters is that there is no place in organic agriculture for the confinement feeding of animals nor should there be any exception for ruminant slaughter stock.”

If that sentiment holds, the organic feedlot exception should end. But if the exception is upheld and “organic” beef is allowed to be “finished” in confinement, that would not only cast doubt on what appears to be a newly inclusive and democratic USDA, it would arguably violate several key aspects of organic livestock production. Confined feeding goes against the organic tenet that animals be allowed to express their true nature, and feeding grain to animals not only produces a different kind of meat that’s much less healthy, it’s also much more energy-intensive and environmentally destructive.

Perhaps the real discussion shouldn’t even be about whether organic beef cows can be confined and grain-fed for the last 120 days of their lives. The discussion should be about whether organic cattle should be fed any grain at all.