The New Year

“So that’s winter too!” he thought. “You can even like it!”     
 - Moominland Midwinter, by Tove Jansson

We could hear shots from where we stood on the ridge that ran through the mud flats. As the late afternoon dusk gathered in the damp yellow weeds and the wind drove another volley of raindrops through the tangled banks of wild roses,the bushes bare but for clusters of red and black hips that rattled and swayed, we could see the flock of ducks rise from the estuary on the shores of Skagit Bay. More shots.

The five of us convened on the path and weighed the pros and cons of continuing toward the rocky “haystacks” that rose from the Bay, or returning to the car and from thence to La Connor for a beverage and a snack. The rain drops spattered across my glasses refracted my already terrible low-light vision into a series of star-tipped bluish blurs. But I wasn’t necessarily ready to head in – the fresh air was delicious and I felt as though the sticky winter joints in my brain were loosening up a bit with the walk. And the shots were far off and not aimed toward our little group, probably, as we'd left our pet duck, Waddles, back at home. We continued along for another hundred yards and passed a low-lying field strewn with silvered logs, as though a giant hand had flung a handful of twigs from the water inland. To our right, we could just see the water of the Bay, to our left, the muddy fields of Skagit Valley stretched to the base of the Cascades.

The hunter approached along the isthmus, a mallard dangling from his left hand, his Labrador close by his side. The duck looked soft and terribly broken by the shot and long fall. Floppy. The dog was having trouble restraining herself from putting the duck’s head in her mouth. She was a young retriever.

In another era, one in which duck hunting was more for provisioning and less for semi-idle sportsmen, I’d like to think the dangling duck would have been roasted, served with rosehip compote, a stuffing of farro and roasted parsnips, and accompanied by a wine as clean and mineraly as a goblet filled with cold, wet stones.

Farro is an interesting grain. Also known as Emmer Wheat and sometimes mistaken for Spelt, Farro was cultivated by humans in the Near East, through North Africa and Europe until the heyday of the Roman Empire when durum and other bread-making wheats took the stage. McGee posits that Farro was probably the second grain to be cultivated, after Einkorn Wheat, the offspring of a chance mating between Goatgrass and Wild Wheat, which was the result of a blind date set up by Cattails. Farro is enjoying a renaissance right now, appearing on menus and in Farmers' Markets everywhere. The nuttiness of the grain is a great foil to roasted meats or fishes, and it takes to the addition of cranberries or tree nuts quite well.

I looked out at the muddy fields and continued musing while the others chatted with the hunter. He had been surprised to see us out there.

In a few months, the flat, wet fields will become vast squares of color as the tulips come up. As the weather warms even more, the Skagit Valley will yield tomatoes, peppers, greens, onions, potatoes – pretty much all the produce we’ll use in the restaurant this spring and summer could come from one of these farms. And then next fall, we’ll have squash and root vegetables, again, from the same farms. But right now, at the closing of the year, the fields are empty and bare but for puddles reflecting watery blue light.

The hunter walked back to the parking lot. We waited a moment to put a bit of distance between our little group and the man with the dog (and the gun) before heading back to our car. The sky darkened into the gloaming, the rain picked up. I was glad I'd worn wool.

As we walked, we talked about New Year’s Eve plans, what our Januarys will look like, what we wish for ourselves and our families for this next year. I thought about what I had planted in the past twelve months and what might, with some pruning and care, become a source of sustenance. The projects that need to be finished, and others that have yet to be begun.

I also thought about the work week: There isn't a busier corridor for a restaurant than the week connecting Christmas and New Year's -- a very Merry Isthmus! This is the week during which the differences between working in a kitchen and working in an office become more glaring. It's a flat-out run for much of the week, and the containers of prepped items vanish almost as quickly as I can make them. While there is no real danger -- except to my sanity, my hands, and my lower back -- the feeling that we are under attack never really goes away. (It's actually pretty fun.) But I am a fool to make plans for New Year's Eve, as wonderful as the evening sounds my Prep List will almost surely begin the peculiar, predictable stretch toward infinity as the night grinds along. Most likely I will be pulling 60 pounds of semi-frozen pig cheeks apart and dusting them with curing salts until 11:50. While my friends pour Champagne, I will crouch among the linen bags and dry goods, changing from my messy whites and sticky clogs into hose and a dress.

The walk drew to a close and we piled into the car and left the mud flats. The drive back to La Connor took us past farmhouses that were the very archetype of cozy: Warmly lit windows, a sense of community and preparedness for the long hunker ahead. I could almost smell the bread baking, the duck roasting. The farro over a slow simmer on a back burner, stirred occasionally with stock added as necessary.

As we drove into town, I realized that no matter how the actual New Year's night plays out, I am going into 2012 with a feeling of promise, as though the year ahead were a prepped field yet to be planted. I'm looking forward to the growth.

Rapini, Rapini

“…And is this the upshot of your experiment?” – Rappaccini’s Daughter, Nathaniel Hawthorn
Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time poring through books – cook books, gardening tomes, collections of fairy tales – trying to find a direct correlation between Rapunzel and rapini. We’ve started using the latter on a few of the spring dishes and part of my workaday routine is blanching and shocking the greens, a task I find impossible to complete without eating at least 30 of the raw, leafy stalks, and then another 10 of the post-blanch lot.
The flavor of rapini, aka broccoli rabe, isn’t the tame chlorophyll-heavy comfort-food flavor of broccoli. Rather, rapini has a bitterness to it, a hint of wild, craggy slopes where only lavender and stunted pines can compete with the greens, and the only mammals are feral goats. At least, that’s what it tastes like to me. I crave the imaginary cheese made from the imaginary milk of these particular goats, because the calcium-rich greenery also has a hint of sweetness, and a genuine robustness that would come through the cheese extremely well. Ah, the terroir of cheese. The imaginary bees pollinating these lonely, rock-strewn fields of rapini and lavender would produce a honey that would pair exceptionally well with the imaginary cheese.
As you may recall, Rapunzel’s mother spent her confinement in a room overlooking a beautiful garden of “rapunzeln”, which the gravid woman craved in huge quantities, and her husband, not wishing to develop a sty because he denied a pregnant woman her wish, crept over the wall in the dead of night and robbed their neighbor’s garden. Unfortunately, their neighbor was a witch and all kinds of trouble come from stealing a witch’s vegetables. But I think Rapunzel’s mother craved calcium and folic acid and that’s why she kept fainting and carrying on.
Anyway, there I was, on the sofa, coffee close at hand, going through the indices of 40 different books trying to find a strand that would tie the tale to the kale – from McGee I learned that rapini belongs to the sprawling Brassica family (Brassica rapa), which, in addition to kale and rabe, includes cabbage, collards, cauliflower, mustard, arugula, radishes, rutabagas, turnips and more. What a family reunion! Delicate Watercress chatting with plump little Brussels Sprout, Rutabaga wondering whether he was in the right place – so many leaves! – and there’s Horseradish, sitting alone in the corner. Not entirely unlike other family reunions I’ve been to, actually.
Had I not been taking a break from the Internet the search would have yielded results a bit faster. As it was, I did track down a book version of the fairy tale in which “rapunzeln” was also called “lamb’s lettuce.” Back to McGee – lamb’s lettuce is our friend mâche, also known as “corn salad.” Not misleading at all. Imagine asking a grocer for some corn salad. She would point you directly to the deli case.
“No, no, I mean lamb’s lettuce.”
Blank look.
“Ok, how about some mâche?”
A smile, a nod toward the stacks of plastic clamshells containing a living bunch of the fragile greens. But at $26/lb, the point is moot.
Today I decided to fire up the ol’ Dell and take a turn around the interrooms. No more dilly-dallying around with “books” and “libraries.”
Somewhat unsurprisingly, my search yielded mixed results. There is a plant called “rapunzeln” (Campanula rapunculus) that has edible roots and leaves, with a slight radishy flavor. Aha! So, while not a Brassica, Campanula rapunculus may be some far-flung relative, uninvited to the Brassica reunion. Perhaps a long-held grudge exists between the two families. The Campanula family is all about bell-shaped blue flowers, which I mention for two reasons: one is that, while we don’t eat a lot of blue food, and I'm not sure a pregnant woman would have craved rapunzeln, a garden filled with blue flowers must have been very beautiful to look down upon; and, two, upon following up the “lamb’s lettuce” lead, I discovered that corn salad nee mâche nee lamb’s lettuce is part of the Valerian family (Valerianella locusta), which is notable for its small BRIGHT BLUE FLOWERS. Aha!
So maybe the Brother’s Grimm took an even older cautionary tale which simply mentioned a garden filled with blue flowers and then they, being Northern Germans and therefore accustomed to seeing fields of Rapunzeln flowers nodding in the breezes, nibbled by sheep (whose milk would produce a cheese with slight almond notes, a bit of a grass flavor and a clean, slate-like finish), simply plugged in the name of the local blue flower. (Here in Seattle, our common Bluebell is also known as “Squill.” And I don’t care how pretty she is: no prince would ever stand at the base of a tower built by a witch and call up to the princess, “Squill, Squill, let down your hair.”)
I happen to have a copy of Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm here with me and the garden is described thusly:
…der voll der schönsten Blumen and Kräuter stand; er war aber von einer hohen Mauer umgeben, und niemand wagte hineinzugehen, weil er einer Zauberin gehörte, die große Macht hatte und von aller Welt gefürchtet ward.

They go on to talk about the schönsten Rapunzeln that was bepflanzen all over the place, but there doesn’t seem to be any mention of blue flowers. So where does this lamb’s lettuce business come from? A faulty online translation page that mistook Macht for mâche? That doesn’t make any sense. Mâche hails from France, where it grows close to the ground on the edges of fields browsed by dewy-eyed French cows (who would produce milk that would make a soft, slightly sweet cheese, hints of strawberry in the nose and finish).
There may be more digging to be done in the Grimm garden, given the fact that we’re talking about plants that were cultivated in the 17th Century and have since been swept up in the bewildering swirl of taxonomy, but for now I think the obvious answer is probably the correct one: Rapunzel was named for rapunzeln, and lamb’s lettuce is naught but a herring in sheep’s clothing.
All of which has absolutely nothing to do with rapini, which I am craving powerfully enough to sneak into work on a day off just so I can eat a few leafy stalks. Perhaps I’ll just go to the store instead. Should you find yourself with a bunch of rapini, treat it as you would broccoli, or kale, or watercress. Rapini would not appreciate being treated like a Rutabaga. I would quickly sauté it with olive oil, minced garlic (watch the heat of the oil – garlic can burn ever so quickly), and a handful of currants that had been soaking in either balsamic or sherry vinegar. Finish with a knob of butter, a good pinch of salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper. If it were me, I’d also put salt-roasted walnuts on the cooked greens, and maybe a sprinkle of feta cheese. Enjoy with friends, a hunk of crusty bread, wine and stories.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

“[Boxer’s] answer to every problem, every setback, was ‘I will work harder!’ ” – George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Years ago, I attended a function in a 30th floor apartment on the Upper East Side, one of those places that astonishes because it isn't unique in that Big Bad City, despite the tiny balcony off the corner of the living room -- the building's bowsprit, where you could stand and watch the snow swirl up the canyons of Third Avenue. My memory of the evening brushes past brown kitchen appliances, along an olive-shag carpeted hallway lined by sagging bookshelves: Was this a retirement party? An 80th birthday? Couldn't tell you without a hypnotist. But I do remember snacking on appetizers built around the Ritz cracker, and striking up a conversation with another partygoer; the Chardonnay must have gone to my head, because I usually run a bit shy. I can also remember feeling rather clever at the time, because I was living in NYC and working as a w-r-i-t-e-r, a species that shares the same astonishing ubiquity in that town as 30th floor apartments.

"So what are you working on?" she had asked, after I'd tipped my hand, revealed my brilliance, etc. "Well," said I, sipping Ernest and Julio's finest, "I'm working on a piece called, 'Gelatin: the Other White Meat.'" I beamed. Although work on said piece had progressed only through the arduous process of coming up with a catchy name, I felt ready for Letterman. And then, in one of those coincidences that simultaneously evoke two feelings -- being happily swaddled in Zeitgeist, and a claustrophobic, almost fatal kind of self-boredom -- she revealed that she was a writer, too, and her last project had been a Jello™ Cookbook.

Well. You can imagine.

She was helpful and encouraging, but I wasn't ready to do much more than continue in the same vein in which I'd started: reading ingredients lists and feeling a sense of delicious dread when I spotted gelatin. Boy, talk about ubiquitous: lozenges, gummi candies, sauces, marshmallows, low fat ice creams and yogurts....

But let's step a little farther back in time, back to the day my relationship with gelatin really bloomed: Middle of June, 1980. Maybe '79. Down the road, across the valley and up a winding road from our little mountain neighborhood tucked into the foothills west of Boulder, there was a cluster of "abandoned" barns -- the galvanized roofs were rusted, the pine boards were silver and splintery, but the barns were still used to shelter three thick-coated, semi-wild, geriatric horses and their hay, an admirable solution to an equine problem usually solved with a quick call to the glue factory. The barns were on an expanse of land that had belonged to Ernie Betasso until 1976 when he'd sold the land to Boulder County to be preserved as Open Space. A true cowboy, the last of the lot, Ernie'd continued making his daily rounds until he died. The Betasso Preserve became the backdrop for all sorts of childhood hijinx, and there are gullies over there that should have been, by rights, the final resting place for my clumsy young bones.

The Betasso Preserve was my destination on that long-ago summer day, and after I'd hung up the heavy white receiver and untangled myself from 13 feet of phone cord, I announced I was going to play with my friend Heather. Snacks were an important part of these excursions and I had my eye on a new treat, an act of undiluted brilliance, an indulgence in my ultimate fantasy: Instead of water, or Country time, or red 5-Alive, I'd bring peach Jello™ ...in its liquid form.

Oh, how I looked forward to cracking the seal on my lukewarm dissolved-protein-sugar-water beverage! How I longed for that first, slightly viscous sip! The only thing missing was a hand-crafted crayon and magic-marker label reading Tepid & Tasty, or Gee, Your Drink Smells Terrific.

Heather was not impressed. Which was fine. More for me! I wonder, though, would I remember that day with such clarity if Ernie himself hadn't discovered us in one of the barns, where we were determinedly pulling a hay-bale apart? Maybe beside the point, but I sure froze up when that old cowboy walked through the barn door. I don't know who among us was the most surprised, but to this day, the smell of peach Jello™ brings on a suffuse guilt and an urgent need to pee.

I have other reasons for avoiding gelatin. Hospital food flashbacks from an early childhood bout of dehydration, my father's jokes about fast-food milkshakes (clutch chest, look at beverage with horror, gasp: "Flicka!"), the Summer 2009 menu's house-made marshmallows for the s'mores -- nothing smells more like a barnyard than hot gelatin mixed with corn syrup at high speed until opaque.

But is gelatin empirically nasty? Can a substance used to create the fragile diamond-paned windows for gingerbread houses be that bad? How can something associated with such beautifully old-fashioned words like "hartshorn" (deer antlers) and "Isinglass" (the swim bladders of fish) smell like a pig-wallow?

The answers are roughly the same for the first two questions, namely, it really depends on how you look at post-slaughter rendering processes, what your personal tolerance for horror is like, and how you decorate for Christmas. Without such processes in place, there would be no pots of paste for people to eat during sieges, no sense in licking wallpaper while the Germans try to get in. Without Germans there would be no gingerbread houses. Without our history of boiling bones and skin to extract collagen, there would be no humor in jokes about eating shoes. None at all.

The third question requires a little light parsing, but, basically the answer lies in the molecular structure of gelatin. Okay. So, think about your favorite sweater. If it’s old enough, there is probably a dangling piece of yarn you really want to pull but you don’t because you know the sweater will unravel. Take a closer look at the yarn: it’s made up of several long strands of wool spun together; if you really wanted to, you could tease it apart into a woolly pile. Don’t. Instead, now think of collagen – a tightly woven, fibrous connective-tissue protein that provides strength and elasticity to bones, tendons, skin and other animal bits. That collagen is made up of long strands of gelatin (chains of amino acids) which form a sort of yarn twisted into a triple helix. These three strands knit themselves together to form collagen, and like most proteins, they can be “unraveled” by heat. Unlike other proteins, however, gelatin doesn't curdle or break as it heats and cools. Instead, the strands group themselves into a loose, “woolly” pile that is remarkably stable, translucent, wiggly-jiggly, and – an added bonus to the cook – these bonds will dissolve again at a temperature roughly approximate to the inside of your mouth, releasing liquid and flavor along with a difficult to duplicate “mouthfeel.” Both hartshorn and Isinglass are collagen-y and were used back in the day to create sweet and savory gels, but the reason the powdered gelatin we used to make homemade marshmallows smells so amazingly, awfully porcine is because today’s gelatin is made not from antlers or from swim bladders, but mostly from pig skin. Along with the skin and bones left over from cattle slaughter and the odd, unlucky horse. But mostly pig. So, from that one animal we happily harvest bacon, ham, pork chops, and cafeteria-style desserts. It's going to be hard to change that system.

Substances like agar agar, pectin, and carrageenan will behave sort of like gelatin, but are actually carbohydrates, not proteins, so, you know, they’ll act a little differently, too. A story for another time. Which, perhaps, begs the question, why a gelatin story at all? Why now? And I think about writing, and living in New York, and a childhood in the mountains, and the answer becomes clear: three strands suddenly gelled.

Not Nettlesarily

We were lucky and had a warm, sunny day about a week ago, warm enough to grill some meats and eat outside in the Crown Hill garden, a space transformed by the completion of the mother-in-law cottage built during the past year. I was, as always, grateful to the point of giddiness to be fed by my friends. Cooks love to be fed. We passed the potato salad as the sky darkened and dabbled with different blues, the indigos and Prussians and cobalts of the clear Pacific Northwest sky at twilight. There was a brief interruption in our conversation about the New Normal – babies have started arriving in my little circle and our Sunday Suppers now feature much less wine and much more coo – when one of the neighbors strode through the backyard and over to the table and asked whether it would be alright if he harvested some of the greens growing in and around the gravel filled pit that forms one corner of the yard, which is still a bit raw from the construction.

After a friendly chat he shoved his hands into some gloves as he walked to the back of the yard and then yanked out the greens and pushed them into an enormous bag, larger than a California King Pillowcase. I went back to my potato salad and watched one baby discover a dangling thing that bounces and chimes, watched another baby take a spoonful of chicken and rice, and calculated that if he stuffed the bag full he might achieve a cooked yield of about two quarts. Not even. Six cups. But while you need a lot of picked greens to feed a family, anyone who has ever planted kale or chard in a two-person garden knows the plants produce and produce and produce until you can barely imagine ever again eating another slice of chard and ricotta tart with a drizzle of fireweed honey, or having another helping of pancetta flecked kale with garlic and a splash of sharp cider vinegar.

In any case, he had his work cut out for him because the greens he was pulling weren’t the friendly kind. They were nettles.

With the insouciance of the armed and dangerous, Stinging Nettles cover hillsides and thrive along roadsides and near the hidden brooks that spring from the granite Cascades. Some intrepid campers have been known to gather and boil nettles in their chipped blue enamel pot, tucked into the coals of the camp fire, to be served with fresh caught trout fried in drippings left from the morning’s breakfast of Dutch oven biscuits and boarbelly. Or, even better, why not take some of those leftover biscuits and break them up into the belly fat, maybe with a foraged spring onion and half of a windfall wild apple, and stuff the split, cleaned fish. Roast, and finish with a tablespoon-full of nettle pistou. I forgot my gloves so I will watch you cook from over here.

Nettles spill across the pages of books, as well: Rabbits creep through nettles, looking for does in all the worst places; Swedish fiction is practically overgrown with their spiny stems and leaves, and, although it’s been a while, I seem to recall some sort of nettle encounter in a Thomas Hardy novel, maybe Jude falls in a patch on his way home. You wouldn’t name a child Nettles, unless the poor creature was an orphan left on the Fens, raised by foxes and a blind one-legged soldier. And even then you might go with “Heather” instead.

Another book, the peerless On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, by Harold McGee, has this to say about nettles:

Nettles (Urtica dioica) are a common Eurasian weed that has now spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere. They’re notorious for their stinging hairs, which have a brittle silicate tip and a gland that supplies a cocktail of irritant chemicals, including histamine, for injection when skin meets needle. The hairs can be disarmed by a quick blanch in boiling water, which releases and dilutes the chemicals.

Well, that sounds delicious. I read on:

Nettles are made into soup, stewed, and mixed with cheese to stuff pasta.

Sure, and yet, I can’t shake the feeling that nettles are only to be eaten either at or right after the end of the world, a delightful post-Apocalyptic dish of spiny weeds boiled in brackish water with a good amount of gravel and a nice turn of coarse-ground ash.

And then there is this entry in the cheerful Greens Cookbook, by Deborah Madison and Edward Espe Brown:

These prickly greens are usually volunteers in the garden that make themselves known with their sharp, surprising sting when you are trying to weed. They are a wonderfully strong green herb with great nutritional value. Boiled in water, the stinging properties disappear, and the broth is rich, smooth and an astounding shade of green. The taste is hearty and deep and does, in fact, give the impression it could sustain one through an otherwise foodless winter. Use nettles in moderation – 1 or 2 handfuls for 8 cups of water. Nettle broth itself, with the addition of a few potatoes and cream, makes a robust and tasty soup. Soups made from the broth of boiled nettles have been known to support the lives of at least two saints – the Irish saint Columba and the Tibetan, Milarepa.

Those two saints might be surprised to find themselves in the same sentence, brought together by nettles. I imagine they both had some other things in common as well. Sackcloth and soot spring to mind. And of course, nothing says a good time like “an otherwise foodless winter.”

But I am intrigued by that “astounding shade of green.” And I remember the amazing soup I had of nettles and pork at last year’s Cochon 555, and the stewed nettles I’ve enjoyed at the same garden table from where I watched the harvest. And, given how much I’ve enjoyed my own little ravioli on the menu right now – a mix of cheeses and basil with no added histamine, maybe for Friday, I'll put together a neat little pasta packet of goat cheese, currants, roasted garlic and nettles. Seems like a good start for the dioica curious. Nettles are everywhere, all over Seattle, in soups, pestos, and pastas. On roadsides and riverbanks, vacant lots and backyards. I think I’ll give myself a dare and put some nettles on the chalkboard for Friday night. I’ll wear gloves and take notes.