Author: Ari LeVaux

Perhaps you’ve heard the story of stone soup. Some hungry travelers arrive at a village during a famine, set up a kettle in the town square, put a rock in it, and start cooking. “We’re making stone soup” is the travelers’ response to the obvious question, and they invite the villagers to join them. One by one the villagers arrive, each with a little something to contribute. In the end, everyone enjoys a great meal, and nobody eats the stone.

I relived this drama the other day. Searching the fridge for my morning meal, I saw lots of leftovers, including a Thai take-out box full of rice. I decided on fried rice for breakfast.

Although I had only a few grains of rice to work with, I didn’t go hungry since all the bacon, sausage, squash, peas, onions, garlic, egg, and chile I had prepared to augment that rice amounted to an adequate meal of its own. I had made the fried-rice equivalent of stone soup.

Fried stone, if you will.

The fried rice most of us are used to is composed of mostly rice and a few bits of vegetables and flecks of meat. But fried rice, like soup, is more a concept than a recipe. It’s flexible enough to handle all the leftovers and creativity you can throw at it. There are few important rules when it comes to fried rice and only one that need be followed to the letter. And while the other rules can be broken, they should at least be broken respectfully.

Rule #1: Traditional Chinese fried rice contains fish sauce. If you were flailing in front of your wok trying to figure out what to add next and you opened a jar of fish sauce and took a whiff, you’d probably say “I don’t think so.” But fried rice without fish sauce is missing something important. If you don’t have fish sauce, consider adding oil from a jar of anchovies.

Rule #2: Many purists claim that fried rice must contain Chinese sausage, aka lap cheong, which is sweet, fatty, and mildly spiced. With all due respect to lap cheong, this rule was made to be broken. You can use bacon pieces. You can use shredded chicken. You can use Italian sausage, pepperoni, tofu, etc. Or you can skip additional proteins altogether without much penalty.

Rule #3: The rice must be cold, ideally having cooled overnight in the fridge. This rule must never, ever be broken.

Because every batch of fried rice is dictated largely by what’s available, I won’t micromanage you with a specific recipe. Instead, I’ll give an example of how I prepared a recent batch as a guideline you can follow, however closely or distantly you like.

I began with some sausage slices: sweet Russian sausage from the farmers market and homemade elk pepperoni slices. Along with the sausage I added slices of leftover squash, so they could brown. I had to add a little oil since the sausage was lean, but if I had used bacon, oil probably wouldn’t have been necessary. If I hadn’t had leftover squash I might have browned some julienned carrots.

After browning them on one side, I flipped the sausage and squash. When they finished cooking, I pushed them to the side of the pan, added another tablespoon of oil, and into that puddle I poured a beaten egg. I let the egg form a bottom, as if making an omelet, tilting the pan to pour the uncooked egg onto any vacant areas. When the egg started cooking through to the top, I sliced it with the spatula and scrambled it around the pan. Then I removed the egg, squash, and sausage.

Another tablespoon of oil, and then some garlic, fresh ginger, and onion. Once this had cooked a bit, I added some pecans (whereas tradition dictates peanuts), frozen snap peas from last year’s garden, chopped roasted green chiles, and a few shakes of fish sauce. I stirred that then added a cup of leftover wild rice (by no means need the rice be white) and a pour of sherry (because I was afraid stuff was about to start sticking). After mixing the rice around I added my eggs and browned sausage and squash, stirred it together, killed the heat, and seasoned with soy sauce.

Some cooks don’t use soy sauce in fried rice, relying on the fish sauce for salt. I prefer to use both. But while it’s better to add fish sauce early, giving its flavor time to mellow, I add soy sauce after I’ve killed the heat so it won’t burn to the bottom of the pan.

Fried rice works anytime, but I eat it most often for breakfast. And since my fried rice often contains eggs and bacon, and since last night’s leftovers are still fresh, and since it tastes very good with coffee, fried rice — or fried stone — just makes sense to start the day.

Sharing food, when dining out, is a great way to bond with your table-mates. Unless you order better than they do, resulting in your plate being the most desirable on the table. This has been my plight for years.

“Want some steak?” my dad would ask, as mom offered me her scampi, while simultaneously they reached for my short ribs.

I studied menus the way investors study corporate earnings, the way a hunter scrutinizes tracks in the snow. When I failed by ordering an inferior dish, I obsessed upon my mistake and tried to learn the lesson it contained. 

In addition to solving the menu to my personal satisfaction, I’d usually guess what my parents would order too. Luckily, the apple fell pretty far from the tree in this department, because the first rule of menuology is to not be predictable.

To play your hand predictably is to take yourself out of the game. You aren’t really studying the menu — you’re responding to cues. To be a true menu black belt, you must keep an open mind, trust your instincts, and indulge your curiosity.

Avoiding ruts, the menu black belt is feather-light and spontaneous. Corned beef hash or frittata? Daily special or specialty of the house? Which way will he go?

The menu is your window into the kitchen. It’s the beginning of a discussion between you and the chef. But it’s only part of the picture. Seeing the kitchen through a menu requires you to tune in to other sources of information as well.

Don’t be afraid to play into strengths. If a restaurant serves Chinese, Thai, and sushi and is run by Thai people, order Thai. If it’s run by Chinese people, order from the Chinese menu.

Don’t be afraid to grill your server and don’t feel bad if they have to trudge to the kitchen for answers. Ask where the ingredients are from, what the dish looks like, if they’ve tried it, etc. If the waiter offers a recommendation, ask “why?” Study them as they respond. Getting the server to talk about what’s on the menu can deliver all kinds of unexpected insights. Assess how much you should care about their opinion.

The more you can learn about the specific raw materials that go into each menu item, the better prediction you can make as to the quality of the finished dish. Locally sourced foods tend to be of higher quality, and their presence on a menu speaks well of the establishment as a whole. If you ask where something is from and the waiter knows without checking, that’s a good sign, even if it’s not local — it shows, at least, they’re thinking about that stuff. If they go into the kitchen to check, that’s still better than a shrugged “from a can.”

“Specials” and “specialties of the house” can be fruitful menu categories as well, but they can also be disappointments. Is the daily special a response to what’s fresh or just another random offering the cook is obligated to invent each day? Is the house specialty a symbiosis of culture, place, and art evolved to perfection or a dish popular 30 years ago that’s now just a hyped bad habit the cooks can’t break?

Sometimes you may feel that you’re close to decoding the menu but can’t quite crack it. Perhaps you want an element of one dish combined with part of another; don’t be afraid to read between the lines and ask for what you want. If the menu offers both scallops in oyster sauce and green curry with chicken, and the chef is flexible, you may end up with deep-fried scallops in green curry.

But be warned: Success in such interactive ordering can depend on factors beyond your control, like restaurant politics, who owes whom a favor, and who in the kitchen has the hots for your server.

Sometimes you have so little information to work with, or such unappealing options, that you have to punt. If your dining companions are running out of patience because you’re dallying their dinner hour away, and you have it narrowed down but can’t decide, here’s a way to trick your gut into tipping its hand: Flip a coin.

Tell yourself, “Heads, the foie gras; tails, the French fries.” If, once the coin decides, you hear yourself whispering a relieved “yes!” then there’s your answer. But if you feel a twinge of disappointment at the coin-toss result, you can disregard the toss because you no longer need it. Your gut has spoken.

I’m no stranger to pumpkin pie. When I owned and operated a small
pumpkin pie business after college, I experimented widely, trying
countless permutations on the basic theme, and tweaked my way to some
fantastic pie. I thought I knew most everything there is to know about
pumpkin pie. But walking around a night market in Bangkok, Thailand,
recently, I had an experience that turned my concept of pumpkin pie
inside-out.

Street food in Bangkok is a universe unto itself, a sweet and savory
maze of seemingly infinite culinary creativity. The high quality and
consistent freshness of the food seems out of place in a street
setting, but the Thais are extremely clean and detail-oriented, and
their street food is protected from urban grime by layers of stainless
steel and plastic. The treasures that await the street-walking
gastronaut include curries, noodles, soups, fried fish, and skewers, as
well as strange eats like fried bugs, steamed pig blood, and
half-formed eggs from the entrails of slaughtered ducks.

I was taking in the brightly colored jellies, tapioca balls, and
syrups of a dessert vendor when I noticed the inside-out pumpkin pie,
waiting patiently for me in a bowl next to some bags of steamed
bananas. It was a squash that was sliced to reveal its bright-white
custard filling. I bought a slice and was rewarded with a tasty
juxtaposition between the sweet and starchy squash flesh and the creamy
coconut custard. It had the flavors of a pumpkin pie, and similar
ingredients, but completely different texture and presentation.

When I say pumpkin pie, I’m referring to pies made from any type of
winter squash, of which pumpkin is the poster child, pie-wise. The
Thai-style custard-filled squash, called sangkaya, is typically made
with kabocha squash, which is dense and starchy. Most squashes,
including pumpkins, are too watery for sangkaya, but buttercup and
sunshine varieties will work. And while sangkaya is traditionally made
with a sweet custard filling, it can also be made with a savory
filling, like curry pork custard. I’ll explain how to make both.

Wash the outside of the squash and then cut a ring around the stem,
like you’re carving a jack-o-lantern. Remove the top and scoop out the
seeds and inner goop.

For a medium-sized squash (about 2 ½ pounds), heat a cup of
full-fat coconut milk and a half-cup of sugar. Palm sugar is most
authentic, if you can get it, but regular sugar or brown sugar will
work. Stir over low heat until the sugar has dissolved, and allow the
mixture to cool to room temperature. Separately, beat five eggs, but
don’t overbeat them, which will make the custard foamy.

Combine the eggs and coconut milk and add a pinch of salt and a
teaspoon of vanilla extract. Vanilla here is a common and perfectly
acceptable substitute for pandan leaf, which is traditionally used.
Pandan leaf has a subtle, exotic flavor and a sweet, comforting aroma.
If you can get it fresh, mince, blend, or crush it with a mortar and
pestle and squeeze a tablespoon of its green juice into the mixing bowl
instead of vanilla.

Pour this mixture into your hollowed-out squash, leaving about half
an inch of space below the cut-out rim. Don’t put the top back on.
Steam it 45 minutes to an hour in a basket steamer. You might want to
set the squash in a bowl for extra support as it steams, so it doesn’t
collapse when it gets soft.

After 45 minutes, open the lid and peak inside. Insert a knife deep
into the custard and see if it comes out clean and dry. If there’s
sliminess on the knife, steam another 15 minutes and check again. When
the knife comes out clean, remove the squash by removing the surface
it’s sitting on rather than picking up the squash itself. It may be
fragile.

Let it cool to room temperature, cut into wedges like a pie, and
serve. The juxtaposition of bright orange flesh and white custard is
striking, and if it weren’t for the flavors awaiting you, you might be
tempted to just look at it.

One thing that’s so special about winter squash is how well it lends
itself to both sweet and savory applications. Back in my days as a
pumpkin-pie tycoon, I dabbled in savory pies, adding meat, greens,
garlic, herbs, and other mixings to unsweetened pie filling. Old habits
die hard, because no sooner had I licked my plate after devouring my
first home-made custard-filled squash than I began scheming ways to
make a savory custard to fill my next squash. I decided on pork panang
curry custard.

Cut a pork chop into inch-cubes and pan-fry until they brown. Stir
in some chopped garlic and a teaspoon of fish sauce, stir-fry a minute,
and add a can of coconut milk, a quarter cup of panang curry paste (or
the curry paste of your choice), and half a cup of water. Simmer for
about 20 minutes until the mixture thickens, then remove from heat and
let it cool.

When the curry has cooled to room temperature, beat four eggs and
combine with the curry. Pour the mixture into the squash and steam as
before, for an hour.

The savory pork curry custard comes out light and rich and full of
spicy curry flavor, which mixes nicely with the earthy side of the
squash’s flavor profile.

With either one of these custard squash dishes, you will rule
Thanksgiving.

The pomegranate is the crazy aunt of fruits. It’s talented and
passionate but misunderstood. But it has not always been this way. The
scabby orb’s blood-red image decorates the temple of Solomon and the
robes of priests, its juice is imbued with medicinal properties, and
its flavor is integral to many Old World cuisines. But in the New
World, the pomegranate’s reviews have been mixed. Its flesh, tart
enough to make you wince, is buried among bitter membranes and crunchy
seeds. Its juice is quick to splatter and stain. Getting to know the
pomegranate’s virtues is messy, painstaking work. It’s worth the
trouble.

The pomegranate runs in many of the same circles as the grape. The
two fruits co-star in several biblical verses, including more than one
suggesting the presence of pomegranates and grapes as an indicator of
good land. Great chefs sprinkle pomegranate seeds atop their finished
dishes, knowing that a single seed is like a sip of wine in the mouth,
creating fireworks when chewed into rich food, from stuffed pork loin
to mushroom linguini.

Brought to the Americas by Spanish settlers, pomegranates grow in
the Southwest and Mexico and ripen from September to January. The
fruit’s shelf-life can be extended for months by wrapping them in paper
towels and storing them in a paper bag at the bottom of the fridge
where there isn’t much activity. You want to leave the wrapped
pomegranates undisturbed, with as few vibrations as possible. Like
bottles of wine, the less they’re disturbed, the better they’re
preserved.

When selecting pomegranates, look for firm fruits with rounded,
rather than sunken, skins. Avoid super-sized fruits, which typically
don’t have as much flavor. Like wine-grapes, pomegranates cultivated
for size produce a more watery fruit, with less evident terroir.
So choose from batches of baseball-sized fruits. Pomegranates don’t
have a fragrance when ripe. The best way to determine the quality or
ripeness of a particular batch is to open one. If the seeds are
brilliant ruby red, juicy and sweet, then get some more from the same
batch for long-term storage.

Many recipes pair pomegranate with walnuts. Historically, they’re
grown in the same regions, and culinarily, the flavors complement each
other beautifully. Walnuts are astringent and oily, while pomegranates
have a penetrating acidic sweetness. Pomegranate seeds are used to
accent sopa de nuez, a Spanish creamy walnut soup; they’re
sprinkled atop chiles en nogada, a Mexican dish of stuffed
chiles and walnut sauce; and they’re ground with walnuts and red pepper
to make muhammara, a Persian dip.

Perhaps the most famous pairing of pomegranate and walnuts is
fesenjan, a meat stew with ground walnuts and pomegranate juice.
Fesenjan can be found throughout the Middle East and Central
Asia, from Georgia to Iran, Armenia to Azerbaijan. Fesenjan is
typically made with chicken or lamb. I’ve tested batches with turkey
and wild duck without complaints.

To make fesenjan, start by browning your meat in a pan with
oil. Large pieces should be cut into inch-cubes; chicken drumsticks can
be left whole. Remove skin from poultry.

For each pound of meat, lightly toast two cups of walnuts in a hot
pan, stirring often. When cool, use a food processor or otherwise grind
the nuts into a dry paste. For each pound of meat, slice one large
onion (or two medium onions) in half lengthwise, and then slice each
half thinly end to end.

After the meat has given up its water and browned, add the onions
and fry until they become translucent. Add the ground walnuts and four
cups of pomegranate juice. Reduce heat to simmer and add seven cardamom
pods (or a teaspoon of ground cardamom), a teaspoon each of cinnamon
and salt, and half a teaspoon of black pepper. Add a cup of chicken
stock and enough water to submerge the meat. As it simmers, add water
as necessary to cover the meat. After an hour, add the juice of one
lemon. Many recipes suggest adding a little sugar. I don’t think that’s
necessary, but add a tablespoon if you want.

After another hour, when the meat is falling-apart tender and fully
impregnated with the pomegranate-walnut sauce, cease adding water and
allow the sauce to reduce, stirring often to prevent burning. When the
sauce is thick as melted ice cream, remove from heat and serve
fesenjan with rice.

Given the current health craze attached to pomegranate juice (some
of its constituents are thought to help prevent cancer, diabetes, heart
disease, prostate problems, and viral infections), you should have no
trouble finding it at your local store. Concentrated juice, aka syrup,
is widely available in Middle Eastern, Persian, and Central Asian
markets. The syrup can be diluted with water into juice.

In addition to its role in dishes like fesenjan, pomegranate
juice makes a good base for a marinade and can be used in salad
dressings or as a mixer.

The word “pomegranate,” a combination of the Latin words for “apple”
and “seed,” literally means “seeded apple.” Although apples and
pomegranates have little in common, their external resemblance may help
explain why modern depictions of the forbidden fruit that tempted Eve
often look like an apple, while many biblical scholars believe it was a
pomegranate. Yet another example of the pomegranate’s perennially
misunderstood status. 

And while the pomegranate may have gotten Adam and Eve banished from
the garden, in another myth, eating pomegranate seeds forced the
goddess-borne Persephone to spend half of her life in hell.

Either the pomegranate is really bad news, or the gods are really
jealous of it. You decide.

Posole, a hominy and chile stew that’s ubiquitous in New Mexico, has
deep roots south of the border, where it’s a celebratory dish often
served at Christmas.   

When most people think Christmas, they think December 25th. But in
New Mexico, Christmas has a different meaning, one that’s holier than
shopping, vacation, and, sometimes, even Jesus.

New Mexico’s version of Christmas is rooted in a question: Red or
green? The query concerns the color of the chile sauce you want on your
food — be it eggs and toast, burgers and fries, burritos,
enchiladas, samosas, fish, chicken, steak, chicken-fried steak …
anything. It’s a question that can trap even seasoned menu black belts
like myself in an existential bind.

Sometimes the solution to this dilemma is to say “Christmas,” which
means you want both red and green.

Red sauce usually is made with garlic, oregano, and red chile, while
green sauce is roux-based, with green chile. Red and green chiles come
from the same plant; the color difference is based on when the chile is
harvested and how it’s processed.

Greens chiles are harvested mid- to late summer, when they’re still
green, and then flame-roasted. The roasting loosens the skin and
releases a smoky, addictive flavor capable of wilting any green
aficionados within smelling distance. Roasted greens are typically
preserved by freezing or canning.  

Red chiles are allowed to fully ripen to a deep red color and are
strung up and sun-dried. Red chile is thin-skinned compared to its
fleshy green cousin and has a sweeter heat.

Posole can be made with either red or green chile, though red is
more common. I prefer cooking my posole with red chile and then adding
chopped green — not the sauce, just the chile — to the bowl
at serving time, for a variation on Christmas.

Hominy, the heart of posole, is a large-kernel corn that’s been
dried and then soaked in lye water. This process, which first appeared
in present-day Guatemala more than 3,000 years ago, spread to much of
the Native American world — as far as the Cherokee Nation in the
southeastern United States. The treatment removes the germ and hard
outer hull from the kernels, adds calcium, makes the corn more
palatable and easier to digest, converts niacin into a form more easily
absorbed by the body, and improves the availability of some amino
acids.

Hominy is widely available canned or dried. Dried is preferable
— it makes a better posole and it’s cheaper, especially if you
order it online (try gourmetsleuth.com). Hominy
traditionally was made with white corn, but today it’s available in
yellow and blue as well. If you can get more than one color of hominy,
by all means mix them up in your posole.

Most feast dishes tend to be elaborate, labor-intensive, and
expensive affairs. Posole is none of these. Nonetheless, I’m going to
complicate things a bit by giving you some options for different
variations. Whatever path you choose, in the end the process simmers
down to little more than putting the ingredients in a pot and cooking
them slowly.

To make four generous servings, use two cups of dried hominy or four
cups of canned. Dried hominy should be rinsed; canned should be
drained.

I make posole with dried hominy, in a crock pot on high for eight
hours. You can also soak dried kernels for 24 hours with a lime
squeezed in, drain and rinse, then proceed on the stovetop. Stovetop
protocol works for canned hominy, too. Two cups of dried hominy should
be cooked in five quarts of water; four cups of canned need only four
quarts of water.

The red chile can be added in powdered or whole form, in quantities
according to your tolerance for heat. I use a combination of three
tablespoons powdered red and five whole reds. Break open the dried
whole chiles and remove the seeds and stems. Hand-crush them into large
fragments and add them to the pot. Add two tablespoons oregano,
preferably Mexican rather than the Mediterranean varieties, and a whole
mess of chopped garlic.

Posole is usually made with pork shoulder, but I prefer red meat
like beef, lamb, goat, or elk. Whichever you use, pan-brown a pound or
two of trimmed meat cut into one-inch cubes. Once browned, add a
chopped onion, or two, or five. (Make sure to savor the smell of raw
onion cooking into the browned meat.) Kill the heat when the onion
starts to sweat.

Add the meat and onions to the pot, and season with salt or garlic
salt — depending on how much fresh garlic you added and how much
you like garlic.

Since this is going to cook for hours, it’s good to start small with
the oregano and the salt. Taste and re-season as you go. Some people
like to add sage, cumin, or even cinnamon. I’d recommend using just
oregano in your first batch and expanding your horizons from there.
Cook on low/medium heat until the hominy is soft — about eight
hours with dried hominy or two hours with canned or soaked.

Roast five or six fresh Anaheim chiles, or similar variety, under
the broiler until the skins blister. Remove the skins, stems, and seeds
under running cold water and chop the chiles.

Add a tablespoon or two of chopped green chile to your red chile
posole, serve with garnish plate of limes and fresh aromatic veggies
like sliced radish, cabbage, and cilantro, and let me be the first to
wish you Feliz Navidad from New Mexico, where every day can be
Christmas. And while purists might shudder, I should mention that I
also like a dab of mayo in my posole. White Christmas, anyone?

Stuart Monk | Dreamstime.com

Alain Passard, founder and head chef at L’Arpège in Paris,
pulled meat from his menu in 2001, because, he announced, he wanted
more culinary challenges. “One day I woke up and asked myself, ‘What
have I done with a leek, with a carrot?’ Nothing, or maybe just 10
percent of what can be done with a carrot.”

Some of his dishes are complex — a chocolate avocado
soufflé, a three-layered nasturtium soup — and others are
the culinary equivalents of sniffing a flower, uncomplicated bites that
present the morsel’s true flavor. A beet baked inside a solid pyramid
of salt, for example, provides a striking but unobstructed journey into
the depths of beetitude.

A beet’s texture ranges from wood to jelly. Its flavor is dirt and
sugar. It stains anything you cook it with and anything else it
touches, including your insides. Most people are at a loss for what to
do with beets and simply boil or roast them. But there are many finer
things to do with beets that are just as easy.

Here’s a trio of recipes to help set you on a beeten path less
traveled. All are simple, use just a few ingredients, and give striking
results. In addition to my version of Passard’s beet in a salt pyramid,
there are beets in chocolate sauce as well as the workingman’s beet,
the one for dinner tonight, braised in vinaigrette.   

While I’m focusing here on the beet part beneath the ground, the
leaves also are worth eating in almost any context, including steamed,
sautéed, in salads, etc. For raw use, you may want to trim the
stems, which behave more like roots, with strong flavor and staining
potential.

Since I can’t bear listening to myself trying to pronounce
betterave rouge en croûte de sel, I call
Passard’s beet dish “Blood on the Snow,” though it isn’t mine to name.
Since I can’t get my hands on Passard’s sel de Guérande, which
is brown-ish, my white coarse sea salt looks more snow-like.  

Mix four cups of coarse salt with a cup of water, stirring until it
reaches the consistency of wet snow. Build an inch-plus base of salt in
an oiled cast-iron skillet. Clip the beet stems just above the tuber
and snip the thin taproot. Place the beet firmly upon the salt
pedestal, and pack more wet salt around it. Use a putty knife to shape
and smooth the salt into a perfect pyramid, if you like. The beet from
a messy pile will taste exactly the same.

Preheat the oven to 300 and bake the salt/beet pyramid for two hours
(an hour and a half for medium or small beets).

Remove the beet from the oven and let it cool for 30 minutes. The
salt will have hardened into a granular shell, so use a hammer and
chisel to open the tip of the pyramid, revealing the beet in its cavity
of salt. Remove it and brush off any salt clinging to the skin. Cut the
warm vegetable into wedges and drizzle with aged balsamic vinegar.

The vinegar lends acidic sweetness and a subtle, forest-like
complexity that interacts with the musky beet in a marriage not unlike
the pairing of wine and meat.

Beets are also perfectly at home on the sweeter side of the flavor
profile and go especially well with chocolate. I’ve played around with
brownies, cakes, and cookies and improved many a recipe or mix with
grated beet. These days I prefer the easy way: beets in chocolate
sauce.

Slice beets into quarter-inch rounds and boil in just enough water
to cover them, adding more water as necessary. When cooked to your
desired tenderness, add chocolate chips, preferably dark. Keep adding
chocolate until the sauce is as thick as you like it. Adding a little
heavy cream is a good option here — it will vanish without a
trace into the deep chocolate beet blackness. Don’t forget to drink the
chocolate beet sauce at the end, with or without milk.

The above recipes are simple, yet so spectacular they seem like an
event. But at home, when I just want some pedestrian, low-profile beet
for dinner, I keep it simpler. Trim and slice a beet, sprinkle with
salt and pepper, add equal parts balsamic vinegar and safflower oil to
generously cover the bottom of the pan. Place the pan in the oven,
about six inches beneath the flame, and broil until the beet slices are
soft, flipping them at least once. Serve with the crème of your
choice — a dollop of chèvre or sour cream, perhaps, or a
big glop of mayo (my favorite mayo is actually fake mayo: grapeseed oil
Veganaise).

Minus the vinaigrette, this is how I usually cook red meat. So it
comes as less of a surprise to me that the salt-and-pepper braise
brings out the beet’s meaty earth tones. Not many vegetables are
versatile enough to taste sweet like candy one moment and rich like
meat the next. Just watch your step, because beets can be moody. It’s a
vegetable that’s part mineral, and you’d think part animal when you see
it bleed. While it isn’t exactly high maintenance, the beet demands to
be treated right, and that includes making it the center of the
universe. The beet doesn’t play well with others. It wants all of your
attention.

If you were shipwrecked on a desert island with only one food, what
would you choose? Think survival. Only unprocessed, raw ingredients are
allowed in this exercise — no energy bars or hamburgers.
 

Call it coincidence, call it cosmic, call it luck, but if you really
were trapped on a desert island, one of the best foods you could hope
to find is a food you’d actually be likely to find. Packed with energy,
protein, fiber, vitamins, and many other nutrients, coconut is a
complete and proven survival food.

The coconut inhabits innumerable deserted islands thanks to a
dispersal method by which it slowly floats around the ocean and
occasionally makes landfall on suitable shores, where it sprouts and
colonizes. This is one reason why coconut is the poster child for my
personal culinary style: the Slow-Boat School of Cooking.

Slow-boat cooking is a regional cuisine focused on local ingredients
but not to the point of dogma. Slow-boating allows the strategic
application of select ingredients from faraway places — like
coconuts — provided they adhere to two basic rules:

1) The faraway food in question cannot be grown at home, ever. This
rules out imported fruits like strawberries and apples from the
southern hemisphere in winter, when they’re out of season at home.
Slow-boat principles dictate that you preserve local foods in season
and use the storage forms all year long, rather than buying the
imported version out of season.

Ingredients like coconuts, chocolate, and black pepper cannot be
grown at home. They also satisfy the second requirement.

2) Imported ingredients are allowed if they can be transported
slowly, unrefrigerated — like the spice and pasta Marco Polo
brought home from China. Polo did not bring back fresh lychee fruits or
frozen pot stickers, which would have rotted and melted. Shipping food
slowly, unrefrigerated, is the most efficient way. While realistically
it’s hard to know by what mode your food arrived, if, in the evolution
of our cuisine, we stick to foods that could be transported by slow
boat, then we hold open the possibility that they will be. And we’ll
create cuisines that could someday be close to carbon neutral, if some
shipping companies would go back to using sailboats. Languedoc
vineyards in France have in fact begun shipping its wine this way.

Wine could challenge coconuts as a slow-boat poster product —
think message in a bottle — were it not for the fact that so much
good wine is produced closer to home.

Coconut brings a flavor and richness to the table that is as close
to magical as food can get. It mixes harmoniously with many local
ingredients, and today I’m going to focus on how it can be applied to
elk and green chile.

The first step is to thaw your meat, which doesn’t have to be elk.
It could be anything, even fish. If you have frozen green chile, thaw
that too. If not, hang in there.  

Many cooks, even in tropical countries where the coconuts drop from
the trees, balk at making their own coconut milk. And while canned
coconut milk qualifies as slow-boat friendly, I prefer to make it
fresh.

Picking a good coconut can be a crapshoot, but you can improve your
odds by choosing coconuts that feel heavy for their size, don’t have
cracks or mold on the outside, and have audible water sloshing inside.
Consider bringing a bowl to the store. Smash your new coconut on the
parking lot, drain the water into the bowl, and taste it. If it tastes
rotten, exchange the coconut for another and try again. Alternatively,
you can keep a can of coconut milk as a backup in case of a bad
coconut.

Pull apart your smashed coconut and bake the broken shards at 350
for 30 minutes, or until the edges start to turn golden. Remove from
heat and let cool. Chop the flesh, which should pull away from the
shell easily with a butter knife or spoon, and put it in a food
processor or blender. Grind for about three minutes, then slowly add
two cups of water. Blend/process for three more minutes. Let steep for
15 minutes, then pour the whole business through a filter. A tea
strainer or paint strainer works well, as does cheesecloth or other
cotton material stretched over a bowl. Squeeze all the liquid into a
bowl, and set aside the leftover coconut flesh and add to your next
stir-fry.

Cut your meat into one-inch chunks and squeeze a few slow-boat limes
over the chunks. Marinate 15 minutes, and then brown the meat in a pan
with hot oil. When brown, add a sliced onion, a few chopped garlic
cloves, and some lime leaves (I get mine from a local greenhouse).

I buy green chiles by the bushel in August, when they’re in season,
and roast and freeze them for year-round use. If you didn’t do this,
you have permission to go buy fresh Anaheim or New Mexico chile peppers
from the store, and roast them yourself to make this dish. It won’t be
slow-boat, but it will be good practice and will hopefully motivate you
to come aboard the slow boat this summer and freeze a stash of roasted
green chile.  

While the meat is browning, peel and clean seven to 10 chiles under
running water, removing seeds if you wish, and chop them.  

After you add the onions and garlic to the pan, let them cook until
they start to sweat, then add your coconut milk. Stir, add soy sauce to
taste, and squeeze in a few more limes. Simmer five minutes, add the
green chile, simmer two more minutes, and turn off the heat. Serve with
rice, and garnish with cilantro if you have any on board.

My inbox has been pummeled recently by a slew of e-mails warning me
of the evils of a bill currently working its way through Congress.
Sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), HR 875 — aka the Food
Safety Modernization Act of 2009 — is one of a raft of bills
introduced in the wake of the peanut-butter-borne salmonella
outbreak.

All of these proposed bills, which ostensibly seek to improve food
safety with increased regulation, threaten to jeopardize local food
systems with overregulation. Unfortunately, it’s been difficult to get
a grip on the bills’ true dangers because of all the alarmist hype
that’s accompanied them — especially, for some reason, HR
875.

“If [HR 875] passes, say goodbye to organic produce, your Local
Farmer’s market and very possibly, the GARDEN IN YOUR OWN
BACKYARD!!!!!” one e-mail announced.

Another warned that HR 875 would result in “criminalization of seed
banking, prison terms, and confiscatory fines for farmers.”

“There is a perfectly legitimate conversation to be had about how we
can have food-safety regulation without jeopardizing small farms and
local food systems,” says Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and
Water Watch, a national nonprofit. “But it’s hard to have a rational
conversation via these forwarded e-mails. It’s not happening in a way
that’s going to change the policy.”

Lovera says HR 875 wouldn’t regulate seed-saving, backyard gardens,
or farmers’ markets. It would, however, split the Food and Drug
Administration into separate agencies, one for food and one for drugs.
Food and Water Watch supports that. Unfortunately, Lovera says,
splitting the FDA might be too daunting a task for lawmakers to take on
right now, and the proposed bill probably won’t make it to law.

More likely to reach a vote, Lovera says, is HR 759, called the Food
and Drug Administration Globalization Act. While this proposed bill has
drawn less attention than the others, she thinks it’s more likely to
cause big problems for small farmers.

HR 759 would make record-keeping requirements that currently apply
to food processors extend to farms and require that such record keeping
be done electronically. It would also mandate that all farms become
certified in so-called good agricultural practices. Following these
practices, which are mostly aimed at controlling microbial
contamination, turns out to be easier for farms that grow just a few
things than it is for diverse, integrated farms — especially if
the farm contains livestock. These and other aspects of HR 759 boil
down, once again, to rules that would place a disproportionate burden
on small, family farms in their attempt to regulate the large factory
farms where most food-safety problems originate.

Elena Elisseeva | Dreamstime.com

HR 875 and HR 759 are but two of several proposed bills that are
supposedly aimed at preventing E. coli in spinach, downer cattle in
school lunches, feathers in chicken patties, and other horror stories
we’ve grown all too used to hearing. But by extending these regulations
to the small farms that typically are not the sources of these
problems, the playing field will further tilt in favor of corporate
agriculture. This is truly cause for concern.

“What people don’t realize is that if any of these bills pass, we
lose. All we will have left is industrial food.” So says Deborah
Stockton, executive director of the National Independent Consumers and
Farmers Association, which promotes unregulated farmer-to-consumer
trade and the commercial availability of locally grown and
home-produced food products.

One of Stockton’s top priorities is ending the controversial
National Animal Identification System (NAIS). Implemented by USDA in
2003 without congressional approval, NAIS is a federal registry program
for livestock and for the premises where animals live or visit. The
system’s stated purpose is to aid state and federal government response
to outbreaks of animal disease.

“NAIS is a safety net for the corporate livestock industry,”
Stockton told me. “They’re the ones with the practices that are
creating problems for human and animal health, and they’re the ones who
need NAIS to cover their backs when something goes wrong. The main
threats to food safety are centralized production, processing, and
long-distance transportation.”

While she too dislikes NAIS, Lovera says the bills currently under
consideration are aimed at the FDA, and NAIS is not an FDA program.
It’s USDA. While she sees many problems with the current bills,
strengthening NAIS isn’t one of them.

Stockton disagrees. If any of these bills pass, she says, it would
ratify NAIS and strengthen the USDA’s ability to make it mandatory that
all livestock, including your flock of backyard chickens, be
registered.

A food-safety bill palatable to locavores will have to protect local
food systems with specific language that guarantees small family farms,
backyard gardens, personal livestock, and farmers’ markets. All forms
of food self-sufficiency and farmer-direct purchasing are exempted.
These regulations need to target the factory farms where the problems
lie and not the small farms that could and should be the solution.

I’m hardly alone in believing the right to buy milk from your
neighbor or grow your own food is as inalienable as the right to bear
arms. And if lawmakers try to take this right away, they’re going to
see a backlash to make the NRA seem like a bunch of flower-wagging Hare
Krishnas.

Winter squash is a well-named fruit. It keeps all winter long and makes great cold-weather comfort food. The warm, buttery flavor adds to almost any dish, sweet or savory.

While summer squash varieties are harvested when the fruits are tender virgins, winter squash are harvested when the fruits are mature with fertilized seeds, a hard, shiny shell, and dense glowing flesh that casts much-needed light in these cold dark days.

First cultivated from wild squash by Central American Indians 10,000 years ago, this authentically American food was initially valued for its seed, as the bitter flesh was unpalatable. Today in Central America and Mexico, recipes based on squash seeds, such as mole, are still popular.

It took many generations of indigenous seed savers to craft the sweet-fleshed squash we know today. That some Indians were buried with a squash stash to feed them in the next phase of their journey speaks to the importance of this crop, which migrated north and reached the East Coast before the colonizers, who survived harsh winters on it and shared it with Indians on Thanksgiving, according to American lore.

Since then, squash has found its way to most parts of the world, where winter squash is widely known as “pumpkin” — a name that in American English is reserved for but one variety of winter squash.

Thanks to its high carbohydrate content, winter squash can serve as the base for a meal. Like rice, bread, or pasta, it can be the substance to which the saucier elements are applied. Or it can be the sauce itself, either as a bit player in, say, a coconut curry or as the body of the sauce — like the sauce in the enchilada recipe I’ll give you in a moment.

Squash can be made into soup, spread, dip, or salad dressing; it can be baked into a cake or baked with custard inside. It can be incorporated into almost anything, or it can be left entirely alone. A baked delicata squash on the half shell, left to cool on the stovetop, needs nothing at all, not even a utensil. Hold it like a piece of pizza and eat it, skin and all. It could be your entire meal.

For a side dish, cut a winter squash into one-inch chunks and drizzle with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Bake at 350 degrees, stirring occasionally, until the chunks are crispy on the outside but creamy on the inside. Eat these chunks with whatever’s for dinner. The next day, toss them in your lunchbox. Toss them in your salad. Toss them into a hot pan with bacon grease, fresh garlic, and pre-browned meat and serve over rice with soy sauce. Or brown them in olive oil, push them to the side of the pan, and scramble in a few eggs.

And then there’s pumpkin pie, which can be made from any winter squash.

Years ago, some friends and I had a pumpkin pie business. We were always testing different recipes, always had tons of half-eaten pies lying around. That’s when I proved, scientifically, that it’s possible to live for days, happily, on nothing but pumpkin pie.

We made pies from blue hubbard, kuri, buttercup, pumpkin, kabocha, acorn, delicata, and sweet-meat squashes, and we had a different recipe for each variety. Starchy kabochas require more eggs and cream, for example, while the sweet and buttery delicatas need less. Sometimes we used classic pumpkin pie spices, such as mace, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, or cloves. Sometimes we mixed in chocolate chunks.

Here is a basic squash pie recipe, which you can use as a template and doctor to your own specifications:

Cut squash in half, scoop out seeds and guts, saving the seeds for roasting with salt, pepper, and olive oil. Place the halves face down on a baking tray with a quarter-inch of water on the bottom, and bake at 375 degrees until a fork easily pierces the flesh — about 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool.

For each pie, scoop out two cups of squash flesh and combine with half a cup of cream and three to four eggs. Sweeten to taste. The average recipe calls for about one cup of sugar per pie; maple syrup works too. Add the pie spices of your choice, up to a half-teaspoon per spice. Add nuts, chocolate, or whatever else you think will taste good. Taste often to make sure the mixture is right. For a fancy variation, separate the eggs, mix the yolks into the filling, beat the whites stiff, and fold them into the final filling.

If you want a savory pie, skip the sweetener. Brown meats and cook and season greens, potatoes, or whatever other items you want. Add a layer of squash, then the filling, maybe some cheese. Cover with more squash filling and bake.

Sweet or savory, bake your pie about an hour at 300 degrees, until the filling is firm.

And here’s that recipe for green chicken enchiladas with squash sauce:

Bake a squash as for pie. Sauté one shallot, minced, and three cloves garlic, chopped, in olive oil. Add one cup of squash, season with a teaspoon each of nutmeg and paprika, and salt and pepper to taste. Stir often. Whenever it starts to stick, deglaze with Madeira or sherry. After 15 minutes on medium heat, add one cup of chicken stock. Cook until thick. Turn off the heat and let it cool, then puree in a food processor.

In another pan, brown half a pound of chicken meat. Add one-quarter cup pine nuts, four chopped kale leaves, and two chopped oven-roasted green chiles. Season with salt and pepper.

Fold the chicken mixture into corn tortillas and pack into a baking pan. Pour the sauce over them, and bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.

Pickled peppers are a cornerstone of my culinary paradigm and a year-round umbilical cord to the bounty of summer. Delivering spice, acid, sweetness, and the subtle earth tones of my local terroir, my pickled peppers are employed — or deployed, in the case of extra-hotties — in a technique I call “co-munching.”

With this technique, the pickled pepper becomes a kind of chewed-in sauce. To co-munch, one takes a bite of the meal, then a bite of the co-munched item. Both are then chewed together so they dance on your tongue. This is co-munching.

Most co-munchables are acid-based and best paired with rich, fatty foods to take advantage of the age-old principle of acid/fat combinations, such as oil and vinegar, catsup and French fries, oysters and cocktail sauce, wine and, well, many things, and coffee with a big, hot, greasy breakfast.

Like a hunter who utilizes every tidbit of his kill, I use the entire contents of my pickled pepper jar, ensuring that nothing is wasted. After the pickles are gone, the remaining vinegar can liven up a soup or salad dressing. Once a jar has been emptied of its peppers, fresh veggies can be packed into the vinegar and left in the fridge to make easy refrigerator pickles. The vinegar-soaked mustard seeds at the bottom can be used as a spicy, coarse mustard.

When the jar is empty, I wash it, wash the ring, and screw the ring back on the jar to protect the rim from chipping while I store the jar for next fall, when the harvest comes ’round and I pack those jars again.

I won’t stop packing until I have 100 quarts. I can’t stop, because I’ll trade or give away 20 quarts easy, while a big feast can wipe out a whole jar on a single night. After the dust settles, I’ll consider myself in good shape if I have a jar per week for steady consumption.

Depending on how hardcore you are, pickled peppers can be a year-round project: Start studying your seed catalogs in January, order your pepper seeds in February, start them inside in March, transplant them in April or May, and tend them all summer before picking and packing them in jars.

If you’re not that hardcore, there are two stages of the process where you can shortcut months of work by building on the work of others: You can buy your pepper starts in spring, saving months of seedling responsibilities, or you can buy the finished peppers during harvest season, when they’re ripe, beautiful, and plentiful. I grow a token number of peppers in my home garden, maybe 10 quarts’ worth, but given the amount of space I have, growing 100 quarts’ worth is not feasible, so I buy big at the farmers market. The plants I do grow are from purchased starts, because raising seedlings isn’t my strong point.

Most fleshy peppers, except bells, are good for pickling, as are small, thin-skinned hots. My favorite hots are the Tabasco-style peppers, like the Arledge or Louisiana varieties. For sweets, I prefer round, yellow-to-red, pimento-style peppers like Klari baby cheese. Put some Arledges and Klaris in a jar together and you’ve got yourself some “Hotties and Sweeties.”

The only drawback to “Hotties and Sweeties” is the fact that the minute you crack the lid, the contents fly from the jar and into the mouths of ravenous bystanders. There is no known way of preventing this from happening.

Part of the beauty of pickled peppers is that every year is different, and you roll with what’s available. This year, alas, my Klari crop was a bust, so I paired my lipstick-red Arledges with a charismatic assortment of small fancy French carrots, left whole.

Another classic mix is jalapeños and carrots — with onions, oregano, marjoram, and cumin, if you want Mexican-style escabeche. Other veggies you can add to pickled peppers are cauliflower and garlic.

Big peppers have to be sliced into rounds; cut the little ones’ tops off close to the stem to allow the brine in. Break cauliflower florets into packable sizes; cut carrots into whatever shape you like.

Keep everything super-clean. If you’re unfamiliar with canning, or any of these terms, read the directions that come with the lids.

Your mason jars, lids, and rings should be sterilized before you pack them with food. This is commonly done with brief submersion in boiling water, but I use the dishwasher (truly a great way to get piping hot, sterile, super-clean jars).

Wide-mouth jars are best for easy packing. Start with a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon each of yellow and brown mustard seeds.

Pack peppers and veggies into jars as tightly and space-efficiently as possible, and leave a one-inch “head space” between the veggies and the top of the jar. If possible, pack in a freshly picked and washed grape leaf, which helps keep your pickles crispy (though the most important factor in maintaining crispness is to not overcook the pickles).

When the jars are nearly packed, heat up equal parts vinegar and water. The vinegar half is equal parts cider and white-wine vinegar. Add a cup of sugar per gallon of brine, which will pickle about eight quarts.

Bring the brine to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. When the jars are packed, pour vinegar into the jars, covering the veggies by a quarter-inch but leaving the half-inch head space. Wipe the rims, screw on the lids and rings, and use canning tongs to place the hot jars in a pot of boiling water, which must cover the jars by at least half an inch. Boil for five minutes, remove, and let the jars cool at room temperature.

As you clean the kitchen, you’ll be serenaded by a jazz concert of pings as your jars seal one by one. This music will be followed by the long, slow song of a year’s supply of co-munchies.