Stop by the information booth at the Olney Farmers and Artists Market and stock up on some Low Country cuisine! Continuing the theme of supplying specialties from the South, you can now buy sacks of Shrimp and Grits mix, which contain all the ingredients except the seafood to cook up a dish evoking the Gullah cuisine of Charleston, South Carolina. There are also sweet and hot pickles from Texas (excellent), and some hot sauce which you won’t catch me anywhere near an open bottle of; but several folks with asbestos palates tell me is terrific.
Why, you may ask, is a Maryland market carrying these traditional products from places like Charleston, South Carolina? Blame it on Britt, Janet Terry’s daughter. She went to college in that city of cobblestone streets, horse-drawn carriages and pastel antebellum houses, not to mention a cuisine influenced by both French settlers and the Gullah Geechee culture of the barrier islands. Ever since, Janet has evoked memories of her visits by finding delicious things to share. (You may wonder why the Market has stopped carrying the deep-fried, eat-‘em-shell-and-all peanuts which were so popular for many years? Well, there’s a peanut shortage at the source. Stay tuned to the Market newsletter for latest developments on the goober front.)
If you want to know more about Gullah Geechee cuisine and how it influenced American cooking, there is a series streaming now on Netflix called “High on the Hog.” One episode features the “rice belt” area of the Low Country, and the cooks and restaurants serving the region’s traditional dishes.
The Shrimp and Grits sack, produced by Gullah Gourmet, contains packages of grits and sauce base. Adding water to each (separately) and cooking for the specified time yields a pot of cornmeal mush and some very tasty sauce. A pound of shrimp, sauteed in butter as the package instructions recommend, completes the dish. It’s rich, filling and delicious, and serves four. For fourteen dollars, it’s an affordable indulgence. Include a salad for a complete meal.
The café tables were artfully decorated with pitchers of flowers, arranged by Madgie of M&M Plants. The booths were full of the best local art anywhere. The lawn in front of the Thrift Shop was edged with booths full of good things to eat and drink. The weather- well, the rain held off, mostly.
View of Art Show
Another View
And Yet Another, Showing the Tables and Flowers
But our spirits could not be dampened, because it was Opening Day for the summer season. The Market was full of mothers and those who love them. All the usual vendors were there. Our favorite musician, Pat O’Neill, filled the air with roots music. There was even a surprise appearance by Sandra Dean.
Pat O’Neill Band with Sandra Dean
And, as a special treat, there was a juried art show! World-famous local artist Greg Mort awarded the three prizes to the artists voted best by our patrons. At-Large Montgomery Councilmember Evan Glass followed up with handsomely-framed proclamations. The Market management presented the winners with bags of Market goodies.
And the winners were:
1st Place – Danielle Reznick, age 14 (!): Cards and Crafts
2nd Place – Ahmad Azimi: Art from found objects
3rd Place – Suzanna Moreau: Baxter Road Designs
L to Right: Master of Ceremonies Doug Terry, World-Famous Artist Greg Mort, 1st Place Winner Danielle Reznick, 2nd Place Winner Ahmad Azimi, 3rd Place Winner Suzanna Moreau, OFAM President Janet Terry, Councilmember Evan Glass
And the Winners with Their Proclamations
Danielle does quilling, art built from coiled colored paper, and sells kid-friendly kits of beads to decorate pictures and picture frames. Ahmod makes art from found objects, ranging from animal skulls to plastic trash. Suzanna is the most conventional artist of the three – she specializes in sea life and chickens.
It was a great start to the full Market season. Here’s looking forward to many more wonderful Sundays. See you there!
Note: This is an updated version of a previous article, just so the Olney Farmers Market newsletter can link to it for Opening Day. That’s this Sunday. See you there!
Turn off New Hampshire Avenue, sneak behind the strip shopping center, beyond the townhouses, to Lethbridge Court, the cul-de-sac named for the erstwhile 300-acre hay, beef and dairy farm that used to be there. Find the driveway that leads to the old barn still standing (newly restored by Mennonite craftsman), and you will find 10 acres farmed by Tom Farquhar and rows of dryland rice being raised by Nazirahk Amen of Purple Mountain Organics. (The rice is available at the Olney Farmers Market from Somerset Produce.)
Tom was a music major in college, and went on to become headmaster of several private schools in this country and abroad, including Sidwell Friends School. Locals will recognize the name Farquhar as one of the old original families of Sandy Spring. The oldest public middle school in the county is named after William Farquhar.
High Corn
Tom took over Lethbridge Farm in 2018, and converted it from a conventional farm to an organic one. He farms beans, tomatoes, corn, squash, and other crops. Last year he raised a stand of Golden Cross Bantam, an heirloom variety of corn, by request of the members of the Sandy Spring Friends. They wanted it to make corn pudding, a specialty from the 18th Century.
Tom is proud of his prize collection from the Montgomery County Fair. His vegetables took 5 Firsts, 2 Seconds, and one Fifth Place. Who says organic vegetables aren’t pretty?
In the old barn, there is documentation that dates it to at least 1810. The landowner is using it to display his collection of old tools and other artifacts he finds locally. History is being maintained, and farming is alive and well in Ashton.
Restored Old Barn
Say hello to Tom at the Olney Farmers and Artists Market this Sunday!
Here’s an expeditious convergence: three dark brown delectable delicacies, each with a spin of strangeness.
Exploding Coal: Do You Dare?
This chocolatier specializes in off-beat flavors like Churros and Carrot Cake chocolate bars, so it came as no surprise to find this chuao Exploding Coal bar marked down in Harris Teeter. It was on clearance after the winter holidays, as chuao only produces it as a seasonal specialty. (Coal in your stocking, right?) Dark chocolate with pop-rocks mix-ins: what could go wrong?
Stick It In Your Stocking and Lighten Up!
And it did in fact feel like fireworks going off in your mouth. My daughter, who grew up biting down on pop-rocks, loved it. Her fuddy-duddy mother thought that once a year was just about right. Great dark chocolate, by the way.
Do They Know It’s Crapulous?
I get a lot of email from the Brownie Points people. They are trying to corner the sizzle end of the “sell the sizzle, not the steak” paradigm. They will supply you (or more to the point, your giftee), by mail, with a selection of specialty brownies for every holiday and gift-giving occasion. Their latest is a line of “browniemojis” which, yes, feature the most popular internet emoji memes in the form of decorated brownies.
Sad face, smiley-face, LMAOF-face: all fine and good, until you spot the one that looks just like the Smiling Poop emoji.
Now, I don’t know how your mother (or other significant other) would feel if she opened the box and found that her beloved relation or friend had seen fit to gift her with a Smiling Poop brownie emoji. I just hope she has a good sense of humor. Or you have a good explanation.
And More Unboxing Fun
I just received a box from the Renewal Mill folks with two sacks of intriguing content: a brownie mix made with okara flour; and the pure okara flour to make of it what you will. Okara is made with the heretofore discarded byproduct of soybean processing, and is a shining example of reducing food waste by turning a bug into a feature. Though one hopes there are no bugs to be found in the flour.
Brownies In My Future
This requires an entire article unto itself, and I will be reporting soon both on the Renewal Mill backstory and the results of my experience with the (especially!) brownie mix and okara flour. Stay tuned!
Quick! What’s the first thing that springs to mind if I ask you what Japan and the Washington, DC area have in common? (Hint: it’s early Spring here.) Why, cherry trees in blossom, you’d answer, and you’d be right! So it’s especially appropriate to read and appreciate a book devoted to the seasonal foraged foods of Japan, so many of which are just as ephemeral as the fragile cherry blossoms now gracing both our landscapes.
But these foods (sansai is the term used in Japan) are not only short-lived in terms of seasonality, but the awareness and knowledge of their identification and preparation is slipping away, becoming lost in the rush of industrialization and globalization of the modern world. In the West, we see the loss of tradition and ancient materials all around us, but who thinks of it happening in the land of geishas, temples, and Living National Treasures?
This is an elegiac book, as well as a celebration. Each chapter is devoted to one aspect of wild food, and each notes how this food was revered or sustained people through hard times in the past, but is now only eaten by a fraction of the folks it once supported. Ms. Bird, who has lived and worked in Japan and speaks Japanese, sought out practitioners of the foraging art all over the country and offshore to boot – she even talked to women harvesting seaweed by diving deep without breathing gear.
The chapters cover early spring greens, horse chestnut trees, ferns, bamboo, and the aforementioned seaweed harvesting. Her description of the ancient horse chestnuts, formerly found everywhere and reliable suppliers of famine food for thousands, being sold and cut down for furniture broke my heart – perhaps because it echoed our own native chestnuts, once rulers of the great forests of the Eastern Seaboard, which vanished years ago. Now I have an Asian chestnut tree in my back yard. It gives me nuts every year, but I would gladly trade it for an American one.
As Ms. Bird notes, the Japanese horse chestnut is related to the European horse chestnut and our American buckeye, but not to the Asian or American true chestnuts. She guarantees that no one who tries to eat an unprocessed horse chestnut will mistake it for the other kind! And speaking of processing, it takes an astonishing amount of time and labor to render horse chestnuts edible, so much that I wonder how adventurous or desperate the pioneers of this process must have been. That said, they keep in storage for a decade or more.
The culture of seaweed harvesting, still extant but much reduced from the past, has fascinated poets since ancient times; possibly because until recently, women dived not only without breathing gear but also without clothes. Japan’s seaweed has terroir; wakame from the Naruto coast is said to be superior to any other because of the fast-moving currents in the strait. But even for seaweed, the experience is not what it used to be. The varieties consumed in the country have been reduced as commercial farming simplifies both ecology and diets.
The narrative part of Eating Wild Japan concludes with a chapter on the native Ainu people of Hokkaido, perhaps the segment of population most connected to their traditional ways of eating. Their religion and culture is wholly concerned with conserving the sources of their foraged food, as they consider these things so interrelated as to be inseparable. There is a revival of interest in this way of life now, but it comes with the risk of exploitation of the material aspects without consideration of the Ainu’s ancestral spiritual connection.
The book concludes with a guide to plants and a section of recipes, all traditional Japanese preparations incorporating sansai. It should not be difficult for those of us outside of Japan to substitute our own local foraged plants for those specified. And, if we do so with a little more reverence and thoughtfulness for what is still available to us than before, we can thank Winifred Bird and her thoughtful insights.
Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes, by Winifred Bird, illustrated by Paul Poynter, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA, 2021. https://www.stonebridge.com/
Well, it’s not so rare as its namesake, but the once-a-year convergence that is happening this month is still a gastronomic treat.
Pi(e) Day, which is becoming more popular every year, is March 14. (3.14 = pi, the relation of a circle’s diameter to its circumference.) In celebration of the existence of this mathematical constant, we indulge in the eating of (round) pie. Three days later, St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated by everyone with any claim to a relation (or not) to Ireland. The best way to do this, in my humble opinion, is by imbibing Guinness while eating something delicious and Irish for dinner, and finishing with the last slice of the pie that was first broached on the 14th.
Apple Pi on the Plate
And may I take the opportunity to show off the perfect plate for the occasion? A pie plate with a “formula” for consumption, which of course includes pi. The reverse spells it out for the innumerates among us.
Self-Explanatory
Harris Teeter provided a perfect example of the Convergence last week, when it celebrated both the Green and the Pi(e) occasions (combined, begorrah, by key lime pie, I kid you not), and by displays which kind of shmooshed into each other.
Sign, Shmooshed Guinness Chips, Pie
Wait! Floating Guinness?? Cognotive Dissonance!
I considered the key lime for a hot minute, but then I bought the apple pie. I have standards.
My last post mentioned the joys of unboxing, and so it was with a shipment of Guinness sent to me by the nice folks at Taylor Strategy, on behalf of Guinness, ahead of St. Pat’s Day.
Box Full’O Guinness Goodness
They included two lovely Guinness glasses, a four-pack of draught stout, and a card describing their initiative to bake bread at the Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore, distributed through the Maryland Food Bank. That’s a terrific idea, and I only wish they had included a loaf. It would have gone down a treat with the Guinness Potato Cheese Soup I made using one of those cans.
Ingredients: Cheese, Stock, Guinness
And Did I Mention Guinness?
The soup was just a classic mix of onions and garlic sauteed in butter, with sliced potatoes added along with Guinness and stock, then cooked until the potatoes were tender, pureed (easy with a stick blender), then cheddar cheese added and stirred until melted in. I had a package of Buffalo Wing flavored cheese (no wings in it, just the seasoning!) so this batch needed no further spice.
Simmer Till Tender
Puree
The only drawback was that using a cup of Guinness did not leave enough to pour and enjoy with the meal. Good thing there were three more cans!
How I miss food events! The lunches, the museum openings, the Fancy Food Show! Miles of smiles, isles of samples!
Here’s a substitute thrill that, like so much else in this plague year, will have to serve; a capsule sample of what’s lost, and, one hopes, what’s to come again. I’ve never watched an unboxing video, but I experience a frisson when I get a box of product sent by a company also missing the old days of face-to-face (table-to-mouth!) interactions. Recently, Yo Mama’s sent along two pasta sauces and two dressings from their product line.
Partially Unpacked, Carefully Wrapped
Ready For My Close-Up!
How do their products stand out from all the other sauces on the market? Well, they claim to contain “no artificial anything,” and “no gums, no fillers, no preservatives,” and the sauces boast “no added sugar.” The lists of contents on their labels bear this out. I could pronounce every last one of them.
And how do they taste? Very nice. Fresh. The low carb and sugar content make them good choices for folks looking for those characteristics. I cooked a batch of meatballs in the Basil sauce and used the Marinara over plain pasta, topped with cheese. Both meals were greatly enhanced by the sauces.
Basil Sauce and Ricotta Meatballs
On to the two dressings. The Honey Balsamic is concentrated, tangy, sweet but not too sweet, and overall a real winner. The Yo Mama folks suggest using it as a marinade as well as salad dressing, so I duly anointed some salmon fillets and sweet potatoes before broiling them.
Ready to Broil
Salmon and Sweets – Sweet!
Delicious! Next, I tried it on broiled Romanesco cauliflower and shrimp.
Romanesco and Shrimp
Another winner! In fact, I started being parsimonious with the remaining contents of the bottle, lest it disappear too soon. I can report that the Balsamic blends beautifully with both yogurt and coconut milk to produce a dipping sauce and salad dressing I looked forward to consuming for several meals.
Lastly, I cracked the bottle of Asian Sesame dressing and marinade. It is almost as good as the Balsamic, mixes just as well with the two creamy stretchers, and goes down a treat with avocado toast
Don’t Hate Me, It’s Delicious!
and with an individual goat cheese tart from the Olney Farmers Market
Open (Yo Mouth), Sesame!
as well as many other things! It is, in fact, a great way to add zing to any meal that might need it.
In short, the dressings are winners no matter what your diet concerns (as long as you notice the servings are measured in tablespoons); the sauces are perfectly pleasant and a benefit to those who are looking for healthy, “keto” and “paleo” certified foods.
Yo Mama’s Foods website has a map showing their distributors, and they will gladly fulfill mail orders.
The question of the hour is: where has all the bucatini gone? The pandemic shelves are bare of toilet paper, bleach, and …bucatini?? Apparently so. This article, “What the Hole Is Going On? The very real, totally bizarre bucatini shortage of 2020,” by Rachel Handler in Grub Street delves into the situation in great, and highly amusing, detail.
Now, I admit I was totally unaware of this problem, not having had occasion to buy pasta in a supermarket for a few months. I have several boxes of my preferred dried shapes in my pantry (bucatini not among them), and when I have the urge for fresh pasta, I head out to the Olney Farmers Market to patronize our new fresh pasta and cheese vendor.
At the Open Hand booth, John Wood offers a changing variety of shaped and stuffed pastas, all made by hand, and fresh cheeses such as mozzarella, ricotta, and burrata. A former restaurant chef, he is now exploring new avenues of income due to the pandemic. This past Sunday, sure enough, he had bucatini on offer.
Chef John Wood with an Open HandBucatini, Upper Left
He had seen the article. I asked him if it’s really harder to make bucatini than other extruded shapes. He gave me a resounding “No!” You don’t need to go to extra trouble to form the hole, he said. The shape of the die and the pressure setting have to be right, and it’s just like making other long shapes. That excuse is bogus!
I am willing to believe, though, that the manufacturers have cut back on making their less popular shapes in order to get enough product on the shelves. Home cooking has apparently encouraged an increased consumption of pasta, and shortages must be averted by ensuring enough production of the sorts of pasta that the hoi polloi will be satisfied with. This does not include the rather more rarified shapes, such as bucatini.
Another theory explored in the Grub Street article postulated that people are using them to replace banned plastic straws in drinks. This seems pretty far-out to me; the pasta would get soggy and gross before your drink was gone, and as a rep from the National Pasta Association pointed out, it might be unsafe to consume raw pasta. I got the distinct impression this theory was presented tube-in-cheek.
Then there was a rabbit-hole involving the FDA, nutrition standards regulations, a complaint against one pasta manufacturer, ramen noodles, and FOIA requests. Even with a background in standardization work, I have to admit that my eyes started glazing over as I read.
But that is not the point of bucatini. The point of bucatini is the eating of it. I cooked up some of John’s product and applied a nice sweet-pepper tomato sauce and grated, aged Gouda cheese. Rachel Handler claims that it’s the most sexy of pastas and even “self-aware,” as its bouncy texture gives it an ability to interact with the eater. I wouldn’t go that far, and admittedly, Ms. Handler was referencing the dried version, not the fresh; but John’s had a very satisfactory chew and ability to deliver sauce without being overwhelmed (due to the hole). It’s even (dare I admit?) slurpable.
Ready to Cook
Ready to Eat
So I hope the bucatini shortage will soon be resolved for those without access to an excellent, local farmers market (yes, even in the dead of winter). Meanwhile, buon appetito!
It’s been awhile since I posted a collection of odd things, not because I haven’t noticed any, but other stuff had higher priorities. Lots of occasions have been cancelled or reformatted lately, and I have been recovering slowly from a traumatic event in my personal life. So, a combination of horrendous public and private circumstances have conspired to slow the content generation of Catillation. I have missed writing, but I will try to be better soon. I have a backlog I’d like to reduce.
These things popped up within days of each other, and with suspicious proximity, as well. So here they are:
The Perversion of a Perfectly Legitimate Citrus Fruit
Here’s a fine display of Buddha’s Hand Citron in the Olney Harris Teeter. I sometimes yield to temptation and indulge in one of these seasonal oddities, even though they are relatively expensive. My last experiment with one resulted in a small amount of mediocre candied peel and a kitchen that needed more cleaning than I had expended in the previous month. It might have been more successful if I hadn’t waited so long it use it, after I had spent a week or so admiring it on my table! I mean, they are truly weird, no getting around it.
Perfectly Ordinary Buddha’s Hands
As I contemplated buying another one, I turned over the tag attached to one. AIEEE!! I had been handling, not a fruit, but GOBLIN FINGERS!!!
Oh, My! Goblin Fingers!
Now if this was a tie-in to Hallowe’en, it was a little late – and I can hardly see these replacing pumpkins as the Official Hallowe’en Vegetation. An example of egregious over-marketing, IMHO.
The Great Pumpkin Mystery of Sandy Spring
And speaking of pumpkins, these appeared, out of nowhere, in front of Sherwood High School and disappeared in the same manner the next day. No context. No clues. No sign: “Please look after these gourds.”
The Mysterious Appearing and Disappearing Pumpkins of Sherwood High
If anyone has any information about this situation, please leave a comment!
Victims of the War on Christmas
The last odd thing has actually been proliferating for some time, and creates more fields of carnage each year. Poor deflated corpses lie strewn across the lawns of the suburbs during the hours of daylight, only to spring up, revived, at dusk. I attribute this phenomenon to the ever-expanding Christmas season colliding with Hallowe’en and creating a race of vampire Santas and snowmen. They wither in daylight and are revitalized by the light of the moon.
Carnage Claus
Or are the homeowners just trying to economize on running the air compressors?
In the middle of August in the middle of the week, I ran out of field-grown tomatoes. Not wanting to wait until the farmers market on Sunday, I went over to Sandy Spring Gardens, where Tom Farquhar raises organic vegetables on a farm a 15-minute walk from my house.
Tom was out in the field, just finishing up with a harrow, and had a problem with his corn crop. “I have a row infested with corn smut – huitlacoche,” he told me. He was unhappy; I was delighted. Cooking fresh huitlacoche has long been on my bucket list, but it’s scarcer in my neighborhood than Aztec pyramids. Until now.
Tom and Strange Fruit
Closeup on the Scary-Looking Stuff
Tom gave me some. I have to admit it looked a little daunting. Had he tried it? He had, but did not consider the dish a success. He knew it was considered a delicacy in Mexico, but allowed that it might be an acquired taste.
Huitlacoche Picked Off Cob
It looks scary – a fungus that distorts the corn kernels into big grey blobs – but I had been assured it is delicious. And it is, when properly cooked. I first relied on Mr. Google for a recipe, and found one for a sauce with onions, garlic and chilies, cooked for 20 minutes and mashed “like potatoes.” It resulted in an unappetizing-looking black mass and tasted about the same as it looked.
Ick.
I thought it would be better if diluted, so I mixed in some of the uninfected corn kernels and served it with pasta.
Second Try
Still unsatisfactory.
I resorted to the good old-fashioned research method: searching through my cookbook collection. I know I have at least one Diana Kennedy book somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. (This is where I have to admit that my house is far less organized than it might be.) But of course I have others, which I joyfully located, and found a clue in Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger’s Mesa Mexicana. They incorporated huitlacoche into a quesadilla recipe, and guess what? The huitlacoche was cooked for a total of two minutes and thirty seconds.
That was the magic! Just barely cooking (or even just warming up) the stuff was all it needed. I added it, just before serving, to a batch of NYT Cooking’s Spicy Corn and Coconut Soup, made using the unaffected corn kernels and broth simmered with the cobs.
Success!
It was excellent! It imparted a slightly sweet, ethereally mushroom-y component to the soup. My daughter, a less adventurous eater than myself, agreed. (She also averred that she only decided to try the huitlacoche after I assured her that I had been eating it for several days, “and you’re not dead.” Thanks for that vote of confidence, kid!)
I now have several pouches of huitlacoche in my freezer. I look forward to adding it to a few more meals. I might even make those quesadillas from Mesa Mexicana.
