Leda’s Urban Homestead

Today I got to play in The Edible Garden demo kitchen at the New York Botanical Garden. It was tremendous fun. I did two cooking demonstrations/local foods talks/book signings. I think I recruited a few folks who had never before thought about why it matters where their food comes from.

Here were the parameters they gave me: 1. theme ingredient is peaches 2. you need to fill at least 45 minutes of stage time 3. you need to make your three recipes and enough of them to provide taste samples for the audience 4. we’d like you to cover all the reasons why local/sustainable is important, but 5. keep it light and entertaining.

Whew.

This was one of those times when I was really grateful for my first career (dance and theater). At least I don’t freak out when the sound technician hooks me up with a microphone and the audience starts wandering in.

Anyway, it did end up being great fun. I got to combine four of my favorite things: cooking, teaching, performing, and supporting a cause I passionately believe in.

The recipes I did were a basic peach salsa, a variation that incorporates grilled corn (in peak season right now along with those peaches), and a peach chutney. The recipes will be up on NYBG’s web site tomorrow (Mon. 8/16/10).

Hope your summer is going well, and that you’re making the most of summer’s abundance.

Fun stuff I’ve got coming up this week:

Food Preservation at NYBG Weds. 8/18/10

Wild Edible Plants and Mushrooms for Green Edge NYC 8/21/10

Hope to see you at one of those, and hope your summer harvests are proving bountiful.

Leda

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget

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

There is something magical about walking between rows of beets and cucumbers while looking across the East river at the Manhattan skyline. Eagle Street Rooftop Farm is one of my favorite places to visit, and it was a pleasure to spend the afternoon there teaching a workshop on edible weeds.

Urban farmer Annie Novak had her workers refrain from weeding for days in anticipation of my event. Even so, there weren’t very many weeds. That’s a problem I do not have in my garden, and I was able to bring samples of a dozen “volunteer” edible wild plants that are common in the city.

At the farm, we did find some amaranth, purslane, lamb’s quarters, and mugwort. I did a garlicky stir fry with the amaranth greens, and a salad with the purslane for everyone to sample.

The farm produces an impressive amount of food in just seven inches of soil. Along with their CSA, workshops, and providing produce to several restaurants, on Sundays they have a small market. The market is indoors where the temperature is cooler than under the blazing sun on the roof.

In addition to the rows of vegetables and herbs, there are also beehives maintained by Megan Paska, chickens, and rabbits.

All of this on a rooftop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn!

The farm is open to the public on Sundays, and there are many wonderful talks and workshops as part of their partnership with Growing Chefs. Definitely worth a visit if you are in NYC.

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget

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

I’m back in Brooklyn after a trip out to California to see family and speak on a local foods panel. While I was away, I gorged on locally grown avocados, citrus, almonds, and other stuff that can’t survive our Northeastern winters.

A couple of days after I arrived in San Francisco to stay with my dad, pianist Kelly Johnson,

I spoke on a panel with fellow local food authors Deborah Madison and Jessica Prentice, moderated by Temra Costa and hosted by the Commonwealth Club. What a wonderful group of feisty, eloquent, passionate ladies! I was honored to be among them.

After that, Dad and I drove up to Yreka where my mom, Penelope Lagios Coberly, her husband, Frank Coberly, and my grandma, Eugenia Kilgore  live. Yreka is about as far north as you can go and still be in California. The official reason for the visit was my grandma’s 98th birthday.

Yia-yia, a.k.a. Grandma Nea was born in SF, but she identifies as Greek. So we cooked Greek: hortopita (like spanakopita–spinach pie–except with whatever green you want to use. Horta means edible greens), eggplant dip, local olives, plus galaktobureko for dessert.

There are two designated lawnmowers who have recently joined my mom’s household, Bert and Ernie.

Frank, my mom’s husband, has a drum set. He invited Nea to have a go. First he got on the drums while she played keyboard.  Then my 98-year old grandmother rocked out on the drums.

After that it was back to SF, where Dad and I cooked for friends. I improvised a mushroom soup using some of the stash of dried wild mushrooms that I’d given him last fall. We also did a seafood salad, and a feta cheese-dried tomato dip. But the real star of the show was Dad’s peach custard pie.

On my last day out west I experimented with a peach salsa recipe that I plan to use for the cooking demos I’m doing for The Edible Garden at NYBG. We picked up the peaches at a farm stand on theway down from Yreka, but I had to run to the supermarket for a few ingredients. While online at the checkout, I saw a magazine called Urban Farm touting the benefits of sustainable city living. That made me grin. The times, they are a changing…

Back in Brooklyn, I dealt with garden devastation. Although my housesitter did an admirable job of watering my container plants, that didn’t compensate for the 3-digit heat wave and lack of rain while I was away. My first round of tomatoes are lost to blossom end rot (from uneven watering). I spent today pruning out brown, brown, brown–black cohosh blossoms that crisped before they ever opened, toasted ostrich ferns…well, I’m going to stop because the full catalog of loss would make me cry. Out on the street, there were so many brown leaves littering the sidewalk that it looked more like October than summer.

I lost most of my cucumber plants. I don’t need to grow cukes for salads, etc. because my CSA farmer Ted Blomgren of Windflower Farm gives me plenty. I grow them to make cornichons pickles because there’s no other way to get the tiny, pinkie finger-sized cucumbers I need for those.

As a consolation prize, I picked up some sour cherries at the farmers’ market today and am making pickled cherries.

But my raspberries, asparagus plants, and a few others were impervious to the heat wave. And some plants bounced back after I gave them a deep watering yesterday. All is not lost.

While I clean up the garden and pray for rain, I’m enjoying the memories of three generations of my family getting to spend time together.

If you have a chance next Weds. 14th, come to one of the two events I’m doing. I’ll be demonstrating (and handing out samples of) Dilly Beans and signing books at the Union Square Greenmarket from 11 a.m.-12 p.m. That evening, I’ll be doing a discussion/reading on how to eat local on a budget at Bluestockings bookstore from 7-8 p.m.

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget by Leda Meredith

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

People get passionate about food and plants. Some of my best friends are people I know through those shared passions.

Yesterday I got to meet Miriam for the first time…but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like a reunion with an old friend. Miriam and I met for the first time online via a wild edible plants group, and then a wild homemade wines group I started, over a decade ago. We’ve shared recipes, foraging tips, mailed each other packages of dried herbs and other gifts, and spoken on the phone. But this was the first time we’d met face-to-face.

Her greatest gift to me was how she really saw what I’d done with the garden and the kitchen (which is also my living room and dining room). I introduced her to the place plant by plant, and she knew what they were and what they were for, and that was a blessing. Nice to have someone recognize what I’ve done with my urban homestead.

While I was showing Miriam the place, I got to mention Ellen, whose botanical photographs grace my walls and who wrote the foreword for my first book. Miriam and Ellen are both on that homemade wine list I started, and so know of each other.

Even though we both live in NYC, Ellen and I have scheduled our next dinner date for next month because we’re both that busy. But Ellen is still, despite the long gaps between our meet ups, one of my best foraging buddies. There has to be someone I can text the excitement of a great foraging find to, and that would be Ellen.

While I’m tipping my hat to great homesteading buddies, let me also mention Kat and Meg.

Kat, like Miriam, was initially an online acquaintance. We’ve met in person twice now, once when I stayed at her place in France and again when she visited me in Switzerland last year. Like Miriam and Ellen, she’s wild edible and medicinal plant savvy and can talk about what’s for dinner while she’s cooking lunch (so can I, in case you were wondering).

Meg is a new friend, initially met via Twitter. She is an expert beekeeper, a backyard chicken raiser, and a terrific person all around. Today I started harvesting the red currants in my garden. I set aside one pint of my ripe, de-stemmed, frozen currants to trade with Meg for some of her honey in a previously arranged barter.

Cheers, fellow homesteaders and foragers! I lift this glass of elderflower champagne to you.

Leda

Follow Leda Meredith on Twitter or Facebook

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget

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

I know that according to the calendar summer hasn’t officially started yet, but for me it started when the first fresh fruits of the year showed up in the field, in the garden, and at the markets. The parade of gem-bright colors and juicy sweetness continues now through the first apples of fall in an ever-changing parade of ripeness.

black-cap raspberries

I indulged in the first strawberries to appear at the farmers’ market even though they were pricey. It was the first fresh fruit I’d seen since last year. I’ve had plenty of fruit in my diet since last fall, but it was the storage apples and pears on offer at the markets or the frozen fruit, jams, and otherwise preserved fruit on my shelves. So I had to have that first strawberry. Now, however, I’m holding out for the more affordable (and often tastier) strawberries I’m expecting in my CSA share next week.

It’s the wild fruits that are exciting me now. Juneberries and mulberries have been coming in for a few weeks, black-cap raspberries just started. Soon there will be wineberries and wild cherries, followed by blackberries, elderberries, beach plums…

One fruit, though, doesn’t seem to be doing too well. Mayapples are dropping before they’re ripe, and have for the past couple of years. Something is wrong there. NYBG pulled up the mayapples in their native plant collection because of a disease. Sad.

Meanwhile, tonight’s dessert is black-cap raspberries and juneberries on spicebush ice cream. I still need to cook dinner first, right?

If you’d like to dig into the parade of wild summer fruit, please join me for one of my upcoming wild edibles tours:

Edible Native Plants in Brooklyn  July 18

Stalking Wild Edibles July 20

Urban Foraging Aug. 21

And one other thing I’m excited about: Leda’s Urban Homestead made it onto a list of 50 Best Homesteading Blogs. Besides being tickled to be included on the list, I discovered some new-to-me great sites there.

Time to go cook dinner so that I can get to that wild fruit dessert…

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget by Leda Meredith

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

Today I went foraging and came home with elderflowers for “champagne” and basswood a.k.a. linden blossoms that Ellen will make into wine. I also collected mulberries, juneberries, and nettles.

I also have a fridge stocked with the current wealth of the farmers’ markets, including some green, or spring, garlic. I used that up on some tostadas I made with Hot Bread Kitchen’s tortillas made with locally grown corn and Cayuga Pure Organics local beans. Some of the nettles got cooked up and added along with lettuce, cheese, and hot sauce. Yum!

I made the hot sauce with the last of last year’s pickled hot peppers. Simplest pickle recipe in the world: seed and chop large hot peppers, or leave small ones whole and prick with the tip of a knife. Loosely pack into a glass jar. Cover with vinegar. Use in any recipe calling for jalapenos or other hot peppers. Since the hot pepper plants I overwintered indoors are already bearing fruit, I have no need of the preserved ones any more. I threw them into the blender along with their vinegar, and voila, hot sauce.

The elderflower “champagne” recipe is a variation on the one in Ellen’s excellent book Down & Dirty Gardening. The original calls for (non-local, where I live) sugar and lemons. I’ve worked out a variation using local honey and homemade vinegar (see recipe below).

I collected lots of the elderflower umbels, but was careful to leave plenty on the shrubs (no flower=no fruit later in the summer). Then I realized I had a problem: the batches of elderflower champagne I’ve made in the past required plastic bottles because the liquid gets really bubbly and can explode glass bottles.

I no longer drink anything that comes in a plastic bottle. Last year Ellen saved me some bottles from her recycling, but I didn’t want to wait to start this batch (yes, you can make it with dried elderflowers, but I like it better when made with fresh). I considered going through my building’s recycling.

But some of the recipes I looked at predate plastic bottles. There must be a way to do it. I’m going to try using some thick ceramic jugs with wire flip-down tops that I’ve saved over the years (from some very non-local Belgian beers). To hedge my bet, I did mooch one plastic bottle from my neighbor, and I plan to divide the batch.

I know it’s not officially summer yet, but harvesting wild fruit and making elderflower champagne makes me feel like it is.

P.S.–Ms. Ella Fitzgerald says hello:

Elderflower Champagne

Makes approximately 4 quarts

4-6 large elderberry flowerheads

6 pints cold filtered or non-chlorinated water

2 pints boiling filtered or non-chlorinated water

1 lb honey OR 1 1/2 lbs sugar

1/4 cup cider vinegar OR 2 large lemons (juice & rind) plus 2 tablespoons cider vinegar

1. Do not wash the flowers–it’s their natural yeast that will cause fermentation. Just shake off any insects and remove the thick stalks.

2. Place the honey in a very large bowl and cover with 2 pints of boiling water. Stir to liquefy.

3. Add 6 pints cold water. Stir in the vinegar and the flowers.

4. Cover and leave, for 48 hours, stirring occasionally.

5. Strain out the flowers (and lemon rind, if using). Pour into clean plastic bottles with screw tops (or, we hope, thick ceramic or beer bottles with flip tops), leaving at least an inch of headspace.

6. Leave at room temperature for a week, “burping” (opening briefly) the bottles occasionally. After that, move them to the refrigerator, but keep “burping” the bottles for another week. Store for an additional 1-4 weeks before serving cold. The earlier you drink it, the yeastier it will taste. Wait the full six weeks from bottling if you want it at its best. (Note: the honey version takes longer to ferment out than the sugar version. The final drink should be fizzy and sweet, but not cloyingly so).

Upcoming Foraging Classes in Brooklyn on June 12 & June 13!

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget by Leda Meredith

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

Recently a woman told me that she doesn’t eat a local, seasonal diet because she’s afraid she’d get bored. “I’m so used to being able to get anything anytime,” she said. She couldn’t be more mistaken. I’d be willing to wager a hefty bet that I get excited about what’s on my plate more often than she does.

Today I went foraging. I collected red clover blossoms (Trifolium pratense), which I’ll dry and use to make wonderfully spongy, slightly sweet red clover bread. Red clover is in peak bloom right now, and that will only last another couple of weeks. That’s okay, the edible flower season is far from over. Today I spotted basswood (Tilia americana) about a week away from its bloom season. I’ll come back in a week and collect those honey-scented clusters for Ellen to make into one of my favorite wines.

I also collected burdock “cardoons” (the immature flower stalks of Arctium lappa) today, which I’ll marinate for an Italian-style antipasto, and pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) shoots that I’m going to use in a quiche. Both plants will soon be out of season, so I’m making the most of them now. That’s okay, because when they’re gone it will be time for milkweed florets, daylilies, and mulberries.

After my foraging jaunt I went to the farmers’ market. I bought strawberries and sugar snap peas. Neither was in season yet when I left for a working trip three weeks ago. I love both, and hadn’t tasted either since last year. Heaven. Of course, those will be going out of season by the end of next month, but that’s okay because then it will be time for cherries, new potatoes, the first summer vegetables…you get the idea.

Sometimes one food stays in season for so long, or there is so much of it, that it does take some culinary experimentation to keep it interesting (note: not because I can’t have it, as that woman supposed, but because I have too much of it!). Last year my CSA farmer inundated us with cucumbers. When it became clear that I wouldn’t be able to keep up by eating them fresh, I got creative with pickle ideas. The maple bread-’n'-butter pickles I came up with became one of my all-time favorites.

I like having choices and abundance as much as the next person. But for me those aren’t about anything anytime. They are about the right thing at the right time.

copyright

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget by Leda Meredith

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

Today I got lost in the woods and also baked a gorgeous loaf of Swiss Sunday bread. While I was trying to find my way home, I harvested wild red clover, nettles, and colt’s foot.

I’m here teaching and directing a dance show. I’m staying with my bosses, Rut and Roland. Today was a day off. They went to visit family, and I thought I might take a hike in the afternoon. Roland left me with detailed instructions for what he said would be a pleasant half hour walk: “Left, then across the little bridge over the stream, pass a wood pile on your left, then another one on your right, through the gate to the horse field, stay right and you’ll come out right by the house.”

Before I left, I baked a loaf of Swiss Sunday Bread (recipe below). I originally learned the recipe from their ex-daughter-in-law here in Switzerland, but I’ve tweaked it a little. I waited until the bread was out of the oven and R & R had taken off before heading out for my hike.

I managed to get utterly lost–or would have, if this wasn’t Switzerland.

Switzerland is walker/hiker friendly. There are yellow signs everywhere pointing hikers in various directions, and no one looks twice if you emerge from the woods onto a highway. So although after an hour it was clear I’d veered from Roland’s directions, I wasn’t really worried about getting seriously lost. Of course, some of the signs are vague.

I followed the wanderweg signs across fields and across woods

until I saw “my” town.

R & R hadn’t gotten back yet.

My bread had turned out beautifully.

“How was your walk?” Roland asked when they returned.

“Fine, gorgeous,” I replied, which was actually true.

Swiss Sunday Bread

1 kilo bread flour

1 tablespoon salt

1 tablespoon honey

100 grams butter

500 ml. milk

1 packet dry or 1 cube moist yeast

2 tablespoons warm water

cornmeal or polenta

1. Whisk together the flour and salt.

2. Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the milk and warm until just above skin temperature. Stir in the honey.

3. Dissolve the yeast in the water. Add to the milk mixture.

4. Make a well in the flour and add the liquid. Stir until combined. Knead 150 times. Place in a greased bowl, cover with a damp kitchen towel and let rise until doubled in size.

5. Press down. Let rest 15 minutes.

6. Cut dough in half. Roll or squeeze each half into a rope. Overlap the two ropes and braid them together. Pinch the ends together and tuck them under (you can skip this and just make one big or two smaller round loaves). Cover with the damp towel and let rise another 45 minutes. Preheat the oven to 350 F or 176 C.

7. Bake until the top is golden brown and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. Let cool 15 min. before eating (don’t bother slicing–best to tear into this one).

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget by Leda Meredith

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

I just did an interview for the radio show Let’s Eat In, hosted by Cathy Erway I shared the interview with Wildman Steve Brill and Ava Chin from the New York Times. It was tremendous fun trading foraging stories and tips with Steve and Ava, and hopefully the interview will encourage even more people to get out there and learn some foraging skills. You can listen to the show online here. Enjoy! Leda

The past couple of weeks have been busy on the teaching front for me. I taught wild edibles classes for Green Edge and for Brooklyn Botanic Garden, as well as speaking on local foods for several groups. It is awesome to see how much interest there is–much more than even a year ago. But I also have a roll-up-my-sleeves-and-get-to-work response to the lack of knowledge I’m encountering.

I’m meeting people who’ve read their Kingsolver and their Pollan, get the environmental reasons for eating local, but still aren’t quite sure how to make local foods central to their meals.

Some of them just aren’t used to cooking, and there’s not much point to bringing home local Yukon gold potatoes from the farmers’ market and then calling for pizza delivery because you’re intimidated by the idea of actually doing something with the potatoes.

Others are daunted by the seemingly higher costs of local, and especially organic, food (shameless book plug: if this is you, you really need to read The Cost Factor Chapter in my new book, The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget).

With the foraging, I’m surprised by the recent surge of interest in wild foods. Surprised and happy. I’m a lifelong forager, and can vouch for how safe, fun, and delicious the ingredients are. I also think it’s important for people to have at least minimal wild edible plants knowledge filed away in their heads somewhere. Why? Well, take what people in the U.K. did during rationing in WWII. Even city people took to the fields and the hedgerows to harvest wild edibles. They may not have been happy about it, but at least they knew how to do it. That knowledge is close to being lost, and so I’m glad to see a resurgence of interest in it.

My personal take on “food security” is my garden, my knowledge of wild edibles, the food preservation I do (yeah, I’ve got plenty to eat in winter), and my personal relationship with several of the farmers who grow and raise much of my food. Hopefully, it never comes down to an emergency situation, but if it did, you’d want to be at my house because I’d be eating really well.