Bamboo for Dinner

Posted on May 16, 2013 by

digging bambooSometimes the best strategy for managing pests is to eat them. Cajuns savor stewed nutria.  Mexicans crunch fried grasshoppers. The French swallow butter-soaked snails. And I have started eating bamboo.

After beautifully screening my bee and compost yard for fifteen years, my bamboo hedge is getting out of hand, pushing up shoots as far as 10 feet from its designated territory and right through the heavy-duty landscape fabric at the base of my raised beds. The shoots can grow as much as a foot in a day.

Why was I fool enough to plant running bamboo without walling it in? Actually, I have no regrets about this, most of the time. The 25-foot-long hedge not only looks lovely all year around; it also provides all the stakes and trellis material that I and my friends can use, and on summer afternoons it shades one of my beds so I can grow lettuce there.

But I need to put a little more effort into bamboo control measures.*

bamboo hedgeI don’t know what species of bamboo I have; the nursery sold it simply as “green bamboo.” According to the American Bamboo Society, there are about 1,450 species of bamboo, many of them native to Asia but others to Australia, Africa, or North or South America. Most if not all species have edible shoots. My bamboo grows about 15 feet high, and the canes are no more than about an inch in diameter.

Because bamboo species vary so much, it’s hard to find reliable advice about harvesting and preparing the shoots. Some people say to cut them a few inches below the soil surface as soon as they emerge from the ground. Others say to let them grow to as high as a foot. Some say what matters is time, not height, because the shoots grow tough and bitter when they are exposed to the sun for too long. I decided to harvest mine when they were no taller than 6 inches; many were only 2 to 3 inches tall. I dug with my hori-hori to break the shoots about an inch below the soil surface.

In most cases I should have waited a day, or a few hours, anyway. There is not much to eat in a 2-inch-tall, 1-inch-wide bamboo shoot, after you remove all the sheath leaves. Also too much bother were the skinniest shoots, ½ inch or less in diameter. I should have left those for the mower.

raw bamboo shootsAll the bamboo experts seem to agree that bamboo shoots should be kept cool and cooked soon, so I collected mine over the course of just a week. I stored them in an unsealed plastic bag in the refrigerator.

As I washed and trimmed and peeled the shoots, I tasted many of them. They had an unpleasant rawness about them, but none were bitter, not even the few I’d harvested at 10 inches tall. Later I cut some 12-inch shoots and licked their ends; they weren’t bitter, either. Next year I’ll follow advice from the self-published book Farming Bamboo: I’ll harvest the shoots at 6 to 12 inches, for a maximum of tasty flesh without bitterness.

peeled & sliced bambooTo make the shoots easy to peel, I scored them lengthwise, as you might an onion. I broke off the tips, which were all leaves without solid flesh, and trimmed off bottom ends that were damaged or very hard. Then, following instructions from Washington State University (WSU) Extension, I cut the shoots crosswise into 1/8-inch rounds, some of them hollow and some of them solid, and boiled them in an uncovered pan of water for 20 minutes. Leaving the pan uncovered is supposed to allow the compounds that cause bitterness to dissipate into the air (according to Farming Bamboo, tropical varieties are especially likely to have these compounds). If any bitter taste remains in the shoots, say all of my sources, boil them in fresh water for 5 minutes more.

The initial 20 minutes’ cooking time was a compromise. Japanese writers call for as much as 90 minutes of boiling, always with rice bran added to remove bitterness, but in Japan cooks often boil their thick shoots whole. Farming Bamboo says that 10 minutes of boiling is enough, and that non-bitter shoots can be added raw to stir-fries.

My cooked shoots weren’t at all bitter. They were still firm to the tooth, but they had lost their raw taste. Their delicate flavor reminded me of artichoke bottoms.

bamboo ready for fridgeHow best to store cooked bamboo shoots? Japanese writers say to keep them covered with water in the refrigerator and to change the water every day; the shoots will keep this way for as long as a week. Farming Bamboo says that if you boil the shoots in lightly salted water, you can store them dry in a plastic bag or other container in the refrigerator. Again, I compromised, sort of: I’d boiled my shoots in unsalted water, but now I put them in a quart container and covered them with salted water (1 ½ teaspoons salt to 1 pint water). I figure I’ll change the water every two or three days, adding a little salt each time.

Bamboo shoots can be frozen, too. If you slice and blanch them, says Farming Bamboo, you can store bamboo shoots in a sealed bag in a freezer for up to a year. They can go straight from the freezer into the wok.

Besides providing a pleasant, mild flavor and an appealing crunch in salads and stir-fries, bamboo shoots are good for your health. They are low in calories, but they are high in potassium and fiber.

bamboo saladLast evening I briefly marinated two handfuls of bamboo shoots in a dressing of lemon juice and roasted hazelnut oil, and then I added the shoots to a salad of spinach, arugula, blanched asparagus, and sliced boiled eggs. A delicious way to celebrate springtime! Tonight I may add the shoots to a stir-fry, with broccoli and maybe some turnips. And, true to form, I’ll also have to pickle some bamboo shoots. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

*A good source of information on other simple control measures (such as shallow trenching—I’ll try that next) and everything else about growing bamboo is the Bamboo Garden, a 20-acre Oregon nursery with 300 bamboo species for sale.

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A Mixed Pickle of Mixed Parentage

Posted on April 25, 2013 by

atjar tjampoerWhen Jennifer Burns Levin wrote about her encounter with atjar tjampoer in Amsterdam, I realized that this Indonesian-Dutch cousin of chow-chow was missing from my collection of recipes for the mixed pickles that originated in the East Indies and traveled with sailors around the globe, evolving along the way to suit local tastes and conditions.

Atjar tjampoer is especially interesting because it’s still popular among the descendants of both the colonizers and colonized. It’s an everyday food not only in the cool Netherlands but also in warm Indonesia, where the pickle goes by the modern, de-dutchified spelling acar campur. Although Indonesian recipes often include tropical ingredients that are rare in Europe, such as candlenuts and lemongrass, both Dutch and Indonesian recipes call for European vegetables: usually cabbage and carrots, and often cauliflower and green beans. As with other mixed pickles, the ingredients can vary according to what’s available in the garden or market.

Chow-chow wouldn’t be chow-chow without mustard. Atjar tjampoer is always brilliant yellow, but usually all the color comes from turmeric, though mustard is occasionally included. In Indonesia, fresh rather than dried turmeric is preferred.

Like chow-chow, atjar tjampoer is a sweet pickle, but the amount of sugar can range from a tablespoon to a half-cup per pound of vegetables. And whereas chow-chow recipes include various spices such as cinnamon, allspice, cloves, and black pepper, atjar tjampoer’s seasonings are usually limited to hot pepper, ginger, garlic, and salt. The resulting taste is clean, pungent, and usually more bitter than sweet.           

American and English picklers tend to put up chow-chow in great quantities, but atjar tjampoer, especially when it’s acar campur, is often treated more as a make-ahead salad than as stock for the pantry. I developed this recipe to fill a quart jar.

Atjar Tjampoer/Acar Campur

Feel free to change the vegetable types and amounts to suit your needs, but aim for a total of 2¼ pounds. In summer, include sliced cucumber and chopped green beans.

I used rice vinegar of 5-percent acidity, but most recipes call for distilled vinegar.

If you happen to have a jar of sambal ulek, Indonesian hot-pepper paste, use it instead of dried hot pepper. Because the peppers in sambal ulek are ground with salt, you may want to reduce the amount of added salt in this recipe. Another alternative, of course, is to grind some fresh ripe peppers yourself.

1 tablespoon peanut oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic
2 teaspoons minced ginger
1 tablespoon ground turmeric
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup vinegar
2 teaspoons ground dried hot pepper
10 ounces trimmed cabbage, sliced thin
6 ounces onion, halved and sliced thin
4 ounces carrots, sliced thin diagonally, the slices slivered lengthwise
1 pound trimmed cauliflower, broken into the tiniest florets

In a nonreactive pot, heat the peanut oil. Add the garlic, ginger, turmeric, and red pepper, and cook the mixture briefly, until it is fragrant. Add the sugar, salt, and vinegar. As soon as the vinegar begins to boil, add the vegetables. Cook and turn them for 1 to 2 minutes, until they are wilted; they should not soften much.

Remove the pot from the heat, and pack the vegetables firmly into a quart jar. Cover them with the liquid. Cover the jar, let it cool, and then store it in the refrigerator.

The pickle can be eaten right away, but it will taste better after several days.

The Dutch serve atjar tjampoer as part of their rijsttafel (“rice table”), an elaborate colonial-style banquet. Indonesians eat acar campur with spicy and hearty foods, including meatballs, pork chops, pot roast, fish, and sandwiches.

Posted in Pickles, Vegetables | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

One Fine Mixer: Fermented Lemon Brine

Posted on April 15, 2013 by

 

While making space in my overstuffed refrigerator last week, I chopped a last slice of brined lemon, tossed it into the bean soup bubbling on the stove, and began to tip the jar of brine into the sink. But I couldn’t resist the scent of that lemony liquid. If cucumber pickle brine can make a good cocktail ingredient, I thought, how much tastier a drink could you make with the salty, sour, bitter, tantalizingly aromatic brine of preserved lemons?

So I heated the brine to sterilize it, funneled it into a bottle, and stored the bottle in the liquor cabinet for Robert to find.

He couldn’t resist. That same day he invented his new favorite cocktail, the Vodka Lemon Pickletini. Here is his recipe:

2 2/3 ounces (1/3 cup) vodka
2 teaspoons brine from preserved lemons*

Combine the gin and lemon brine in a chilled cocktail glass, and stir.

The lemon brine, said Robert, “softens the alcoholic edge of the vodka, and the saltiness brings out a dimension of umami. The bitterness of the lemon oil fills out the taste, while the citrusy, slightly medicinal aroma excites the nose.”

You might decorate your glass with a sliver of brined lemon.

 

*Put whole fresh, thin-skinned, unwaxed lemons into a glass jar. Pour over the lemons brine made from one tablespoon fine salt to each cup of water. Weight the lemons, cover the jar loosely, and leave the jar at room temperature for about three weeks. Then close the jar tightly, and store it in the refrigerator.

Posted in Fermented foods, Fruits | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Experiments with Tibicos (Water Kefir)

Posted on April 5, 2013 by
Quince-honey tibi

Quince-honey tibi

When my friend Rose Marie first asked me what I knew about water kefir, I was baffled. Water kefir, she explained, was a culture for a bubbly beverage made from water, not milk, in the form of “grains” that resemble those that produce kefir.

I was skeptical. Was water kefir, like kombucha, another excuse to drink soda pop and call it good for you?

Well—yes, more or less. But I’ve since come to enjoy using what many Americans are now calling water kefir but that has gone by many other names in the past, including California bees, African bees, ale nuts, Balm of Gilead, beer bees, beer plant, and Japanese beer seeds. Europeans call water kefir tibi, and they maintain that it came originally from Mexico, where it is likewise called tibi or, traditionally, tibicos.1 In Mexico, grains of tibicos are fermented with pineapple juice or brown sugar (or both) in water to make tepache de tibicos, a refreshing, sweet, slightly alcoholic beverage.

Tibicos, or water kefir grains. The coloration on some of them resulted from using dark fruit syrups.

Tibicos, or water kefir grains. The coloration on some of them resulted from using dark fruit syrups.

Rose Marie ordered some of the grains from an online vendor and brought me about two tablespoons of them in a little plastic tub of water.2 I poked them; they were firm, irregularly shaped, colorless and translucent gelatinous masses, averaging about a quarter inch across. I fed them some sugar and put the tub in the refrigerator.

Within a day or two the lid was swelling. I needed to do something soon with my tibicos, I figured, or risk killing them. I could put them in a jar on the counter with more sugar water, but I wouldn’t want those empty calories, and why would they? Surely they would prefer to have some fruit juice. I didn’t have a pineapple handy, but it occurred to me that I had dozens of bottles of fruit syrups of various sorts, left over from candying fruits or made experimentally. On hot days my kids sometimes combined the syrups with carbonated water from the grocery store. I considered how I hated buying those plastic bottles, and hauling them back to town to recycle them.

I was beginning to see some value in tibi.

So I began making my own tibi pop. The recipe is simple:

Pour ½ to 3/4 cup fruit syrup, depending on the magnitude of your sweet tooth, into a quart jar. Add a tablespoon of tibicos and enough water to fill the jar. Fit a lid on loosely. Set the jar on the kitchen counter. Wait two days. Strain out the tibicos, rinse them, and store them in fresh sugar-water in the refrigerator. Funnel the partially fermented liquid into a liter-size clamp-topped bottle, the kind with a ceramic stopper that’s lined with a rubber ring. Clamp the bottle shut. Leave it on the counter for two days, no more. When you’re feeling hot and thirsty, unclamp the bottle. Gas should explode from the bottle just as if you’ve opened a bottle of champagne. If the explosion is weak, reclamp the bottle and wait another day or two. Then pour a glass of the bubbly. Adjust the taste if you like, with an ice cube or a squirt of lemon. Reclamp the bottle, and leave it on the counter. Pour yourself more tibi every day or two until the bottle is empty.

Each time you open the bottle, it will be as bubbly as before, or more so. I’ve made strawberry tibi, Asian pear tibi, plum tibi, and even tibi from syrup left from preserving green walnuts (the last tasted a bit like root beer). My only mistake was when I left the tibi bottled too long, perhaps four days, without releasing the pressure. Between opening the bottle and reaching the sink I managed to spray every wall and cupboard and several open cookbooks with plum pop.

If you don’t drink your tibi every day, do remember to open the bottle daily to release the pressure. If you forget one day, open the bottle the next day in the sink or outdoors. Ignore the example of one tibi maker, who, after a bottle of his tibi exploded, stood at a distance from the others and shot them with a rifle.

In an article published in 1990, Jürgen Reiss analyzed tibi scientifically. 3 The grains, he found, are made of dextran, a polysaccharide. Within the dextran are, in a symbiotic relationship, three species of microbes: Saccaromyces cerevisiae (which is used in making beer, wine, and bread), Lactobacillus brevis (common in sauerkraut and fermented pickles and a spoiler in beer), and Streptococcus lactis (also known as Lactococcus lactis, and used in making buttermilk and cheese). Reiss concocted his experimental tibi with dried figs and other dried fruit, as is common in Europe.

This is what happened in the fermenting tibi, according to Reiss: The sugar level declined constantly. After six days the alcohol reached its maximum level, slightly less than 0.5 percent, and acetic acid reached its maximum, too. Lactic acid was produced “in reasonable levels” only after fourteen days.

I can barely taste the acetic acid in my tibi, but I can’t miss the lactic acid. When it comes on, after about three weeks in my cool kitchen, the pop suddenly goes flat and sour. It is now vinagre de tibicos, which is drunk in Mexico to promote weight loss, fight arteriosclerosis, and prevent heart attacks. Only at this point does tibi seem truly comparable to kombucha, a weak vinegar made from a solution of refined sugar, flavored with tea, and usually drunk when partially fermented, so it’s at once sweet, sour, and slightly alcoholic. Both tibi and kombucha are considered probiotic, tibi because Lactobacillus brevis is said to survive in the gastrointestinal tract. Tibi is different from kombucha in that tibi is slow to sour and, when it does, the acid produced is mainly lactic, not acetic.

Tibi is also much gassier than kombucha, though not as gassy as commercial pop. As a child I never liked those sharp-tasting bubbles or the violent burps that followed. But with the gentler gassiness of tibi I’m learning to appreciate the taste of carbonation. Yes, carbonation has a taste! Only a few years ago, at the University of California, San Diego, scientists discovered that an enzyme expressed on the sour taste receptor cells in our mouths is stimulated by carbon dioxide.4  Humans have been enjoying this taste since at least the late Middle Ages, when bubbly mineral waters from natural springs became popular, medicinal refreshments. Ginger beer, made from another set of bacteria in natural symbiosis, originated in England in the mid-eighteenth century (you can buy ginger beer “plant” as well as tibicos from online sources). Europe’s great appetite for both mineral and bacterial bubbly waters caused Joseph Priestly to believe he’d made a great discovery when he invented the first artificially carbonated water in 1767. Soon English and American pharmacists were combining carbonated water with syrups to produce our modern soda pop. Until well into the twentieth century, people believed that carbonated water of any sort, syrupy or not, would cure or ease all sorts of ailments.

I wasn’t fooled, though. I was drinking pop without dyes or artificial flavorings or colorings, pop that might please the bugs in my bowels, pop that didn’t require buying or recycling a nasty plastic bottle, but still I was drinking pop. Could I make it a little more healthful? I eyed the quince in honey syrup on my kitchen counter. This was March, and the jar had sat there since early December. I make quince-honey syrup every year by simply mixing a pound of cubed quince with a pint of honey (this and many other syrup recipes are in The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves). The honey draws water out of the quince pieces, which slowly shrivel, and soon I have 2 ½ cups of raw syrup, rich with vitamin C from the quince and aromatics from both the quince and the honey, ready to soothe any sore throat that arises.

Straining quince syrup

Straining quince syrup

We’d had no sore throats over the winter, and now spring had almost arrived. It was time to strain that syrup, revive the shriveled quince cubes by simmering them in white wine, and make myself some quince-honey tibi.

The tibicos seemed to respond to the honey as well and as fast as they did to refined sugar. The drink turned out a little foamier than usual (honey causes foaming when used in jam making, too). It tasted strongly of both quince and honey. The quince-honey tibi was especially delicious after a week, when it was less sweet and noticeably, though barely, alcoholic.

Not olive oil but quince-honey tibi

Not olive oil but quince-honey tibi

At this point I value my tibicos enough to want to share them. Sadly, they haven’t multipled noticeably; I still have only about two tablespoons. Rose Marie said ginger seemed to encourage tibicos to reproduce, but mine didn’t respond when I put a couple of slices of ginger in their refrigerator tub. In Jürgen Reiss’s experiments, he found that tibicos reproduced themselves when fed dry figs but not when given other dry fruits (raisins, dates, prunes).

In my pantry I have dried Desert King figs in plenty. My next batch of tibi, I think, will be fig-flavored—perhaps with a little ginger added, too. After that, I’ll have to try a Mexican-style batch, with pineapple. I don’t need to buy a pineapple, actually. As I now recall, there’s a bottle of pineapple syrup in my pantry.

1. The best source of information I’ve found on tibicos in Mexico is Más Allá de Pulque y el Tepache: Las Bebidas Alcohólicas no Destiladas Indígenas de México, by Augusto Godoy, Teófilo Herrera, and Miguel Ulloa (México City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2003). As far as I can find, the book is unavailable in any U.S. library or bookstore, but most of the discussion can be read on Google Books. According to this book and other sources, tibicos develop on the fruits and pads of nopal cactus, which may be the original, ancient source of the grains.

2. Online sources for tibidos include www.yemoos.com and www.waterkefirgrains.com.

3. “Metabolic Activity of Tibi Grains,” in Zeitschrift für Lebensmittel-Untersuchung und Forschung 191:462­–65.

4. Jayaram Chandrashekar et al., “The Taste of Carbonation,” in Science 16 (October 2009): 443-45.

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Posted in Books and blogs, Fermented foods, Fruits, Preserving science | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Homegrown Belgian Endive

Posted on March 9, 2013 by

endive bouquetMy California sweetheart farmer, Rich Collins, came through once again this year with a Valentine’s bouquet of Belgian endive. So I put off harvesting any of my own chicons until yesterday.

chicory

 

 

 

This is how my chicory plants looked in the garden last summer (remember, what we call Belgian endive is actually chicory). The leaves, though edible, were ferociously bitter. I left them alone, thus ensuring that the plants would have the energy to form big roots.

chicory roots, fresh dug

 

In December I dug up the roots. Here they are at harvest.

chicory roots, trimmedTo replant them for their winter growth, I trimmed off their tops and took them to the barn.

I found a plastic box, 13 inches deep and cracked on the bottom, which seemed a perfect planting container; nobody would mind my filling the box with dirt, and the roots would have drainage, if needed, without my damaging the box further. Lacking either sand or light soil as a planting medium, I used some commercial potting mix that I had on hand. I trimmed off the bottoms of the roots so that the tops would be covered with at least an inch of the moistened potting mix. Now I needed to bury the roots further in a light material like sawdust or leaf mold, or more planting mix, but I had already filled the box to the top. So I piled some wheat straw over the roots, inverted another plastic box on top, and secured it with a couple of half-bricks.

chiconsExcept for occasional peeks, I left the roots alone. Our cat Daphne, however, did not. While we were on vacation in late February she managed to knock off the bricks and the top box, leaving the chicons barely covered with straw for as long as six days. When we came home I covered them again—until yesterday, when this is what I found. The biggest chicons, I saw, had grown on the biggest roots. Some of the heads are a bit greener and more open than they should be, because of Daphne’s transgression, or the transparency of the bottom box, or my failure to bury the roots deep enough, or a combination of these possibilities. But no matter—most of the heads are firmly closed, and even the green leaves have hardly any bitterness.

If you’re in the United States and want to grow Belgian endive, you can buy the seeds from Nichols. For tips on preparing Belgian endive for the table, see my piece from last year, “Playing with Belgian Endive.”

Posted in Vegetables | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Eating and Drinking in New Orleans

Posted on March 5, 2013 by

Robert and I flew to New Orleans the week before last to spend time with our youngest, who was finishing an internship in southern Louisiana, and to see the city for the first time. I hope you don’t mind my diverging from the topic of homegrown food once more to share some photos of NOLA’s unique food culture.

Cafe du MondeWaiters take a break at Café du Monde, the city’s favorite spot for beignets and people watching. Though I’ve avoided coffee blended with chicory since my dreadful experiment with a 100-percent chicory brew, I had to try Creole coffee, typically an 80-20 blend served as equal parts brew and milk. New Orleans folks seem a bit defensive about their chicory, which tourist literature describes as “very mildly bitter”; Café du Monde’s website says chicory “is added to the coffee to soften the bitter edge of the dark roasted coffee.” Thankfully, the milk softens the bitter edge of the chicory, but the acrid aftertaste lingers on the tongue.

Cafe BeignetbeignetThis is Café Beignet, Café du Monde’s leading competitor, situated in a lovely city-owned plaza where musicians entertain at nearly all hours. Café Beignet’s beignets—rectangular yeast doughnuts sprinkled with powdered sugar—are said to be lighter than Café du Monde’s, and we concurred with this opinion. We also appreciated not having to excavate Café Beignet’s beignets from a mountain of powdered sugar. (At Café du Monde, I watched a man eat his excess sugar with a spoon.) But at both cafés the beignets were excellent, as doughnuts nearly always are when they’re served fresh and hot. Which is the only way to serve a doughnut, right?

Our server pictured at Café Beignet is Laurie, who led a fascinating group tour of New Orleans eateries through Tastebud Tours.

daiquiris to go

On Bourbon Street, in the French quarter, crowds of tourists stroll and stagger from one club to the next, all night long. Choose your blues, jazz, rock, Cajun, or whatever (the music is so loud that the genre may not matter), and you can sit and listen or dance for free provided you buy a drink. But many people prefer to drink as they amble down the street, and this is perfectly legal. Here is one of several shops specializing in frozen daiquiris to go, in a rainbow of artificial colors.

walk-up bar

And here is a walk-up bar that opens right onto Bourbon Street. The sign says, “Pour me somethin Mister!”

muffuletta

I was thrilled that our food tour included servings of muffuletta, also known as muffoletta or muffaletta. I’d been intrigued by the name of this sandwich ever since my sister brought me a jar of olive relish labeled with the same word. Actually, the relish isn’t properly called muffuletta or even relish; it’s known in New Orleans as olive salad. Originally, muffuletta was the name of neither the relish nor the sandwich but of the bread loaf, which a Sicilian baker introduced to the city in the late nineteenth century. In Sicily, soft, round, sesame-topped loaves of muffuletta are still popular, especially on November 2, All Souls Day. They are split crosswise and spread with various fillings, such as cheese, anchovies, and olive oil. At Central Grocery, a little Italian market still thriving in the French quarter, Lupo Salvatore invented the New Orleans muffuletta sandwich in 1906, when he filled muffuletta loaves with Italian cold cuts, cheeses, and a mixture of chopped olives and pickled vegetables and wrapped the sandwich in paper to make a portable lunch for his countrymen who worked on the Mississippi River and on nearby farms. The muffuletta pictured here is from Mike Serio’s sandwich shop.

Once I understood that muffuletta was bread, the name lost its mystery. Muffuletta is an obvious cousin of the French moufflet (soft, tender bread), the German muffe (small cake), and the English muffin. I suspect that all of these words are related to the English muff and terms in various European languages for puffy things–boxing gloves, mold, softness, and even wild sheep.

hot sauces

A French Quarter shop displays hot sauces, distinguished one from another more by their provocative names and label art than by their ingredients.

Johnny's Po-Boys

Johnny’s Po-Boys, another stop on our food tour, specializes in the other iconic New Orleans sandwich, the po’ boy. Filled with anything from roast beef and gravy to deep-fried seafood, the po’ boy has its own origin legend: Bennie and Clovis Martin worked as streetcar conductors until they saved enough money to open a coffee stand in the French Market in 1922. Inn 1929, the streetcar workers went on a long and violent strike, which the public supported with a boycott. The Martins offered free food to the strikers, big sandwiches filled with gravy and fries. Whenever one of the strikers came toward the stand, the Martins would say, “Here comes another po’ boy!” Their generosity made them and their sandwiches famous.

The Martins worked with a local baker to develop a new sort of French loaf, 40 inches long and blunt at both ends, to be easily quartered with no waste. Today most of these loaves are made by a bakery called Leidenheimer, which also makes most of the muffuletta loaves used by New Orleans shops and restaurants.

By the way, the German immigrant who founded Leidenheimer Bakery in 1896 first tried to sell the dense, dark breads of his homeland. But today Leidenheimer makes only “French” (white) bread. We saw no whole-grain bread anywhere at all in New Orleans.

Coon Ass BarkLaura’s Candies specializes in pralines (pronounced “prah-leens”), candied pecans that are more candy than pecan and formed like drop cookies. Other candies in the shop are at least as interesting.

coffee truck

 

 

 

We came across this coffee truck in the Garden District. The only food carts allowed in the French Quarter, for some reason, are Lucky Dog hot-dog carts.

jelly pansRoyal Street, in the French Quarter, has a lot of antique shops. In one of them we found these French copper jelly pans, priced from $300 to $600. Keep these in mind if you want to send me a birthday present.

crawfish

 

 

 

 

In New Orleans we ate a lot of crawfish, mostly boiled in heavily spiced water (and at one restaurant left in the water until they turned to fiery mush).

crawfish etouffee

 

 

 

 

 

Better still was this crawfish etouffée, shelled crawfish smothered with a roux-based sauce, at the Praline Connection on Frenchmen Street.

fried pickles

 

 

 

At the Praline Connection we also ordered fried pickles, vinegared dills sliced crosswise, battered, and deep-fried. They are a pleasant change from French fries or fried onion rings, but fermented pickles sliced into spears are much better for frying, I think.

Miss Sandra

 

 

Miss Sandra stirs her gumbo at the New Orleans School of Cooking. I took several pages of notes in her class, which was as entertaining as it was informative.

Speckled T's

 

 

 

 

After a swamp tour near Slidell, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, we let Sam’s GPS find us a restaurant. What the GPS thought was Schaefer’s turned out to be Speckled T’s, but no matter. For $19 each, we enjoyed the most amazing all-you-can-eat brunch of our lives, with raw and grilled oysters, boiled shrimp and crawfish, braised catfish, shrimp and grits, asparagus, sliced duck breast, whole boned quail, prime rib, and more, including all-you-can-drink champagne.

peppered potatoesFor our last meal in New Orleans we visited Deanie’s Seafood, a fifty-year-old favorite with a casino downstairs. While we waited for our entrées, the waitress brought not us not bread but red-skinned potatoes, boiled, apparently, with the same chile-based seasoning mix used for crawfish and shrimp. What a revelation! In Louisiana, potatoes and sweet corn are often boiled in the same pot with shellfish, but I hadn’t considered boiling potatoes on their own with Cajun-Creole spices.

soft-shelled crabAt Deanie’s we also loved the soft-shell crab, something we don’t have here on the West Coast. How clever to time the catching and selling of crabs so people can eat them just after they have lost their shells but haven’t yet begun to grow new ones! If I had to shell a crab this small, though, I think I’d order something else.

I’m sorry we didn’t get to eat at Commander’s Palace, probably New Orleans’s most famous restaurant, in the Garden District across from Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. The owners, the Brennan family, have several other expensive restaurants in town. Five days in New Orleans wasn’t quite enough.

017 Commander's Palace

We did eat in two other expensive and impressive restaurants where I was too busy eating to take any pictures: Lüke, one of John Besh’s several restaurants in the city, where I watched the cooks work in a glass-walled room, and La Petite Grocery, in the Garden District, where the lobster beignets were unforgettable. Keep these two in mind if you plan your own trip to New Orleans.

Posted in Pickles, Vegetables | Tagged | 8 Comments

A Quick Wintertime Refrigerator Relish

Posted on February 19, 2013 by

What can you do with a few beets, some slowly shriveling apples from last fall’s harvest, and an ever-expanding patch of horseradish? Inspired by a traditional beet-horseradish relish from Russia and a canned beet-apple pickle that I read about somewhere last year, I decided to make a relish of grated beets, apples, and horseradish.

horseradishUsually gardeners dig the transverse roots of horseradish for kitchen use, but my horseradish has apparently reacted to abuse—occasional mowing and a total lack of irrigation or fertilizer of any sort—by running its horizontal roots deep. Fortunately, the young vertical roots are good to eat as well, in winter or early spring, and when you have too many you don’t mind sacrificing some. Here you see a four-headed root ready to burst into spring finery. (I dug many more little roots, so Robert could share them with his pals at work. He looked at me oddly and left for work without them.)

For the quantities here, you’ll need one big or two small beets, and one big or two small apples. I used Fuji apples. Bake the beets whole, in their skins, at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour or until they are just tender.

This recipe could be adapted for canning, by adding more vinegar, heating the relish, and putting it through a boiling-water bath. But that would make the relish too liquid and cause the horseradish to lose its delicious pungency. I would prefer to make this relish in small quantities, store it in the refrigerator, and use it up within a few weeks.

Beet-Apple Relish

6 tablespoons cider vinegar
½ pound tart, firm apples, with peels intact
¾ pound beets, baked, cooled, and peeled
1 small piece horseradish root
1 teaspoon pickling salt
3 garlic cloves, minced
1½ teaspoons yellow mustard seed
1 teaspoon coriander seed

Put the vinegar into a bowl. Coarsely grate the apples around their cores, and add the gratings to the bowl. Coarsely grate the beets; mince any pieces that you can’t grate without risking cut fingers; and add the beet bits to the bowl. Peel the horseradish root; finely grate enough to make 1½ tablespoons; and add the grated horseradish to the bowl. Stir gently. Add the salt, and mince and add the garlic. Toast the mustard and coriander in a small, dry pan until the spices release their aroma and the mustard begins to pop. Grind the spices in a mortar until the coriander pieces are fine, and add the spices to the bowl. (Mustard is much harder to grind than coriander, but you want to leave it mostly whole for texture anyway.) Stir once more, and pack the relish into a pint jar.

beet-apple relishI love this relish for its gentle sweetness (notice that I added no sugar), the bit of heat from the horseradish and mustard, the fragrance of the coriander, and the mild sourness that allows you to heap the relish on other foods without overpowering them. Here you see my lunch of beet-apple relish with pickled herring and sourdough rye bread. It’s a pleasant combination, but every taste of this relish makes me crave corned beef or pastrami. Somehow, my beet-apple relish seems to demand a pairing with spicy salted beef.

Which reminds me: I should corn some beef for St. Paddy’s Day. The relish may not last until then, but I can easily make more. I won’t even have to dig in the horseradish patch again, because all those roots Robert wouldn’t take to work will keep well in the refrigerator for several weeks.

Posted in Fruits, Pickles, Vegetables | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Citron Melon Again, for Dessert

Posted on February 11, 2013 by
A few of the seeds had started to sprout.

A few of the seeds had started to sprout.

Every day this winter I’ve eyed my citron melons in the entry hall, admiring their summery beauty and wondering how long they would keep. Some people say they store well for a whole year, but I’m guessing that’s true only in a quite cool place, such as an unheated cellar. The temperature in my entry hall is usually about sixty degrees Fahrenheit, probably not cool enough to warrant pushing my luck past February. Last week I figured that, though I didn’t need more citron melon preserves, I also didn’t want to lose the chance to experiment more with the melons, which I might never grow again. So I cut into a second one.

Although citron melons are notorious for their hard rinds, I’d had no trouble cutting my first melon, back in December. This time the rind seemed to have toughened. I sympathized with the writer of a poem, published in the Burra, Australia, Record in 1935, that begins this way:

There ain’t no dish I’d rather try
Than my dear wife’s good melon pie.
I get a melon from the pit
And take the axe and open it.

slicing citron melonInstead of an axe I used my twelve-inch chef’s knife, which Robert bought me for cutting big winter squashes. I’ve been a little bit scared of this knife ever since the day it flew into the air and I caught it by the blade instead of the handle. Now I often use the knife by holding it in place and pounding it with a rubber hammer (which as you can see I also use for closing paint cans).

Peeling citron melonThat worked to split the melon cleanly. Cutting the halves into wedges, as I’d done to make citron melon preserves, would be too difficult and dangerous, because besides growing a tougher skin the melon had also become more mucilaginous, as if someone had injected it with a quart of aloe juice. My hands and cutting board were already slippery. I tried spooning out the pulp, but that was slow going. So I used a technique I often rely on for another hard fruit, the quince. I turned the halves face down and sliced them straight downward. Then, using a smaller, thinner blade, I cut the rind from the slices without much trouble.

Now I needed to remove the big, hard, numerous seeds. I picked as many as I could out of the sliced flesh, cut the slices into smaller pieces, and picked out more seeds. This is a job to do while listening to an excellent radio program, so you don’t start dwelling on the question of what your time is worth.

Although I hadn’t found a single pie recipe for this fruit that’s often called a pie melon, I‘d found two recipes for compotes of sorts, one in Mildred Maddocks’s Pure Food Cook Book, published in New York in 1914, and one from an unnamed cook in Queensland, who described the fruit as “So country! So winter! So not dinner party material.”
I based my recipe less on Mildred’s than on the Queenslander’s, which included, enticingly, cinnamon and marsala. Lacking marsala, I used brandy.

Although the Queenslander used only a quarter of a melon, her other quantities seemed about right for my five-pound melon; this made me wonder just how big citron melons grow in Queensland. I wonder also if the flesh of Queensland pie melons is especially tender, because whereas the Queenslander cooks her compote for about forty minutes, mine needed two hours for the melon to soften.

As these differences indicate, melons called citron or pie melon can vary a lot. Mine are striped, white-fleshed, red-seeded, and tasteless. If yours vary from this description, you may need to adjust the recipe.

Baked Citron Melon Compote

½ cup raisins
¼ cup brandy
1 5-pound citron melon
1 cup sugar
1 orange
1 lemon
2 cinnamon sticks
2 tablespoons butter

Soak the raisins in the brandy for at least several hours.

Peel and seed the melon, and cut it into approximately 1-inch cubes. Heat the oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Remove the zest from the orange and lemon in fine strips, and then squeeze out the juice, picking or straining out any seeds.

citron melon ready for ovenIn a three-quart casserole, combine the raisins, their soaking liquid, the melon cubes, the sugar, and the orange and lemon juices and zests. Tuck the cinnamon sticks into the mixture, and dot with the butter. Bake the compote uncovered for about two hours, turning the fruit gently a few times, until the melon is tender, golden, and slightly translucent.

 

You can serve the compote warm or cool, perhaps with cream, though I like it plain.

Baked citron melon compoteThe compote turned out mildly sweet. If you think you’d like it sweeter, honey would be a pleasant addition. The fruit’s mucilaginous texture remained after baking, but neither Robert nor I found it objectionable; I think it’s growing on me. Because the melon is virtually tasteless, all the flavor of the dish comes from the added flavorings–the raisins, brandy, cinnamon, and citrus. How could a dessert with those flavors be anything but good?

As the Queenslander points out, you could make this dish into a pie by thickening the liquid (with cornstarch or arrowroot or just by simmering it down a bit), spooning the fruit and liquid into a baked pie shell, and perhaps adding a topping of cream or meringue. I like the compote just as it is, though, for breakfast or an afternoon or late-evening snack, and maybe even as a homey dinner-party dessert.

Posted in Fruits, Wild foods | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

A Bean Worth Drying: The Scarlet Runner

Posted on January 30, 2013 by
The pink-and-purple beans are from green pods.

The pink-and-purple beans are from green Scarlet Runner pods.

I was filling baskets with French beans and Spanish magic beans last summer when I noticed that some of my Scarlet Runner Beans were ready to eat. Why in the world had I planted so many beans?

I was growing runners for the first time in at least seven years. I’d stopped planting them when my children had stopped asking me to erect bean tepees, which had never seemed worth the trouble of building. For years I had imagined the kids sitting inside a lovely live, green tepee on a hot summer day, making fairy houses or reading a picture book, and they apparently shared this fantasy. But it rarely came true. Hoeing in the tepee was difficult, so before long the space would fill with tall weeds. Watering was always troublesome, too. I would wrap a soaker hose around the perimeter of the tepee, but the hose would leak, from a tear or from a faulty connection, and form a mud puddle. And then one day the wind would come up and bend the tepee to one side, and, despite my efforts at straightening, the tepee would lean ridiculously for the rest of the summer. Unless I let it collapse altogether, picking the highest bean pods was nearly impossible; a ladder wouldn’t fit inside the tepee, and when I set the ladder on the outside the peak of the tepee was too far away to reach.

But last winter I realized that I missed the Scarlet Runner Bean’s bright red flowers and meaty pods. I thought of an easier trellising system: I would anchor a cattle panel with metal fence stakes and then tie tall bamboo poles to the cattle panel. Our bamboo grows to only about fifteen feet, and runner vines can run longer, but I figured they could hang from the top, dangling their pods to within my reach.

And so in early summer I planted a small handful of Scarlet Runner Beans and set up my sturdy new trellis. Now the first meaty pods had to be picked, or else they would get tough and fibrous. At the moment, though, I had no appetite for them. They were too few to bother blanching and freezing, and the kitchen refrigerator was stuffed full of other vegetables. Could I do as so many other gardeners did—enjoy the flowers and let the beans go? I was too frugal for that.

There was an obvious alternative: I could leave the pods alone now and shell them later. I had always saved shelled runner beans for later planting, but only a handful or two, and only at the end of the season. I’d never thought to save the whole crop for drying and eating.

Growing your own beans for drying takes dedication, especially in the Pacific Northwest. You’ve got to put the seeds in the ground early enough for the pods to fill and start drying before the fall rains begin to rot them. Rotting is especially likely with bush beans, which often rest their pods directly on the wet ground. And, assuming you can collect enough full, healthy pods, you might need an hour to shell enough little beans by hand for one family dinner.

The last of the harvest. Although the pods are stained with mold, the seeds within are flawless.

The last of the harvest. Although the pods are stained with mold, the seeds within are flawless.

But runner beans are more amenable to drying than bush beans or any kidney beans. When provided with a trellis, runner beans hang their pods high, where they’re less prone to rot. The plants can survive a few light frosts. And because the seeds are big, about an inch long or longer, shelling goes fast.

Thanks to a dry September and a fairly warm October (during which the plants did indeed withstand light frosts), I was able to put off harvesting the runner beans until after Halloween. Then I tossed the pods, in various stages of drying, into a tray in the greenhouse. In mid-November I shelled some. With ten minutes’ work I had a pound. As you can see, the shelled beans were beautiful, violet speckled with black.

To fully appreciate the beans as food, I decided to serve them plain. I soaked them and boiled them as I would any beans, and then puréed them with a little olive oil, salt, and smoked paprika. With fresh, warm homemade tortillas, this was lunch. The bean purée was greyer than refried pinto beans but delicious, with a smooth, creamy texture and a mild flavor lacking in some beany element that, I realized, I really don’t like.

What was this unbean-like bean? I wanted to know its place in botany, history, and cookery.

Botanists, I learned, call runner beans Phaseolus coccineus. The species name refers to the color of the blossoms—red, like cochineal—although in some varieties the blossoms are white. Unlike Phaseolus vulgaris—regular kidney beans—runner beans are perennial, though we must grow them as annuals outside of the tropics. In the highlands of southern Mexico and Central America, where the beans originated, the seeds come in many colors—white, pink, purple, and black—and go by frijoles botil, ayacotl, or ayacote (note the similarity of the last two words to the French haricot). The starchy roots get so big in Mesoamerica that they too are used as food, although mine looked too skinny to bother with.

Many American gardeners love the Scarlet Runner Bean primarily as a hummingbird attractant, yet this particular variety was developed by the hummingbird-less English, who at first used the flowers in bouquets. John Tradescant the Younger, a botanist who traveled to Virginia between 1628 and 1637, gets credit for introducing the bean to England. I doubt he found it in Virginia at such an early date, although Thomas Jefferson probably grew it much later at Monticello; the French name haricot d’Espagne suggests a more likely path of transmission. A century after the Scarlet Runner came to England, Philip Miller, through his Gardener’s Dictionary, popularized it as food, but it’s unclear to me whether he liked the bean green or shelled. In any case, when the English eat runner beans today they are nearly always in the pod.

Phaseolus coccineus is popular in Spain as a dried bean, but usually in a form with white seeds—a form the Spanish call judía escarlata or Phaseolus multiflorus, according to Eroski Consumer; Spaniards reserve the name Phaseolus coccineus for judía pinta, or what we call Scarlet Runner Bean. In other words, they divide runner beans into two species. Whether this makes sense to you or not, in Spain you can buy packages of big white runner beans labeled as el judión de La Granja or judión de El Barco for your olla.

Mexico and Central America grow runner beans less than they used to, since the vines don’t fit well with modern monoculture. And Mexican and Central American farmers don’t grow the Scarlet Runner, at least not commercially. But they have their own favorite runner-bean varieties. Best known are Ayocote Morado, with pale lavender flowers and purple seeds, and Ayacote Negro, with big orange-red flowers and seeds that dry purple-black. Both of these varieties are available for gardeners from a little Missouri company called Azure Dandelion. If you want to taste the beans before planting them, you can order them for $5.50 a pound from California’s Rancho Gordo, which sells not only Ayocote Morado and Ayocote Negro but also a yellow-seeded variety, Golden Yellow, and two white-seeded varieties, Ayocote Blanco and Runner Cannellini Bean. The last scored highest of all varieties in a 2010 Seed Savers Exchange bean tasting.

If Americans are now paying $5.50 a pound for imported black, white, and purple runner beans, why aren’t we eating the speckled ones from our gardens? All runner beans, says the Rancho Gordo website, “are great with loads of garlic and wild mushrooms or just as part of a mixed salad. In Mexico, you find them served with a chile sauce or in a soup, but in Europe, you might see them drowned in good fruity olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice before dusting with sea salt.” Isn’t that inspiring?

In December I shelled some more of my runner beans and made this vegetable stew:

Stewed Runner Beans with Tomatoes

2 tablespoons olive oil
½ pound onions, cut into wedges
½ cup diced red peppers, sweet or mildly hot
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1 quart canned tomatoes, with their juice
3 fennel seeds
2 pinches ground saffron
½ cup chopped parsley
Ground black pepper
12 ounces (about 2 cups) dried Scarlet Runner Beans, boiled until tender with a sprig of sage and a garlic clove
Salt

In a large skillet, sauté the onions. Add the peppers and garlic, and sauté until the garlic releases its fragrance. Add the tomatoes, fennel, saffron, and parsley, and twist the pepper mill over the pan two or three times. Break up the tomatoes with a spoon or spatula. When the mixture is hot, add the beans. Boil the mixture about 10 minutes, until it’s suitably thick. Add salt to taste, and serve with bread or rice.

I wish I’d taken a picture of this dish, so you could see how the beans stayed intact and took on a handsome deep red color, somewhere between brick and burgundy. The dish would especially please vegetarians, although it would also be excellent with cooked bacon or sausage slices added toward the end of cooking. And you could vary the seasonings; for example, you might add oregano, cumin, or bay.

Scarlet Runner Beans for planting are easy to find. If you prefer, you might choose a closely related cultivar, such as Scarlet Emperor, an English type selected for tasty pods and sold by Nichols and Territorial. Painted Lady Runner Bean, with bi-colored red and white blossoms, and Sunset Runner Bean, with salmon-pink flowers, are both available from Seed Savers Exchange.

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A Tart Little Tuber from the Andes

Posted on January 18, 2013 by

ocaA couple of weeks ago I noticed the motley assortment of pots in the middle of my greenhouse floor, dragged there for minimal protection from the winter cold and now adorned with the limp, frozen foliage of various tender plants. Wasn’t that drooping bush at the side of one pot the top of the oca, a South American wood sorrel? I should have checked sooner to see if the plant had produced any tubers. Kneeling on the ground, I started digging.

My oca plant was actually two, in a single pot. I’d gotten two little tubers last spring from Rose Marie Nichols Magee, whose Nichols Garden Nursery is one of very few North American suppliers of oca. Because the plant is sensitive to day length, Rose Marie had explained, the tubers are produced in mid-October in our region—if the plant is protected from frost.

That posed a problem for me, since in recent years the first frost has hit my garden in early October. So I decided to plant the ocas in a big pot on the deck, where I’d be sure to keep an eye on them. Before moving the pot to the greenhouse about October 1, I poked my fingers around the roots and felt no swellings.

Now I pulled out a pile of tubers, some less than an inch long and the longest four inches, each looking like a cross between a pink-skinned potato and a fat grub. Washed and dried, they looked shiny, as if rubbed with oil.

What was this strange vegetable? Oca is Spanish for oqa, apilla, cuiba, or ibia—all of which are among the indigenous South American names for one of several tubers traditionally farmed in the Andes, where oca follows potatoes both in popularity among root vegetables and in the customary crop rotation. Botanists call this tuber Oxalis tuberosa; Mexicans call it papa extranjera; and New Zealanders, who grow and consume substantial quantities, call it yam. (It helps to know these other names when you’re searching for information about the oca, because in Spanish oca also means “goose.”)
Like the potato, the oca comes in many colors—pink, red, yellow, white, and even black.

Unlike the potato, the oca is generally palatable when raw. Different varieties, however, vary in their levels of oxalic acid, which can interfere with mineral absorption in the body and lead to kidney stones. So in South America ocas are treated to reduce the oxalic acid level—by setting the tubers in the sun for several days, by boiling them, and, in the case of high-oxalate varieties, by first fermenting and then freeze-drying them.

This doesn’t mean ocas aren’t good for you. They are rich in carbohydrates; they have almost twice the vitamin C content of potatoes; and some varieties have ample carotene. They also contain a soluble protein called ocatin, which has antifungal and antibacterial properties.

I had to taste some of my ocas right away. They were crisp as an apple straight from the tree, not sweet, but pleasant. Some had a slight sorrel taste; others were quite tart. Inside, the flesh was light golden. I left the remaining ocas in a bowl in front of a window for several days, turning them occasionally, but, as usual in western Oregon winters, the sun never came out.

I figured I’d better cook the rest before I absentmindedly ate them all raw.

So, how to cook my ocas? Ecuadorians, I learned, preserve ocas in syrup and combine them with berries in jam. Columbians serve boiled ibias, as they call them, with tomato-and-onion salsa. They also cook them with eggs in something like a Spanish tortilla, make them into jam, puddings, and cakes, and, most often, use them for chicha, a beverage of grain or root vegetables fermented with cane syrup and water.

I’d harvested a measly 9 ounces of ocas, and I wanted to save some for planting, so I had only about 4 ounces to spare. The recipes I found sounded either impractical for such a small quantity or, with the cupboard still full of Christmas sweets, too sugary to have much appeal. So I decided to use my ocas as I do so many other small pickings from the garden: in a stir-fry. I made–

Stir-fried Tofu, Ham, Leeks, and Oca over Steamed Mizuna

Weight and drain a pound of tofu, unless it’s quite firm, for half an hour or so. Slice it into cubes. Slice two small leeks, or one large one, crosswise into pieces about 2 inches long, and slice the white part thinly lengthwise. Cut about ¼ pound ham into ½-inch cubes. Rinse about a pound of mizuna. Mince two cloves of garlic and two quarter-size slices of ginger. Cut ¼ pound oca into approximate ½-inch cubes. (Ocas don’t need peeling.)

In a wok, deep-fry the tofu in vegetable oil until it is golden brown. Drain the tofu on paper towels or a paper bag, and pour out all but a teaspoon or two of the oil. Stir-fry the leeks briefly; add the garlic and ginger; toss; and scoop the leeks into a bowl. Stir-fry the oca briefly, and then add about 2 tablespoons water or sake, reduce the heat, and cover the wok. Cook the oca until they are as tender as you like. Put them in the bowl with the leeks. Add more oil to the wok, if needed, and briefly stir-fry the ham. Add soy sauce, pepper jelly, and sake to the wok to make a sauce. Return the tofu to the wok, and toss it to coat it with the sauce. Add the leeks, and toss again. Add a little roasted sesame oil, toss once more, and empty the contents of the wok into a bowl.

Steam the mizuna in the wok just until the greens are wilted. Spread them in a serving bowl or on a platter, and put the reserved tofu, ham, and vegetables on top. Serve the dish with steamed rice.

oca stir-fry

The oca skins lost most of their color with cooking. Can you see the little barely-pink chunks hiding among the tofu and ham cubes?

The stir-fried oca tasted a lot like water chestnut, though less sweet. I cooked it until it was fork-tender, but Robert and I agreed we’d probably like it better cooked only briefly, so that it would stay crisp.

In case you’d like to grow oca yourself, you can order starts from Nichols; they will be shipped in mid-March. To be sure your harvest is bigger than mine was, read this article from Mother Earth News.

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