CSA week 3: 8 vegetables, easier prep, mostly tasty meals

This is what came in
my CSA basket Wednesday.

This is what it looked like.

This is what I did - or am going to do - with it.

• The green leaf lettuce went into two hamburger buns, two side salads, and two dinner salads.
• The radishes went in a baggie, with salt, to my neighborhood playground. My daughter ate them as we watched her children play.
• The broccoli is in my refrigerator's vegetable drawer. There's a good chance we'll eat it tonight, with salmon.
• The beets, wrapped in aluminum foil, went into the oven at 400 degrees for an hour. After spending a day in the refrigerator, they joined the green leaf lettuce, a couple of oranges, some goat cheese, and a few slices of red onion in a dinner salad.
• The beet greens are likely to show up under tonight's salmon, after I've chopped them and wilted them in olive oil.
• The kale stared at me defiantly until I repeated the process I described last week. We always have potlucks to go to. And actually, the kale bread is so good that I'm making a little extra so we'll have some at home too.
• The romaine is in the vegetable drawer waiting for an avocado to ripen. It will soon join a black bean / cheese / bell pepper / chopped tomato / sliced avocado salad.
• The arugula threatened to get even more bitter if I didn't use it immediately. I found a salad recipe in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, a book you should own if you frequent farmers' markets or subscribe to a CSA, and made the salad the day the kale arrived. If you're desperate to use up some arugula, you don't have to wait to buy the book: the recipe is here.
• The zucchini is with the romaine and the broccoli in the vegetable crisper. I'm planning to dice it, sauté it lightly, and toss it in pasta, probably rotini, with diced roma tomatoes and last week's garlic scape pesto.

Whew. I think it will all be used up by next Wednesday, when the next CSA portion arrives.

Kale-cheese bread; or, taming the green-leafed monster

This is me, cowering behind this week's allotment of kale.

I do not like kale, cooked or raw.

I do not like to have to gnaw

On greens so tough you need a saw

To cut them, or they break your jaw.

I would not like them here or there,

I would not like them anywhere.

But I don't like to throw things out, either. It occurred to me that bread can improve almost anything, and cheese can improve it still more. So I tried this experiment.

KALE-CHEESE BREAD: SHORT VERSION

• Make a filling of cooked chopped kale, cheese, egg, onion, and garlic.
• Make dough for French bread.
• Spread the filling on the dough, roll lengthwise, and bake.
• Cool before slicing.

KALE-CHEESE BREAD: PAINSTAKINGLY DETAILED VERSION

1. Fix the kale. I washed mine, removed the hard stems, chopped the leaves into smaller pieces, and simmered it, uncovered, in water. When most of the cooking liquid had cooked down and the kale was soft enough to eat, I drained the remaining liquid, stirred in maybe half a cup of my awesome leftover garlic scape pesto for flavor, and spun the greens in the food processor until they were finely chopped, though not yet a paste.

(There are lots of ways to prepare kale. You could also sauté it in olive oil with onion and garlic, adding liquid and simmering it for awhile if the sauté alone doesn't get it soft enough. Different kinds of kale respond to different treatment. Just cook your kale one way or another until it's edible, if not tasty.)

2. Make the filling. Grate about 6 oz of cheese: Cheddar, Gruyère, Emmenthaler, Comté, Manchego ... take your pick. Stir it, plus one beaten egg, into the kale slurry (or give the mixture a short whirl in your food processor). Set aside.

3. Make bread dough. Easiest way in the world: Put 1 lb white bread flour, 2 tsp salt, and 1 1/2 tsp rapid-rise yeast in the food processor. Spin for 5 seconds. While it's still spinning, pour 1 1/3 C warm water into the tube with a little hole in it, so it is added in a small steady stream. Spin for 30 more seconds. Pour a little olive oil into a medium-sized mixing bowl and use your hands to slosh it up the sides. Put the bread dough in it, turning it several times so it's covered with oil. Cover with plastic wrap or a dish towel and put it in a warm place for 2 hours or more to rise. (Tasty variation: instead of using 1 lb flour, use 14 oz flour and 2 oz corn meal or polenta.)

4. Shape the dough into a rectangle. Sprinkle a little flour on your countertop and work the dough into approximately this shape. (The dough in the picture is approximately 12" by 15".) If the dough is too elastic to shape, wait another 15 minutes and try again.

5. Spread the filling on the dough. Leave a 1" border all around.

6. Roll the dough and filling lengthwise. Seal the ends and bottom by pinching the dough together. Now you have a nice loaf, ready to bake. Put it on a cookie sheet or in a French bread pan. Let it rise for an hour.

7. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Squirt water into the oven. Put the bread in. Squirt more water. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes.

Uh oh. Why did the filling leak out the sides? Why does the bread feel fragile? Is this going to be a grand disaster? Will it fall apart when I slice it? Will the bread get soggy? Will I have to throw it out and sneak in to the potluck and pretend I brought something? 

8. Relax. Let the bread cool. Wrap it in aluminum foil and refrigerate it overnight.

9. Slice and serve.

Now then, that wasn't so bad, was it?

In fact, I took this bread to the church potluck, and even avowed kale-haters said they loved it. 

Chard: The gateway green

If you've been following my CSA posts, you know that this week's delivery flummoxed me. But things are turning out okay. Thursday night I made a salad that included

• the romaine lettuce; 
• the turnips and the kohlrabies (which I sliced thin and roasted); 
• garbanzos marinated in olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic scape pesto; 
• thin sliced tiny yellow bell peppers; 
• and a diced roma tomato. 

It wasn't bad.

Last night I fixed the chard. Chard is not one of your giant gnarly greens. It's a little crisper than spinach and has a slightly sweeter flavor. It's worth trying even if you aren't a fan of the more serious greens such as kale, collards, or mustard greens.

I washed the leaves, removed the largest stems, and tore the chard into smaller pieces. You can eat the stems if you like a bit of body in your greens, though it's a good idea to cook them for at least five minutes before adding the leaves.

I cooked the chard uncovered in about a cup of vegetable broth, stirring frequently. In about 20 minutes, it was soft enough to eat. Toward the end, I added a spoonful of garlic scape pesto for flavor (that is seriously good stuff!). The whole pile of leaves cooked down to two large servings!

I served the chard with Trader Joe's Pizza Greco-Roman, one of the tastiest frozen pizzas you can buy.

And now all I have to face are the enormous lacinato kale leaves and the second installment of garlic scapes. I'm going to make more garlic scape pesto in just a minute, and I'm working on the kale. Stay tuned.

The Great Scape: or, what to do with yet another weird CSA vegetable

This is a garlic scape.

It is the stem of the garlic flower. Farmers often cut it off so that the garlic bulb, the papery-covered thing we buy in little red-net packages at Trader Joe's, will grow bigger. I don't know what most farmers do with the scapes. I had never met a scape until last Wednesday.

My CSA portion included a fistful of scapes. Naturally I turned to Google, since I had no idea what to do with them, and I found "The Crisper Whisperer: 7 Things To Do with Garlic Scapes." Bookmark that link: you will need it, should you ever encounter a garlic scape.

I decided to make garlic scape pesto. I immediately encountered a problem, though: how much of each scape should I use? See that slight pale protrusion about a third of the way in, with its long tapering tip? Is that the flower? Is it the part to use? Should I use only the part that looks like a green onion? Or should I use both?

Only way to find out: eat some. OK, the long pointy ends of my scapes were not very chewable. The green tubes, were, however. And yowie! Did they ever assert themselves!

These are the ends I cut off and discarded.

So I cut off the flower ends, and then I took the long green tubes and chopped them into short pieces. I put the chopped-up scapes into my food processor along with the other ingredients the pesto recipe calls for (do check the link) and chopped everything further before adding the olive oil in a slow stream.

This is the finished garlic-scape pesto.

Cyberspace does video and audio really well, but this pesto must be tasted to be believed. One sample taste and I was a true believer. I stirred about 1/3 of the pesto into 4 ounces of cooked spaghetti and served it for dinner, along with leftover Brussels sprouts mixed with leftover marinated garbanzos (see yesterday's post) and tiny sliced bell peppers for color.

This was dinner.

If it looks good to you, I'm sorry: I have no idea where you'll find garlic scapes. But do start looking immediately. They must be harvested young, in late spring.

Oh, and one small caveat: Remember that this is garlic. If you eat it, probably everyone else in your household should too. Not that it will be hard to persuade them.

But what will you do with the kohlrabi?

That's what several of my friends wondered when I posted this picture on Facebook. It shows the contents of this season's first delivery from One Straw Farm's CSA (community-supported agriculture) program.

This is the second time I've signed up with a CSA. You pay a local farmer an agreed-upon fee up front, and then you get weekly assortments of incredibly fresh food throughout the entire growing season. One big plus is that you get to try foods you probably wouldn't have bought (or even seen) at the grocery store. One big minus is that you may not like some of the foods you get.

I had no idea what a kohlrabi (kohlrabus?) tastes like. (It's the bulbous thing on the right. There are two of them.)

More knowledgeable friends suggested roasting them and serving them with a sauce, or shredding or slicing them and using them in a salad. I like salads. Not only because they taste good, but also because I can put just about anything in them. Here's what I put in last night's salad.

1. Several hours before dinner, I made a salad dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, Dijon mustard, chopped chives, minced garlic, and a little salt. I then opened a can of garbanzos, rinsed and drained them, and set them to marinate in the salad dressing.

2. I prepared the red-leaf lettuce that I got from my CSA. I washed it, spun it, tore it into bite-sized pieces, and drained it further on paper towels. Eventually I put some of it in this bowl.

3. Next, having no idea what I was doing, I attacked the kohlrabies (yes, that is the plural: I looked it up). I removed the leaves (I hear they are edible, but I didn't want to get carried away). I sliced each bulb as fine as I could with my large chef's knife. I took a smaller knife and removed the outer rind from each slice. I noticed that some slices were woody, and I either removed the woody core or discarded those slices. I cut the slices into little triangles. I ate a few triangles to see what I was getting into. They tasted sweet and spicy with a slightly bitter undertone; they felt like crisp apples or jicama.

4. Since some small bell peppers in my refrigerator had no plans for the evening, I sliced half a dozen of them and popped them under the broiler until a few of them started to blacken.

I then dumped the garbanzos and dressing, kohlrabi slices, and slightly blackened peppers onto the lettuce and used my hands to toss them.

Finally, I divided the salad between two pasta bowls ...

5. ... and topped each salad with about half an ounce of shaved Parmesan cheese.

6. Et voilà - dinner for two!

The kohlrabi slices were delicious. Their flavor was mild, but they added a little zing. Their crunchy texture worked well with the softer lettuce, garbanzos, and peppers. If I get more kohlrabies next time, I'll try to slice them thinner. The food processor slicing blade might work, or a mandoline slicer.

Gazpacho!

Photo by Elaine Armstrong

Twelve more days of summer. Produce abounding in farmers' market and backyard. Vacation days used up: no time for labor-intensive food prep. What to do?

Make gazpacho!

I fell in love with gazpacho on a trip to Spain. It's a chilled red vegetable soup that's available everywhere in that country--and everywhere I ate, I ordered some. 

Each restaurant had its own way of making it. Some gazpachos were smooth as cream. Some were full of chunky vegetables. Most came with optional toppings served on the side: chopped herbs, diced veggies, crumbled hard-boiled eggs, even sliced avocadoes. All were good.

You can Google gazpacho and find any number of recipes, or you can play with the principal ingredients and make up your own. The only thing you must do is use fresh, ripe (but not overripe) ingredients. You can sometimes get away with dumping tired old veggies into a hot soup, but that will not work with gazpacho. The flavor depends entirely on the quality of the ingredients.

Fortunately, this time of year everything you need is abundant and cheap. Or free, if you have a generous neighbor with a green thumb (those are her veggies in the photo).

Here's what you need, to start:

• A blender or a food processor
• One or two medium-to-large tomatoes for each serving (you don't need to peel them)
• A cucumber or two (you don't need to peel them either, though I usually do)
• A clove of garlic or two (don't go hog wild here; I've found the garlic's flavor is enhanced if I soften the cloves for about 5 seconds in the microwave before adding them)
• Olive oil (just a dollop--or drizzle it on top of the soup just before serving)
• Something tangy: sherry vinegar, red wine vinegar, or lemon juice (start with about a teaspoon per serving)
• Salt and pepper (I use a pinch of red [cayenne])

Whiz it all in your blender or food processor. If it's too thick, add water. If it's too thin, tear up a slice of bread and blend it in. Taste it until you like it. You can do this in 5 minutes, once you get the hang of it. Prepare the soup before you leave for work, refrigerate it, and enjoy it with--or for--dinner.

You can make a meal of gazpacho by serving it with chewy bread and manchego, a sheep's-milk cheese from central Spain (available at a reasonable price from Trader Joe's). In Spain, you'd probably have it with a small glass of cold, dry sherry (fino or manzanilla, not the syrupy stuff). Or you might try a dry rosé or crisp white wine.

Variations:

• Add a red (not green!) bell pepper to the mix, or top the soup with finely diced yellow bell pepper
• Add a little onion to the mix, or top the soup with chopped scallion or green onions
• Add your favorite herbs to the mix, or top the soup with chopped herbs or a small sprig of basil leaves
• Add other fresh vegetables and see what happens.
• Vary the consistency. Spin it smooth in the blender, leave it coarse in the food processor. Or try this: spin the tomatoes and garlic in the blender until very smooth; then add the other ingredients and pulse to chop.
• If you forget to make the soup in the morning, you can spin it in the blender with a few ice cubes and eat it instantly when you get home. Not quite as good, but good enough!

Make It Modular: quick and easy vegetarian meal ideas

Most of the time I want food that looks good (lots of color!), tastes good (fresh ingredients!), is good for me (mostly plant based!)--and takes just a few minutes to fix. If it takes hours to prepare, I'm probably not going to eat it very often.

This is why I tend to ignore most of the vegetarian cookbooks on my shelves. Their authors seem to think I want to spend all day hunting for odd and expensive ingredients, then bringing them home to peel them and chop them and grind them into powder with my mortar and pestle.

Now and then that can be fun, but there's a much easier way to eat vegetarian: Go modular.

Figure that your meal will need three basic elements:

1. A grain. This could be made of wheat, corn, rice, barley, oats, quinoa...  Ideally, it will be a whole grain, which means it will probably be brown.

2. A source of protein. Instead of meat or fish, go for nuts, cheese, yogurt, beans, or eggs.

3. Fruit and/or vegetables, the more the merrier. Go for color. Go for texture. Go wild.

You can arrange the three elements on a plate: a mound of beans, a mound of rice, a mélange of finely chopped tomatoes, avocadoes, corn, and jalapeño peppers. You can combine the grain and protein (bean burrito, cheese pizza, peanut butter sandwich) and eat a salad or a bowl of fruit on the side. You can turn your grain, protein, and vegetables into minestrone soup. Those are all good, quick meals.

What I most like to do with the three elements, though, is stack them--grain on the bottom, protein next, fruit or vegetables on top--or mix them all up together. Here are some sample combinations:

Grain	Protein	Fruit/Vegetable
bread	peanut or almond butter	applesauce or other fruit
bread	cheese	lettuce, tomato
tortilla	beans, cheese	lettuce, tomato, avocado, chili peppers
rice	beans	bell peppers, tomato
spaghetti or linguine	parmesan cheese	tomato sauce
farfalle or rotini	goat cheese	chopped broccoli, zucchini, carrots, etc.
waffle or pancake	yogurt, sliced almonds	berries
pie crust	eggs, milk, and cheese	spinach or broccoli
couscous	chopped walnuts	chopped broccoli

Three elements--that's all you absolutely need, though you'll probably want to accessorize. Add a little salt and pepper or herbs or spices or onion or garlic or lemon juice or vinegar or anything likely to make your meal tastier. Experiment. Make up your own combinations based on whatever's in season or in your refrigerator. By late spring, you'll be an accomplished vegetarian cook. And then the farmers' markets will open and the fun will really begin.

What wine goes with ... beans?

Lentil patties ISO compatible wine ...

Forget the wisecracks - this is a serious question for would-be vegetarian wine-lovers. Cabernet sauvignon? Beef, of course. Pinot noir? Made for salmon. Sauvignon blanc and shellfish, chardonnay and chicken, zinfandel and grilled meats - what's a vegetarian to do?

Well, there's always slightly fizzy chilled mineral water flavored with a soupçon of orange or lemon. In fact, that's very refreshing some of the time.

Fortunately, however, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, author of Drink This - a delightful wine guide I'm going to describe on The Neff Review just as soon as I finish reading every word of it - offers wine-pairing suggestions for vegetarians as well as omnivores. Here are some of her ideas:

• Sauvignon blanc: Vietnamese and Thai salads; pasta or risotto with walnut pesto; roast vegetables; fruit
• Riesling: Butternut squash risotto; Thai coconut milk curries
• Cabernet sauvignon: Grilled mushrooms; eggplant and pasta; polenta with parmigiano or reggiano cheese
• Syrah: Rich, smoky bean stew
• Chianti: Anything Italian with red tomato sauce; grilled vegetables
• Pinot noir: 95% of all foods, including truffles, mushrooms, grilled eggplant, grilled fennel, braised chard

As far as I know, there's still no book dedicated to matching wine with vegetarian foods (please correct me if I've missed it). Maybe the book isn't necessary, though - lots of inexpensive wines work well with a variety of vegetarian dishes.

If you like white wines, it's hard to go wrong. Sauvignon blanc and dry or off-dry riesling, for example, work wonderfully with salads, green vegetables, Asian food, summer fruit and vegetables, winter vegetables, pastas with white sauce, risottos ...

Red wines are great with vegetables as long as the wines don't overpower them (some reds can get a bit pushy). Pinot noir works well with most plant-based foods. Red zinfandel is good with foods you'd serve with Coke or beer: pizza, tacos, chili, stuffed potatoes. Chianti and other red Italian wines, unsurprisingly, are made for pasta and tomato sauce.

So what wine goes with beans? Grumdahl recommends syrah (also called shiraz) for bean stew. I recommend  zinfandel (Gnarly Head is good) for vegetarian chili with onions and cheese. The lentil patties pictured above are begging for a glass of pinot noir. Or maybe it's pinot gris they're hankering for. Try both, and let me know!

What vegetarians eat on vacation

It used to be really hard to eat vegetarian while traveling, especially if you were traveling from Washington to Illinois with vegetarian children who refused to eat any food that might have been cooked on a griddle that may also have been used for hamburgers (I speak from experience).

In the thirty years since that stressful trip, America's food tastes have changed. It's now almost easier to eat vegetarian in a restaurant than at home. Even in barbecue-loving Texas, where we just spent nine days.

The easiest way to do it? Eat ethnic.

We ate Italian at Hasta la Pasta and Vespaio Enoteca, Colombian at La Palma de Cera, Ethiopian at Blue Nile, Chinese (sort of) at Panda Express, Mexican at Los Cucos and El Chile, Thai at Thai Kitchen, Middle Eastern at Pita Pit, and Indian at Udipi Café. The winner: La Palma de Cera (Katy) - and if you go there, you must try the flan, which is the best we've ever tasted. Runners-up: El Chile (Austin) and Blue Nile (Houston).

In addition, we ate lentil soup, tamales, and an eggplant sandwich at the delightful Hyde Park Bar and Grill, which despite its name has a range of vegetarian options; strange but tasty concoctions at the vegan bar in Austin's gigantic mothership Whole Foods store, pancakes and sweet potato hash at the famed Kerbey Lane Café, sandwiches and fresh fruit at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center café, and tilapia and green beans at Pappadeaux in Houston's Hobby airport. One evening we bought stuffed portabella mushrooms, Greek potato salad, and green beans at Whole Foods and ate dinner in our apartment. Another evening we went to Central Market and brought home herbed risotto croquettes, cauliflower in truffled oil, and balsamic glazed yams.

We never went hungry. We never had trouble finding good, affordable food.

Eating while traveling would probably be more difficult if we were vegans. We cheerfully eat dairy products and eggs (though we do our best to buy them from organic farms, or at least from farms that give their cows and chickens pasture time). We also eat a little fish. The term for what we are seems to be pescetarian, though we prefer a friend's neologism: vegequarium (others might call us part-time vegetarians or pseudovegetarians: you can read a vegetarian taxonomy here). We had tilapia at the Colombian restaurant as well as at the airport, and David had fish tacos at Los Cucos. Most of our meals, however, were lacto-ovo-vegetarian.

Why eat vegetarian while traveling? Well, if you're a committed vegetarian, that's what you do. But even if you aren't, there are advantages to making some of your restaurant meals vegetarian. Take your pick:

• Reduce your fat intake, which always seems higher in restaurants.
• Lower your chances of encountering food-borne bacteria.
• Enjoy interesting new tastes, especially if you go ethnic.
• Feel better, thanks to all those fruits and veggies.
• Save money.
• Save the planet.

Also, the vegetarian selections are often very, very good.

10 good reasons to be a part-time vegetarian

There are lots of good reasons to be 100% vegetarian. For one, vegetarians tend to live longer than meat eaters. For 10 others, see my May 7 post, "10 good things about being vegetarian." The list is by no means exhaustive.

But there are also good reason to eat meat some of the time. I first heard the term part-time vegetarian in 2005 when I was traveling in Asia. Many Buddhists, I learned, occasionally eat meat though they favor a plant-based diet. In largely Buddhist Thailand, for example, per capita meat consumption is about 30 pounds per year (in the United States, the figure is about 125 pounds; you can compare various countries' meat consumption here).

Part-time vegetarians are a diverse lot. Some, like my parents when I was growing up, eat meat no more than three or four times a year. Others, like some of my friends, eat meat six days a week but take a one-day vegetarian holiday. Here are 10 good reasons to try part-time vegetarianism yourself:

1.    Family. Some of your family members want to eat meat, and you don’t have time to cook separate meals. You can, however, offer meatless meals one or more times a week.
2.    Friends. You’re basically vegetarian, but you don’t want to be a fussy guest when people invite you to dinner.
3.    Taste. You’re basically vegetarian, but now and then meat tastes so good...
4.    Curiosity. You prefer to eat vegetarian, but you love to travel and sample native cuisines.
5.    Budget. You buy only ethically produced meat, which means you can’t afford to eat it very often.
6.    Winter. You eat mostly locally grown food, and you run short of vegetables and fruit in the winter.
7.    Sustainable agriculture. You eat lots of plants and small amounts of meat, since pastured animals make organically grown plant foods possible.
8.    Food intolerance. You can’t digest dairy products and/or beans, and so consistent vegetarianism is difficult to practice.
9.    Religion. You have religious reasons for periodically abstaining from meat; or you find that it is often easier to eat vegetarian than to find kosher or halal food.
10.  Practice. You would like to be a full-time vegetarian someday, but you need to spend time learning how.
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If you'd like to be a vegetarian, whether full-time or part-time, scroll through other posts in this series  for tips on vegetarian cooking, eating, and dining out.

10 vegetarian meals in pictures

A healthful diet is usually colorful. A good meal always is. Eating vegetarian does not need to be dull. And in case you were wondering, Adam did not trade Paradise for an apple. It was an avocado.

Breakfast (or lunch or dinner, for that matter)

1. Whole wheat waffles topped with slightly sweetened plain yogurt and fresh raspberries

Lunch (or dinner)

2. Salad with arugula, black beans (hidden), queso fresco, tomatoes, yellow bell peppers, and avocado

3. Avocado, cheese, tomato, and lettuce sandwiches

4. Insalata caprese: basil leaves, tomato slices, fresh mozzarella, pine nuts, salt and pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil; even better with homemade bread

Dinner (or lunch)

5. Chestnut soufflé with lamb's lettuce, apple, and pine nut salad

6. Gnocchi with tomato sauce and parmesan, white beans with caramelized onions, and - to add the necessary color - a strip of chopped spinach

7. Cheese and artichoke quiche with arugula and tomato salad

8. Orecchiette pasta with fava beans, ricotta, and mint (serve a colorful salad separately)

9. Risotto, asparagus, and tomato slices

10. Vegetarian salade niçoise: red leaf lettuce, tiny boiled onions, asparagus, green beans, boiled eggs, tomato, avocado, capers - all cold, in a vinaigrette dressing

10 spring vegetables and what to do with them

Most farmers' markets in our area (northeastern Illinois) open in June, but the one in our town brings produce from southern Illinois and southwestern Michigan in early May, and we are feasting. Here are 10 treats for vegans, vegetarians, omnivores, locavores, and everyone who likes unbelievably fresh food, even though it's still May.

1. baby lettuce leaves - no wonder the rabbits love them. The green and red leaf lettuce I've been buying is utterly delectable, dressed with just a little olive oil, a squirt of fresh lemon, and a tiny sprinkle of salt.
2. rhubarb - Barbara Kingsolver, craving fruit in April, discovered rhubarb, which Alice Waters called "the vegetable bridge between the tree fruits of winter and summer."
3. asparagus - steam* or simmer lightly, but be sure it stays crisp. Serve with a little butter and lemon juice in a separate dish for dipping. Emily Post approved of eating short, crisp stalks with your fingers.
4. baby potatoes -steam* for a few minutes, then sauté in olive oil and/or butter. Best with coarse salt and freshly ground course pepper. Add garlic during last minute of cooking, if you like. Remove from heat and stir in fresh parsley.
5. spinach - heat a splash of olive oil in a large pan over medium-high heat. Soften some garlic or green onions or shallots in the oil, if you like. Add spinach and stir until all the leaves are wilted. Immediately remove from heat. Good as is, or add a small squirt of lemon juice.
6. chard - spinach's more colorful cousin. Stalks are delicious. Chop them and cook them separately in olive oil with a little onion and/or garlic. Sprinkle with lemon juice. Leaves can be cooked however you cook spinach.
7. beets - cook the greens however you cook spinach. Stab the red bulbs several times with a fork, wrap them in aluminum foil, and bake for 30-60 minutes, depending on how big they are. Good hot, good in soup, very nice cold, sliced thin, in salad with crumbled goat cheese and orange slices.
8. carrots - steam,* boil, add to soup, grate for salad, turn into juice, or give to small dogs as treats. My dog Muffin often says "Why?" when I ask her to come back in the house, but if I say "Carrot?" she comes immediately.
9. radishes - I have never seen much reason to eat these, which is why I did not renew my C.S.A. subscription - my farmer, a wonderful lady, seemed to have a radish fetish. But you can slice the little ones on salad and stir fry the big ones, and I'm sure God made them for a reason.
10. broccoli - bring a big pot of water to a rapid boil. Drop the broccoli into it. I usually eat just the florets and a small amount of the stem. If you want to eat lots of stem, chop it up, drop it in the water first, and let it bubble for a couple of minutes before adding the florets. Then turn the heat to medium and cook for just a minute or two. You don't want it to turn sickly green. Drain and serve with melted butter, vinaigrette, or a drizzle of olive oil. Alternately, you can steam broccoli, but by the time it's tender enough, it may lose its color.

*I steam many vegetables in my Tupperware microsteamer, usually until they are about half done (this often takes only a couple of minutes). I then finish them by sautéing them in a little olive oil or roasting them in a hot oven. This is not a commercial. The steamer was a gift from my daughter Molly, who also has one and uses it all the time.

Today's special - second-hand poop!

"You want chicken poop with that steak?"

Want it or not, says Animal Factory author David Kirby in an April 9, 2010, Huffington Post article - you're likely to get it. "Poultry excrement is loaded with urea, which bovine stomachs are adept at converting into lean, ready-to-grill protein," he writes. "We feed chicken manure to cattle because it's cheap; and because we produce far too much of it to properly dispose of as fertilizer."

In the 1960s and 70s, writes Nicolette Hahn Niman in Righteous Porkchop,  “agribusiness researchers came to regard all kinds of poop as acceptable cattle feed (and poultry and pig feed too)." The Food and Drug Administration was not especially bothered by this. Check out chapter 2 of their 1980 document Feed from Animal Wastes for a complete run-down on how to feed chicken poop to cows, cow dung to chickens, etc.

Ah, but that was 30 years ago. In the meantime we've had all kinds of scares: BSE ("mad cow disease"), salmonella and campylobacter, e coli ... surely the FDA has tightened its rules since then?

No, actually, the FDA and the USDA don't see anything wrong with second-hand poop. And if you think government regulators work hard and earn their salaries (think banking, Wall Street, oil spills, etc.), you probably feel quite confident that our food is safe. It won't turn your stomach to learn that many imported Chinese shrimp dine on chicken feces dropped from cages hanging above their ponds (see this L.A. Times article), or that after a temporary U.S. ban on feeding poop to cattle (2003-2005), the FDA concluded that the practice is perfectly safe and allowed it to continue (see  instructions, "Feeding Poultry Litter to Cattle," on the University of Missouri Extension website).

You won't be troubled by the fact that the rendering industry - the business that provides all that delectable manure to the animal feed companies - disliked the ban on bottom feeding and filed these comments with the FDA, arguing that there's no reason to lock the barn door if the horse hasn't been stolen,  providing laughable arithmetic computations to try to prove that BSE is not a danger, and engaging in a little jingoism: "It is our firm conviction that we must refrain from erroneously emulating the European legislation and instead pursue policies, which closely reflect the true state of affairs in this country." And you won't worry over the fact that the FDA listened to them.

Kirby describes the FDA response to agribusiness in 2004, and the government's lackadaisical attitude then and now:

In 2004, the FDA proposed banning poultry litter in cattle feed, to avoid the spread of BSE. It was already outlawed in Canada. But days later, the agency postponed its change, citing "troubling feedback" from the agricultural sector. Some foreign countries balked at buying US beef, but the Bush Administration held firm, refusing to commit to a deadline... 

I imagined that the Obama Administration would complete the work left undone by Bush and enact a universal ban on feeding beef products to cattle. Instead, I discovered that Obama's FDA had ratified what his predecessor proposed: Doing nothing.

You might want to check out the stats on agribusiness influence and lobbying. It doesn't look like we'll have an abundance of poop-free meat anytime soon.

Meanwhile, if you don't like the idea of eating second-hand poop, all you have to do is avoid shit-eating factory-farmed animals. The ascetically inclined may choose veganism. The rest of us can look for meat, poultry, fish, dairy products, and eggs at the farmers' market, or that bear at least one of these labels:

• 100% organic
• vegetarian-fed
• wild-caught
• 100% grass fed
• animal welfare approved

Voting with your fork -- Review of "Righteous Porkchop" by Nicolette Hahn Niman

"Are you trying to convert us?" asked one of my daughters after reading my recent posts on vegetarianism. Not to vegetarianism, I emailed back - just to mindful eating.

I like Michael Pollan's creed : "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

I also like Nicolette Hahn Niman's advice at the end of her 2009 book, Righteous Porkchop:

Do not thoughtlessly eat foods from animals. Know the source. Question the methods. There is great power in posing the following simple question to grocery stores, restaurants and farmers: “How was this raised?” Then shift your buying toward those meats, fish, eggs, and dairy products that come from animals raised in a way that you like.... It’s voting with your fork.

Voting with your fork seems like such a pathetically tiny response to the worldwide scourge of factory farms, which Niman describes in heartbreaking detail : Ecological devastation, such as the 1995 lagoon break that spilled “more than twenty-five million gallons of liquefied hog manure into the New River (more than twice the volume of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez).” Increased poverty in areas where agribusiness, with the help of public subsidies, tax exemptions, and favored treatment, has driven small farmers off the land. Endangered public health from antiobiotic-resistant infections and poisoned air and water. And, of course, unspeakable cruelty to animals who never see the sun, eat manure-rich feed, and are dismembered while still alive.

Model farms

Fortunately, in Righteous Porkchop Niman goes well beyond exposing the evils of factory farming. As her delightful title suggests, a small but rapidly growing movement is challenging industrial food production - not only by throwing well-deserved stones, but also by modeling animal husbandry as it should be practiced. Just as Pollan praises Joel Salatin's Virginia chicken farm in The Omnivore's Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer extols Frank Reese's Kansas turkey farm in Eating Animals, Niman writes glowingly about farmers who treat their animals and the environment with respect: the Klessig family, who own a Wisconsin dairy farm, for example, and Rob and Michelle Stokes, who raise goats in Oregon.

Niman herself is now a rancher. Formerly a senior attorney with Robert Kennedy Jr.'s environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance, she married Niman Ranch founder Bill Niman in 2003 and got personally involved with raising cattle, an odd vocation for a woman who has been a vegetarian since college. Ms. Niman, however, is by no means opposed to righteous porkchops. Having learned that milk cows and egg-laying hens are kept in conditions as abysmal as their meat-animal cousins, she "simply couldn't continue consuming eggs and dairy products and maintain any sense of moral superiority." All foods of animal origin can be farmed cruelly or responsibly. Those who eat such foods can ignore the problems - or they can vote for change with their forks.

But does voting with my fork do any good? What is one person against the Goliath agribusiness?

Change in the air
The thing is, it isn't just one person. It isn't even just a few activists or extremists. Michael Pollan's books regularly hit the best-seller lists. David Kirby's new book, Animal Factory, is getting rave reviews (watch this interview on the Fox Business channel). Movies like King Corn and Food Inc. are making the rounds. Farmers' markets have never been more popular.

Businesses are listening. Trader Joe's and Whole Foods markets are springing up everywhere, and major supermarkets are adding an abundance of organic products.

Policies are changing, too. “To qualify as ‘organic,’ dairies have not been required by USDA to truly keep their cows on pasture,” Niman wrote last year. Beginning next month, this will no longer be true. According to a February 12 New York Times article, Department of Agriculture rules go into effect in June requiring that dairy cows be allowed to "graze on pasture for the full length of the local grazing season. The season will be determined by local conditions and agriculture authorities, like organic certifiers or county conservation officials, not by the dairy alone. While the grazing season must last at least 120 days, in many areas it will be much longer."

In the meantime
Meanwhile, of course, factory farms flourish, and their public relations and marketing departments work overtime to persuade the public that their approach is ethical, healthful, and necessary. One of Niman's best chapters, "Answering Obstacles to Reform," no doubt has its roots in the legal battles she waged - and won - against industrial agriculturalists when she worked for Waterkeeper. Read it whenever you're tempted to believe that large operations are more efficient than small ones, or that industrially raised meat is necessary in order to feed the world.

And whenever you think it's just too hard to save the world one fork at a time, read the preceding chapter, "Finding the Right Foods." Even though interest in responsibly farmed food is growing, it can still be difficult to find 100% grass-fed beef, or milk from cows who graze in pastures, or eggs from hens who breathe fresh air. Niman offer many pointers and websites to make the search less daunting.

Righteous Porkchop covers a lot of ground. It's a memoir and an exposé, a call to action and a buying guide, a good read packed with information. If I'd been Niman's editor, I might have tried to get her to narrow her focus and smooth out her style  - but I might have been wrong. She's not as well-organized as Pollan or as literary as Safran Foer, but she makes an excellent case. She's going to convert a lot of us.

How to cook for your vegetarian friends - 10 ideas

"Help! I just discovered one of my dinner guests is a vegetarian! What can I do?"

Take a deep breath. If your friend has been a vegetarian for more than a few weeks, she is already quite used to fending for herself at meals where meat is served. A new convert to vegetarianism, on the other hand (like a new convert to almost anything), may go all righteous and preachy on you. Don't argue with her. Ask questions, listen, and resolve to give her a few months to settle in before inviting her back.

We have quite a few vegetarian* friends, and they are, without exception, gracious and appreciative guests.

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*Note: It helps to find out what your friends mean by vegetarian. Many vegetarians happily eat dairy products and eggs, while some (vegans) eat nothing that comes from animals, not even honey. A few people who call themselves vegetarians are actually pescetarians - they eat fish, but not meat. And some are selective meat eaters - they will eat meat only if they know it comes from a family farm that treats its animals humanely.

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Here are 10 ideas for feeding vegetarians and meat-eaters together.
 1.   Do nothing. Serve whatever you were planning to serve before you knew your guest's eating habits. Just be sure to provide, alongside your steaks, plenty of side dishes that the vegetarian can eat.
 2.   Provide a selection of sandwiches, soups, and/or salads and let everybody take what they want.
 3.   Serve buffet or family style to maximize choice.
 4.   Serve pasta with a choice of sauces.
 5.   Serve pizza with a choice of toppings.
 6.   Serve tapas or meze - a wide selection of appetizers that make up an entire meal.
 7.   Ask your vegetarian friend to contribute a hot dish.
 8.   Host a potluck.
 9.   Cook a vegetarian meal for everybody (see suggestions here, here, and here).
10.  Meet your friends at a restaurant.