Leda’s Urban Homestead

On Tuesday, the day before my knee operation, I was hobbling over to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription I’d need post-op. On the way, I spotted a beautiful hen-of-the-woods mushroom, a.k.a. maitake, a.k.a. Grifola frondosa. Crutches be damned, I managed to get it cut off at the base and into my backpack. When I got home I weighed it: two pounds. Not the biggest I’ve ever found, but not too shabby.

I had a long list of mundane tasks that had to get done before going to the hospital:  change the cat litter, do laundry, take out the trash, etc. I added the task of cleaning and cutting up that hen and getting it into my dehydrator to my list. Fortunately, mushrooms dry quickly, and this one was crisp and ready to pack into jars well before I needed to leave for the hospital the next morning.

I feel especially blessed by this find. I’d been depressed about missing the fall foraging season because of my knee injury. Thanks to two pounds of free gourmet mushroom, I no longer feel like I missed the season entirely.

Meanwhile, my right knee has a new ACL as well as a repaired meniscus. I ain’t going foraging again any time soon. I’m spending most of my time hooked up to a machine called a CPM (for Continuous Passive Motion) that restores mobility to the knee. This is my friend Julie right after she brought me home from the hospital. She is gesturing towards my leg, in the huge black and blue brace, on the CPM. Yup, that’s a leg.

The first couple of days after the surgery I really didn’t make it much further than from the CPM machine to the bathroom, but this morning I felt a little better. I also have a refrigerator full of vegetables from yesterday’s CSA share  (my friend Anne has been picking my shares up for me). I was starting to go stir-crazy and decided that I could take some time out from the CPM for a little cookery.

I am really, really glad right now that I have a tiny apartment! It is possible for me to reach from the refrigerator to the table without going anywhere. I put a cutting board on the end of the table closest to the refrigerator. While there, I can fill a pot with veggies. Then comes the question of how to get it to the stove because I can’t carry the pot and use my crutches at the same time. But I can reach from the table to set the pot in the sink, crutch over to the sink and from there lift the pot to the counter, crutch from there to the stove and reach over to move the pot from counter to burner. The end result today: a very nice potato leek soup. Now, of course, I have to reverse the whole process to get the leftover soup back to the refrigerator.

Fortunately, my friend Kendall is on her way over. Our stated mission for the evening: to have her wash, chop, and otherwise prep all the CSA produce in my fridge so that it won’t be quite such a marathon for me to make use of the ingredients while on crutches. Oh, and she’s going to cook dinner while I get back to the CPM machine. Bless my friends!

Not sure what this is about? Read Getting Ready for the 250-Mile Diet and The Rules

Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

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This past week my mom visited me in Brooklyn.

We canned corn relish, carrots, pickled hot peppers, dried tomatoes, and blanched and froze okra from the garden. It was a huge help having her here right now while I’m injured. It’s peak harvest season, but getting local food put by while on crutches is challenging (injury update for those who are interested: I have a full ACL tear in my right knee and go in for surgery in a week and a half).

Along with the food preservation projects, we also found time for the silly but fun extravagance of a pedicure (hey, the crutches are ugly but that’s no reason for my toes not to look fabulous).

Aside from Mom’s visit and my knee woes, the other news is that two local food and food preservation videos I participated in just went online. One is part of the launch of a new local food web site called Taste of Local. There’s an article about my 250-mile diet along with the video.

The other is of me and Ellen canning dilly beans in Ellen’s lovely kitchen in PA. The video is up on the Kitchen Caravan site, along with the recipe, which is from my book (shameless plug for the book, just in case you haven’t read it yet). Kitchen Caravan is devoting the entire month of September to local foods.

Both Kitchen Caravan and Taste of Local are great sites with lots of intriguing info. Well worth some time browsing through the other videos, articles, and recipes.

Time to go ice my knee again.

Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

Not sure what this is about? Read Getting Ready for the 250-Mile Diet and The Rules

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One of the bummers about being injured and on crutches right now is that this is peak harvest season. Normally I’d be running around to the farmers’ markets to augment my CSA share and garden crops, buying up tomatoes and other goodies at their best and cheapest, and stocking up for the winter. Not possible right now. However, there has been enough bounty from CSA and the garden for me to do a little stocking up.

This is the flower and pod behind it of one of the burgundy okra plants I’m growing: I blanch the pods in boiling water for three minutes and then freeze them. It looks like I will get enough off of the three plants I’m growing to make a big pot of gumbo for company some time this winter. Next year I’m going to grow more of them just because they are gorgeous plants and seem to be immune to the various bugs and mildews that abound here…and because I like gumbo. The dehydrator has been on drying celery and tomatoes. I’ve got about half as many tomatoes dried as I’d like to have. My mom is coming to visit for a week, and I am so sending her on farmers’ market runs for me!

I think I’ve got enough jars of ratatouille put up for the year, though if more eggplant shows up in my CSA share, I’ll probably can some more. I’ve pickled plenty of carrots. And I’m about 2/3 of the way to having as many jars of canned tomatoes as I need.

Last year during The 250 I realized that if I ran out of my home-canned tomatoes as had always happened before, I wouldn’t be able to run out to the store for any. Before that, my favorite storebought brand was Muir Glen Organic Fireroasted. So I figured out a way to make my own fireroasted tomatoes. They are so much tastier than the regular ones that I’m fireroasting all of my canned tomatoes this year.

Fireroasted Tomatoes

Step One Skewer a tomato with a fork and hold it over the flame of a gas stove burner (sorry, electric won’t work). As the skin starts to char and split, rotate the fork to expose all sides of the tomato to the fire. Remove from fork into a bowl to cool. Repeat with the next tomato (I usually get all four burners on my stove going at the same time so that I don’t spend all day on this step). During the fireroasting, the tomatoes carmelize slightly, which intensifies their flavor. Now you’ve got something that looks like this:

Step Two When cool enough to handle, rub the skins off of the tomatoes. They will come off easily. Don’t worry if you don’t get every single bit off.

Step Three Cut off the stem part of the tomato and discard.  Coarsely chop the tomatoes. Squish most of the seeds and the gel that surrounds the seeds out and discard (you could skip this part, but you’d end up with a very watery, seedy product, which is not what we’re after).

Step Four Pack into pint jars, adding 2 teaspoons vinegar or lemon juice or 1/4 tsp. citric acid to each jar. Leave at least half an inch head room. Screw on two-piece canning lids. Process in a boiling water bath for 40 minutes. Remove jars from water and let cool completely before moving them. Even though you squished out the seedy gel, there will still be enough water in the tomatoes that at first the pulp will separate from the liquid and look like this:

Once the jars are completely cooled, you can shake them up to reintegrate the liquid and pulp. Et voila! Home-canned fireroasted tomatoes!

Not sure what this is about? Read Getting Ready for the 250-Mile Diet and The Rules

Get the book: Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

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This past Saturday I taught a food preservation workshop at Genesis Farm. I went up the night before, and got up early so that I could spend some time before the workshop hiking the grounds. Gorgeous!

I felt like I’d had a mini-vacation before I had even gotten halfway up the slope to the spectacular views from the top. Genesis runs a CSA farm along with its workshops, and powers itself on some impressive solar panels.

The workshop went well–it was a joy and a privilege to share food preservation know-how with genuinely interested participants. We canned fire-roasted tomatoes, blueberries, pickled carrots and green beans, and got tomatoes into the food dehydrator and talked about lacto-fermentation and other preservation methods as well.

The next day I led a foraging class for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I don’t get to collect much on such jaunts because I’m usually too busy teaching, but I did manage to add some elderberries to my stash and spot a fruitful stand of spicebush that I’ll be getting back to in a few weeks when they are ripe. There is an excellent blog post with photos about our day by one of the participants at supereco.

Sadly, I won’t be traipsing off for any foraging walks anytime soon. This morning while teaching a dance class I slipped and dislocated my right knee. Won’t know more until I see the orthopedist, and that is currently delayed under a fog of workers’ compensation legalities. Meanwhile, I’m on crutches.

My garden is nine steps down from my back door. It desperately needs watering. Not going to happen any time soon. I guess I’m about to find out whether it really is true that holding off watering on ripening tomatoes makes them sweeter.

Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

Not sure what this is about? Read Getting Ready for the 250-Mile Diet and The Rules

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Her real name is Cameron, but I still sometimes think of her as Machete Woman because of how I met her.

I had just moved into the one-bedroom garden apartment rental I still live in. The fence between my yard and the neighboring one was just calling out for vines: morning glories for a pretty maybe? Or something more useful like grapes or hops? I opted for hops, knowing that they are voracious growers and climbers and could easily cover the fence in a single season.

So I was baffled when weeks passed and the hops vines made no headway on the fence. Every morning I’d come out and they’d be in a sorry little pile on the ground, not at all climbing and twining the way I expected them to. The mystery was solved one morning when I came outside and saw a woman in the neighboring yard carefully untwining my hops vines from the fence. She didn’t notice me. “Don’t like nothing on the fence,” she muttered, “…nothing on the fence.”

Her head was wrapped in a bandana and she was wearing what my grandmother would have called “a kitchen dress,” one of those nondescript floral print gowns that could as easily have been a nightgown. Beside her feet was a shiny, obviously well cared for machete. Machete trumps garden design plans. I moved the hops.

I wish I had a picture of her, but she is camera-shy. I can show you her tomato stakes, made out of old mop handles

and her ties, made out of old nylon stockings.

That machete seems to be her sole gardening tool. I have seen her in a wide-legged stance with the machete raised over her head. Thwack! The machete dives into the ground. Then she jimmies it back and forth. That is how she digs the holes her plants go into.

That first year, she didn’t speak to me much. I didn’t learn her name until a conversation when she asked me if I was going to grow any food. She thinks I’m just some white chick who’s going to put in nothing but flowers, I thought in response to her disapproving expression. When I replied that yes, I was growing food, and pointed out the vegetables and herbs I’d already put in, her face softened. “I’m Cameron,” she said. We’ve become friends, and each fall she generously shares some of the figs from her fig tree. I give her some of my basil, mint, and other herbs, which she doesn’t grow but shares lots of recipes for. I guess she doesn’t have to grow them since I grow them for her, just like I don’t need to plant a fig tree.

I’ve been here for five years now, and have gone from having an exclusive-access lease on the garden to sharing it with folks in the apartment next to mine (with no notice and no new lease) . The last neighbors had dogs who left “offerings” that their owners regularly neglected to clean up. The dogs also tore up my strawberry bed, so I ended up having to put little fences up around everything, which didn’t look great. On the bright side, they were content to let me do the gardening and grow whatever I wished.

They moved out three weeks ago, and my new garden-sharing neighbors will be moving in any day now (my lease still says I have exclusive access, but whatever.) I haven’t met them yet, so I have my fingers crossed.

I happened to be out in “my” garden at the same time as Cameron was in hers yesterday and explained the situation to her. “I remember before you came, there was nothing in that garden. Whoever moves in, they should be happy that you’ve done something with it.”

Let’s hope.
Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

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Not sure what this is about? Read Getting Ready for the 250-Mile Diet and The Rules

Today I collected several cups worth of elderberries in the park. Last week I got some in the community garden, and the ones in my own backyard are a few days away from perfectly ripe. All free, all delicious, and not usually available even at farmers’ markets. I’ve got a deal with Ellen that she’s going to turn them into wine that we’ll eventually share (I collect the fruit, she ferments it–I don’t have room in my apartment for fermentation jugs that have to sit around for months).

Bactracking a bit here, I promised a party update from the last night of The 250. We started off with what has become my go-to appetizer for entertaining: pickled sour cherries with Hudson Valley Camembert (thank you Anne F., for coming up with that unlikely but scrumptious combination!). You can get the recipe for the pickled cherries at the end of this post. It’s a bit late in the season for cherries, but the recipe works equally well with small plums.

The main course was moussaka. Moussaka is slow food, labor intensive and definitely not something you’d make for a worknight meal, which makes it all the more special for celebrating. The recipe is in my book, but I’ve also posted it here. My dad was visiting from SF, so I had a willing sous chef (thanks, Dad).

We also had skordalia (Greek garlic dip), homemade sourdough crackers, an heirloom tomato salad, and a ginger cake (made with wild ginger, Asarum canadense, and spicebush, Lindera benzoin–both plants native to our Northeastern U.S. woodlands) with peaches and whipped local cream. We washed it all down with some lovely local wine pairings suggested by Darrin of Red, White, & Bubbly.

Okay, so that was the party, and judging by the lack of leftovers and the number of empty wine bottles, a good time was had by all.

(Both party pics photo credit www.tasteoflocal.com, a new local foods site that launches Sept. 5th)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

It’s stockpiling time again. The dehydrator is humming on the floor of my living room/kitchen/dining room (what do you call that kind of one-room combo anyway? You’d think New Yorkers would have come up with a name for it by now. Mine is a one-bedroom not a studio apartment, so the studio tag doesn’t fit. The Almost-Everything Room?). The first few jars of this season’s tomatoes got canned yesterday. The freezer is filling up with fruit and greens. I’m canning ratatouille tonight.

If you’re interested in food preservation (pretty much an essential for a locavore), I’m teaching a workshop on it at Genesis Farm. And if that mention of free-from-the-park elderberries caught your eye, I’ve got a wild edible plants class for BBG coming up next Sunday.

Last but not least, I got two bits of press this week. The NY Times made it sound like I’d never canned before The 250, which isn’t true, but it was still nice to get the mention. Alexa Schirtzinger asked very intelligent questions about eating locally, and you can read her interview for Plenty Magazine here.

Cheers,

Leda

Not sure what this is about? Read Getting Ready for the 250-Mile Diet and The Rules

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Right after the local foods feast celebrating the end of The 250, I headed to Ellen’s in PA for a weekend of local foods cookery. Kitchen Caravan was filming us for a piece on “What Here Tastes Like.”

Ellen lives in a beautiful wooded area of Pennsylvania, and some of our weekend included foraging near her home. (So good to get out of the city for a couple of days!)

We started out collecting the last of the season’s highbush blueberries,

and then lucked into a patch of blackberries laden with ripe fruit.

We also found some choice edible mushrooms, boletes and blewits. Sophia, from Kitchen Caravan, sauteed the blewits and served them up on toast alongside a salad for lunch.

We canned blueberries and dilly beans, and made an herbal vinegar with beebalm (a.k.a. Monarda, an indigenous herb in flower now). I also collected some sassafras leaves to dry and grind for filee powder to use in gumbos this winter.

The main dinner included quail wrapped in bacon and seasoned with rosemary and spicebush–put together by our friend Mark and grilled by Ellen’s husband, Michael. Alongside, we had potatoes that I sauteed in duck fat (no olive oil exemption for this meal!), spicebush ice cream made with all local dairy (from a recipe in my book) served with blueberry pie, and lovely local wines including Ellen’s homemade blueberry wine.

Emma, the camera gal for Kitchen Caravan, grabbed moments in between cooking frenzies to interview each of us. The topic, What Here Tastes Like, is an interesting one, and I look forward to viewing the piece when it is up on the KC site.

This was not a historical meal. We were not trying to replicate what the food of the region tasted like before other-than-indigenous cultures arrived. We were going for a blend of what is truly native to this place with what has been introduced but is now part of the landscape. Take that quail, for example, and its rosemary-spicebush seasoning. Spicebush (Lindera benzoin) is a plant native to the Northeastern U.S. that was and is used by people indigenous to this region. Rosemary is a European herb, but the sprigs we used were grown here. Needless to say, the quail and bacon were locally raised. The combination was delicious. Maybe this is a different kind of fusion cuisine, combining what is grown and raised here now with what was here all along.

This morning Michael made sunnyside-up Guinea hen eggs. We at these with toast and a variety of Ellen’s jellies plus Mark’s blackberry jam. For lunch, we had local spicy lamb sausage, roasted pattypan squash, several of Ellen’s chutneys, a salad with purslane from the farmers’ market, and blackberries with a zabaglione that Sophia cooked up.

Tonight I’m back in Brooklyn. After cooking for 17 people on Weds. and a weekend of contributing to the cooking for the KC spot, I’m thinking simple. So simple that I may not get much further than a salad with CSA tomatoes and basil from my garden, followed by locally grown popcorn and a Netflix movie. Hey, it may not be the most nutritionally balanced meal ever, but once in a while ain’t gonna hurt me. Think of it as a locavore’s version of fast food.

Not sure what this is about? Read Getting Ready for the 250-Mile Diet and The Rules

Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

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Yesterday was the last day of my 250-mile diet year. I celebrated with friends and a scrumptious local foods feast (if I do say so myself). One of the guests took a lot of pictures (I forgot), and I’ll post soon with some of those and some recipes from the menu. But now I want to write about what it is like not to be on The 250 today.

I do feel a sense of accomplishment for having done the whole year, but all morning I’ve been hit by waves of melancholy. I think I’ve figured out what that is about.

In many ways, The 250 simplified my life. I stuck to the rules I’d set for myself, and that meant that if it wasn’t a local ingredient, I didn’t eat it. I’d stand in line at the Park Slope Food Coop, and the people pulling things off the shelves that had lots of packaging and long ingredient lists seemed far removed from my life.

But now I’ve rejoined the world of choice. I went to the coop this morning and walked through the aisles knowing that technically I could buy anything I wanted to. Would I dare to eat a mango? Would it be worth the fuel burned and the most likely underpaid labor somewhere thousands of miles away? Did I even want to? No, not today.

My commitment to eating locally grown food remains strong. But now there are choices I’ll have to make every day that I didn’t even have to think about during The 250, and that is where the melancholy comes in. In a way, it will take more motivation to eat locally now than it did when I had a list of rules to follow.

There is some dip leftover from last night’s party, but we ate all of the crackers I made with locally grown wheat flour. My dad, who is visiting from SF, still has some non-local crackers left from the airplane snack he packed for his plane trip. Do we eat those with the dip, or do I opt for slicing up some local cucumber and using those instead (I don’t have time to make another batch of crackers today)? Choices.

Meanwhile, it’s tomato season and I know that I need to can at least 25 jars of them before winter…

Not sure what this is about? Read Getting Ready for the 250-Mile Diet and The Rules

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This year attendance at my vegetable gardening and foraging classes has more than doubled. And it’s not just my classes. Several gardening and wild edible plants email groups have had discussions recently verifying that others are experiencing the same thing. In an interview I did recently, I was asked what I thought was causing the swell of interest in do-it-yourself food sourcing.

On the bright side, I think it’s partly because of the burgeoning local food movement and interest in sustainable food sources. On the dark side, I think there is an underlying anxiety caused by news of food shortages, rising food and fuel costs, salmonella scares, and how not taken care of people are when disasters like Katrina hit.

“Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food,” writes survivalist Barton M. Biggs. “It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson. Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely breaks down.”

I hope he’s wrong about that last sentence, but thanks to The 250 I am better supplied than many, at least when it comes to food. In my book, I joke about sleeping with fifty jars of home-canned food under my bed because I have nowhere else to store them in my one-bedroom apartment. But all joking aside, maybe I do sleep a little better knowing that they’re there.

Another trend I’ve been noticing is people growing food in unusual places, maybe because they don’t have anywhere else to garden. Instead of flower pots on the front steps, this Brooklynite chose to plant tomatoes and basil.

I’ve also spotted vegetables and herbs being grown next to people’s trash and recycling bins.

Survivalism aside, I think it’s great that more people are getting directly involved with where their food comes from, whether it’s foraging or inventing places to garden.

Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

Not sure what this is about? Read Getting Ready for the 250-Mile Diet and The Rules

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There are 17 days left of The 250.

Yesterday I led a foraging event for Green Edge. I was teaching more than harvesting, but I did snag a bunch of peppergrass (Lepidium).

When I got home and transferred the peppergrass to a paper bag to dry I had a sense of deja vu: this is where The 250 began almost a year ago. Once I decided to do The 250, I knew I would run out of black pepper (which comes from a vine that grows on the Malabar coast–hardly local!, so I stocked up on peppergrass.

I don’t miss black pepper at all. Neither do I miss sugar, two things I’d thought might be tough to do without in the kitchen. So I won’t be reintroducing them into my diet after The 250 is over. Why would I since I don’t miss them anyway?

I do have a short list of things I probably will restock once The 250 is over: baking powder, soy sauce, cinnamon. But other than that I plan to continue my local foods diet, just not quite as strictly as I have been this past year.

During The 250 I’ve spent time figuring out where to get ingredients and substitutions for ingredients that can’t be produced locally. But for the most part, I’ve been eating so well that it’s almost embarrassing. I was a good cook before I started this adventure, but this has forced me to become a really good cook. Interestingly, my kitchen time has also gotten easier. With ingredients this good, my recipes have gotten simpler and simpler. Fancy sauces would just camouflage great tastes and textures, so why bother?

This isn’t new, but I think it’s worth repeating:

WHY EAT LOCAL? BECAUSE SAVING THE PLANET TASTES GOOD.

At the end of yesterday’s foraging event, I served roasted gingko nuts, daylily dip with cucumber slices, and maple-spicebush dessert bread. All of it disappeared quickly, but the daylily dip was an especially big hit. Only one participant missed the nibbles because he was getting comfortable for a nap in a tree.

Here’s the recipe for the daylily dip:

Daylily Dip

1 quart yogurt

1 tablespoon wild or domesticated garlic

1 teaspoon oil

1/4 cup fresh or dried daylily petals, chopped

salt

1. Line a colander with cheesecloth or paper coffee filters. Place over a bowl or pot. Dump in the yogurt. Refrigerate overnight (if you used coffee filters, please remember that they can be composted).

2. Cook the garlic with the oil in a skillet over medium-low heat until just starting to turn golden.

3. Stir together the drained yogurt, sauteed garlic, daylily petals, and salt to taste. Refrigerate overnight before serving.

Get the book: Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith (Heliotrope Books, July 2008)

Book reading/signing event in NYC Monday, July 21st

Not sure what this is about? Read Getting Ready for the 250-Mile Diet and The Rules

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