Last Sunday, I started my first set of seeds for this year’s garden: tomatoes, tomatillos, and peppers. We put them in dirt, kept them nice and warm and wet, and waited.

Nothing happened!  For days!  Nevermind that nothing was supposed to happen for days.  Those seeds are certainly busy under the dirt, I told myself.  Just because I can’t see them doesn’t mean that they aren’t busy germinating.  But I fretted anyway, because there were no cues to tell me if I was doing it right.

I wanted to start from seeds, because while it’s more work, there are lots of benefits to it.  You can choose from many, many more varieties, which is especially important for tomatoes, and for unusual growing conditions.  You can avoid the diseases and bugs that sometimes come along with nursery plants. You also get the satisfaction of watching the whole process from start to finish – assuming they start at all.

The problem is that deep down inside, I don’t really believe that seed starting works.  How can it?  The tomato seeds we planted are tiny, so tiny they almost slipped through my fingers as I poured them from the packet.  They look like tiny pebbles, or grains of sand.  They bear no resemblance to a tomato.  Rationally, it doesn’t seem possible that such a tiny thing could, with a little water and dirt, grow into a 5-ft tomato plant that will give you pounds upon pounds of fruit.  If you met an extraterrestrial (or, sadly, some humans) who knew nothing about gardening, and showed them the seed and the full-grown plant, and told them that the seed would turn into the plant, they’d tell you that you were mad.  Right?

A lot of gardening books talk about how great it is to garden with kids, so they can witness the “wonder of creation.”  They always seem to put it in quotes, as if we adults all know it’s pretty ordinary stuff.  I disagree.  It’s pretty damn amazing, no matter who you are.

So I’ve got my seeds, and I’ve been caring for them for almost a week.  I got the whole setup: they’re in a warm closet, sitting in egg cartons on a tray over a heat mat.  (I’m not sure if I can recommend the egg carton method – it seems to dry out the soil pretty quickly.)  I’ve got a mister full of water, and another for fertilizer once the seedlings emerge.  I’ve got a big shelf with a grow light in the basement, ready to go.

And there’s still lots of waiting.

But this morning, when I went to water them, I got my first surprise: two tiny white tendrils creeping up from one of the compartments.  Two just-born tomatillo plants!

Magic.

So maybe this will work, after all.

It is the perfect time to make plans for eating more sustainably over the next 9 months or so when good local food is easy to come by. I’ve got my resolution – more like a master plan – for this year already.

In the past, I’ve always tried to go to the farmer’s market every week, and that’s where we get most of our produce and eggs during the local growing season.  My favorite market, in Takoma Park, has a huge selection including almost every kind of vegetable, eggs, dairy, meat, and a handful of specialty items. If you can make a farmer’s market or farmstand part of your weekly food shopping, or even go a couple times a month, that’s a good resolution for eating more locally.

Or, you could try a CSA.  CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and it’s a system where you can sign up with a local farm (most are run by individual farms) to get a weekly box of whatever’s good.  They vary in length (most run from spring through early fall) and in the details. Most have a set of pickup times and locations, and you just need to find one that’s convenient; but some will do an extra dropoff if you get together a bunch of interested neighbors or coworkers, and a few will even deliver to your house.  Some will let you sign up on a week-to-week basis (good if you’re traveling a lot), but in most cases you’ll subscribe for the full season.

The challenge of a CSA is that you can’t usually choose what you get.  Your box will contain whatever is ripe that week.  If the farm has lots of tomatoes, you’re in luck.  If this week it’s kale and collards, you may find yourself flipping through cookbooks trying to find something, anything new to do with greens.  And if, for example, your whole family hates zucchini, there may be a few weeks when your CSA share will make you sad and you have to force most of it on your unsuspecting neighbors.  But it’s a great way to challenge yourself to cook more (you’re more likely to cook vegetables if you have them on hand), it can be convenient to pick up your weekly share, and you’ll be surprised with new, exciting, and sometimes unfamiliar foods.

A CSA isn’t for everyone (it’s not really for me), but if it sounds appealing, now’s the time to sign up.  A lot of CSA’s fill up long before the season starts.  While farmer’s markets aren’t even open yet, it’s the perfect time to research your CSA options.  For DC-area CSAs, check out this listing from the Washington Post. If you live elsewhere in the US, Local Harvest is a great resource for local foods of all sorts, including CSAs.

Then there’s the home garden.  There is no more local food than what you grow for yourself.  If you’re concerned about staying organic, your garden is the only place you have complete control.  And the vegetables will always be fresh and delicious.

It isn’t always easy to garden in urban areas.  Until we moved last year, we had zero outdoor space for growing.  But if you have even a little outdoor space, you can grow something in containers.  And if you have none at all, you can try for a community garden plot, or borrow space in a neighbor’s backyard.  If you really want to garden, there are always options.

Our food resolution this year is to grow as much food as we possibly can on our 8×15, partially shaded patio.  We tried to grow a number of things last summer, after we moved in, without much success.  I blame the rain, which started the same day as our hasty post-move planting, and lasted for a month without pause.  If I can blame it on the rain, it makes me feel better about my chances this year.

Despite (or perhaps because of?) last year’s failure, I feel compelled to go overboard this year.  Since we’re not in the middle of moving (yay!) we can actually plant things at the appropriate times, plan out the layout of our garden, and even start seeds indoors.  And we’re doing it all.  It may end up being madness, but hopefully the madness will give us a decent harvest of our own food. I want nothing more than to get up in the morning and pick some lettuce and a tomato to go on my sandwich for lunch.  Or to come home and pluck fresh herbs and a head of kale for dinner.

We’ll see how it goes.

That’s my resolution.  What are you doing to eat more sustainably this year?  Have you tried a CSA?  Are you starting a garden?  Tell us in the comments!

Today’s Washington Post had a great article explaining the many issues with disposing of animal waste from factory farms. If you don’t know much about it, it’s a fascinating and disgusting topic.

On a small farm, one that runs the “old-fashioned way,” things function in a more-or-less closed system.  You feed the animals.  The animals poop, and you use their manure to fertilize the crops.  The crops grow, and you use some of the crops to feed the animals.  Sure, you probably supplement their feed with some food from outside, and supplement the fertilizer, too, but most of the waste gets used. It’s a nice, neat cycle.  Sustainable, even.

On a large farm, it’s a different story.  When you pack thousands of animals into a tiny space, they generate a whole lot of waste, and there just isn’t enough nearby farmland around to absorb it all.  Some fraction of it gets used as fertilizer, but some dries out and becomes an airborne pollutant, and some seeps down into our waterways.  This is bad news for people who breathe air, and bad news for our major lakes and bays – not the least because all the extra nutrients in the water are causing huge algae blooms, which lead to large dead zones where plants and fish can’t live.  This is happening all over the world, notably in the Gulf of Mexico and our own Chesapeake Bay. And it’s truly frightening.

The Post article goes into the process in more journalistic, unbiased detail than I could hope to.  But manure pollution is just one of a dozen good reasons to avoid factory farms.  If this troubles you like it troubles me, the best way to protest factory farms is to buy all your meat, eggs, and dairy from small, local farms.

There are, however, a few fresh cheeses that you can make at home using things you already have.  Yogurt cheese is perhaps the easiest, but it won’t be satisfying if you’re curious to see how milk transforms into cheese, because you make it simply by draining yogurt in a cheesecloth until it becomes thick and spreadable.

But panir (or paneer) is dead easy, and gives you the magic of watching curds form out of milk.  It was the first cheese I ever made from scratch, and I was entranced by how liquid milk could suddenly turn solid.  (That’s half the reason I keep making cheese, honestly: it’s magic.)  Panir is a fresh Indian cheese with a mild (but tasty) flavor, and you’ve probably encountered it in Indian restaurants.  It doesn’t melt.  You can make it hard or soft, but if you want to use it in Indian-style dishes, you’ll want it solid enough that you can cube it and it’ll hold together.

You already have everything you need to make panir.  The only “specialized” equipment is a finely-woven cheese cloth (called butter muslin), but you can use a clean, thin kitchen towel if need be.

It takes just a few minutes to make the curds, and a couple hours to drain.  Then you can use it to make palak panir, like I did, or any number of other dishes.  (No recipe for the palak panir, sadly, because I made it at the end of a very long day, and I don’t remember clearly how much I used of anything.  I’ll figure it out and share it with you, I promise.)

Note that you can double this recipe; mine made enough for 4 servings or more.  You can store it in the fridge for a few days, but not longer than that.

Fresh Panir

• 1/2 gallon of milk (whole or skim, but whole will give you a better yield and flavor)
• 1/4 cup vinegar or lemon juice

In a large pot on the stove, bring the milk gently to a boil.  Stir occasionally so the bottom doesn’t burn.

Once it boils, remove the milk from the heat and drizzle the lemon or vinegar over the surface.  Stir well.  You should almost immediately see the milk separate, forming thick curds and thin, yellowish whey.

Let the curds sit about 5 minutes to let the vinegar do its work.  Put a colander in the sink and line it with your cheesecloth or towel, and carefully empty the pot into the colander (don’t lose any curds!).

Give the curds a good rinse with water to get rid of any lingering lemon or vinegar flavor.  Then form them into a patty, wrap it in the cheesecloth, and put a weight on top of it to help it drain.  A large can works great for this; so does a bowl of water.

Let it drain for a couple hours, then unwrap it and it’s ready to eat!  Or, you can store it in the fridge for a couple days.

I know that the District used to have incredibly tight regulations about food carts, which they’ve recently started to relax, but even downtown there are few food carts, and most of them are dominated by tourist-friendly hot dogs and ice cream – nothing a hungry office worker would ever grab for lunch.  In the neighborhood of my office, outside DC proper, there’s almost nothing.

DC has plenty of good, local restaurants.  Why this lack of food carts?  I have to believe it’s because of regulations and obstacles, not the lack of inspired entrepreneurs.  If so, that’s a sad thing.

I have big plans for my garden this year – maybe “grandiose” is a better word, since last year said garden didn’t produce much of anything.  I blame it on poor timing: we bought our new house at the end of May last year, moved in early June, then frantically bought seedlings and shoved them into pots on our patio that very same weekend.

Then it rained for the entire month of June – we were in our new house for 3 weeks or more before we even saw the sun.  So if our chard never reached full size, and our thyme withered away, and our tomato plants grew big and tall but never produced any tomatoes, I blame it on the weather.  That’s what I tell myself, so that I’ll have the will to try again this year.

We have practically no yard at our townhouse, but we do have a large patio that gets more sun than most of the rest of the houses, so we’ll be doing container gardening almost exclusively, packing as much into our limited space as we can.

I’m trying to focus on vegetables where we’ll get the most benefit from growing our own.  Growing my own food is, to me, an important part of eating locally and sustainably, and being connected to my food, but some crops are more important than others.  Peas, for example, need to be eaten as fresh as possible.  As soon as they’re picked, their sugar begins turning into starch, so even an hour after picking they’re already past their prime.  The peas you get at the farmers’ market aren’t bad, but even if they were picked that morning, it’s too long ago.  And the peas you find at the grocery store?  Forget it – at that point, you’re better off with frozen ones.

Tomatoes aren’t quite as dramatic, but there is still nothing like eating a tomato warm from the vine.  Then there are fragile, expensive foods like berries – they are easily bruised, and grow old quickly in the fridge.  I’d rather have them fresh from the plant, and available for snacking.  I miss snacking off the raspberry bushes that my parents had when I was a kid – I want some raspberries of my own.

Herbs are perhaps the most necessary: they’re expensive to buy, and when you do buy them, you get so much you can’t use it all up.  Only by cutting it off the plant as needed can you actually have a steady supply of fresh herbs.

So I ordered a whole bunch of seeds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange last week, and now that most of them (except the potatoes) have arrived, I’m eager to start them:

• Three kinds of tomatoes (Eva Purple Ball, Hungarian Paste, and Zarnitsa)
• Tomatillos (my new obsession, and they’re hard to find locally)
• Dinosaur kale (which goes by many names, including Obama kale, at my local market – I’m not sure why)
• Swiss chard
• Sugar snap peas
• Basil
• Caribe potatoes (which will be a lovely shade of blue)

I’m hoping to plant a few more items than that – there are some seed swaps coming up, and I’m going to buy herbs and berries as seedlings – but that’s my beginning.

Buying seeds felt overwhelming, but now that I have them, it seems like the hard part really starts.  I don’t know much about starting seeds, including when to start them – all I know is “not yet,” and I hope to figure out the rest soon.  And it just gets more complicated from there: this seed needs to germinate in the dark, that one should be transplanted; this one should be heavily pruned, that one shouldn’t be pruned at all; this one wants plenty of nitrogen, that one will die with too much nitrogen but it needs plenty of phosphorus.

Confused yet?  Me too.  I’m hoping to figure it out as I go along.  I take comfort in the knowledge that all these fruits and veggies have been cultivated for centuries, often by people with access to far less information and fewer tools than I have – and the plants survived on their own with no help from humans for millenia before that.  It can’t be that hard, can it?

Plus, they look as pretty as they taste:

I found some dried porcini mushrooms at the farmer’s market a few weeks ago, early in January when otherwise there wasn’t much there.  I came home with a ziploc bag full, which I expect will last a while.  I love porcinis especially, because they have a very dark, meaty flavor, but chantrelles, morels, shiitakes, and others are all an equally good buy.

You can find dried wild mushrooms in most grocery stores, especially higher-end ones.  They are expensive – don’t look at the price per pound! – and they come in small bags, but when you’re cooking with them, a little goes a long way.  These dry, shriveled things pack a whole lot of flavor.

To use dried mushrooms, put them in a bowl and cover them with warm water.  Then just let them sit for about 15 minutes, until they’ve absorbed the water and become soft and squishy.  Then fish them out, chop them up, and add them to your cooking.  But save the liquid!  Carefully pour it off into another container (dirt and debris from the mushrooms will sometimes settle to the bottom of the liquid – don’t be grossed out, but don’t save those bits, either) and stick it in the fridge.

You can put dried mushrooms in lots of things – just about anywhere you’d use regular button mushrooms.  In fact, one of the best ways to use them is alongside button mushrooms, to enhance the flavor while the cheaper mushrooms provide most of the substance.  Try:

• Add them to soup (porcinis make the best mushroom soup you’ll ever taste)
• Putt them on pizza
• Add them to stir fries (especially shiitakes)
• Stir them into risotto
• Put them into pasta sauce, or just serve them over pasta, sauted with a little butter

You can use the liquid anywhere you’d use stock – and since you can use stock almost anywhere you’d use water, there are lots of possibilities.  You can use it with the mushrooms, or for extra flavor in another dish. It’s especially good:

• In soups
• In risotto
• In the cooking water for rice or pasta
• In sauces and gravy

If you’ve never used dried mushrooms, you’ll be amazed how much they boost the flavor in a dish.  They’re like a secret weapon of deliciousness.

One pitfall: don’t hoard them.  I have a bad habit of not using them except on the most special of occasions… but they’re not that pricey when you use them in small quantities. And when you let them get pushed to the back of your pantry, you’ll forget they’re there.  So get them, and use them!

The roads are bad, and the government let us know that it won’t even try to plow local streets until after the snow stops.  One thoroughfare near us is blocked by several fallen trees (yes, that’s a road in the picture); other main roads are covered in slush that may soon turn to ice.

But we’re lucky to still have power (so far, so good), we’ve got nowhere to go, and I’m excited to spend a weekend hunkered down and eating good food.  How better to spend a blizzard than by baking?

Other people seemed to have the same idea.  Our local grocery stores on Thursday night were out of things like bread and milk (for the panicked pantry-stocker), chips and beer (for the panicked sports fan – no one’s going shopping between now and the Superbowl), and dangerously low on chocolate chips (which was my priority).  Fortunately, Nathan secured us some chocolate chips, and we’re well stocked to spend the weekend eating.

If you’re snowed in, now or in the future, here are some of my favorite storm survival techniques:

• Hot cocoa is a must.  None of the instant powdered stuff, please.  Put milk in a saucepan, add cocoa powder and sugar (in roughly equal quantities for your standard cocoa – make it sweeter or more chocolatey depending on your preferences), and heat it until it’s steaming.  Or, add pieces of real chocolate for an even richer drink.  Then spice it up with cinnamon or cayenne (for a Mexican flavor), mint or almond extract, or your favorite liquor (rum, kahlua, and Bailey’s are some of my favorites), and enjoy.
• Cookies!  I made a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough last night, formed it into rolls, wrapped it in plastic, and chilled it in the fridge.  Now it’s ready for us to slice off and bake cookies anytime, and have fresh hot cookies whenever we want them.  But really, in a snowstorm, any sort of cookie will do.
• Bread can be an all-day activity, and is satisfying in an entirely different way that cookies.  I’m making pretzels.
• Soup of any kind.  Tomato soup, lentil soup, vegetable soup, all perfect.
• Chili.  I’m making chili tomorrow for my coworker’s Superbowl chili cookoff, but I would make it anyway.  If I can’t make it to the party because the roads still aren’t clear, I WILL make it anyway.
• Macaroni and cheese. Need I say more?
• Baked potatoes, which we had last night loaded with cheese and broccoli.
• Something extravagant – because, has there ever been a better time to spend all day in the kitchen?  It’s the perfect excuse to try your hand at pasta-making, make a four-course French dinner, or simmer a curry for hours on the stove. Make enchiladas with homemade tortillas and sauce.  Use one of the 5 gallons of milk you stocked up on to make your own cheese.

Wherever you are, if you’re in this storm, you’re not going anywhere.  So flip through your cookbooks, and make something tasty!

Are you stuck in the snowpocalypse this weekend?  What are you making?

There should be a story behind this “meatball” recipe; I should tell you that it was my great-grandmother’s veggie meatball recipe, or that it was invented in a fit of brilliance when I had meat-eating friends coming to dinner and wanted to trick them.

The truth is less grand, even a little sad.  I lost this recipe.  I made it up 3 years ago, and I don’t remember why.  I was probably frustrated with the selection of vegetarian meatballs in the freezer section (which usually look and taste like mush), so I set out to make better ones.  I made these, or something very like them, was extremely pleased with myself, and then forgot all about it.  I even forgot how I made them.  So I felt foolish over the past several months as I kept wanting meatballs, but avoided making them because I wasn’t sure how.

Eventually I just buckled down and took my best guess, and they came out just great.  Lesson: make that food you’ve been avoiding, because you’ll almost always be glad you did.

This is also one reason I’m glad I have this blog; when I make something that comes out well, I can record it, publicly, and never forget it again.

These tofu meatballs don’t actually taste that different than regular meatballs, at least in my mind.  Tofu itself has little flavor, the nuts and mushrooms give it a meaty taste, and the seasoning does the rest.  Ground beef honestly doesn’t have that much flavor on its own – a few spices like fennel and oregano, which are often found with meatballs, are enough to trick the palate.  Crumbled tofu even has the same texture as ground beef.  They don’t behave that differently than meatballs, either, though mine crumbled more than I wanted them to.  They held together great when I baked and froze them, but when I added them to pasta sauce, they started falling apart.  I used egg as a binder, though, and I’m 99% sure that adding a second egg would solve the problem. (I know they didn’t fall apart last time I made them… Do real meatballs fall apart, too?)

On the other hand, you could eliminate the egg altogether, mix this up with tomato sauce, and have a great “meat” sauce.  Not a bad alternative.

The biggest variable in this recipe is the tofu.  Not all tofu are alike – mine was very firm and unusually dry.  If your tofu works out differently, post a comment and let me know what happens!

Vegetarian Meatballs

• 1 lb very firm tofu
• 1/2 cup walnuts, finely ground
• 1/3 cup breadcrumbs
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup vegetables, very finely chopped (I used mushrooms)
• 1-2 cloves garlic, very finely minced
• Seasonings – I used:
  • 1 tsp oregano
  • 1 tsp fennel seed
  • 1/2 tsp basil
  • 1/2 tsp salt, to taste
  • pepper, to taste
• 1-2 eggs

Crumble the tofu into small crumbs (I found that a pastry cutter made this easy).  The finer all the ingredients are, the finer the texture of the meatballs will be – see the picture below.

Stir in the nuts, breadcrumbs, garlic, and your choice of vegetables.  Any vegetables will work as long as they’re very small.  Mushrooms, carrots, and spinach should work well.  Add the seasonings, mix well, then taste and adjust the flavors until you’re happy with it.

Once the taste is right, beat the egg and add it, stirring to spread it evenly through the tofu mixture.

At this point, the mixture should be just slightly wet and sticky, so it’ll hold into a ball if you squeeze a handful. If it’s too dry, try adding some stock or even another egg.  If it’s too wet, add more breadcrumbs to absorb the moisture.

Heat the oven to 350, and lightly oil a baking sheet.  Form the meatballs by gathering a small handful of the tofu mixture and squeezing it into a roughly round shape.  Don’t try to roll it to perfect the shape, or it will crumble.  Place the balls on the baking sheet, close together but not touching.

Bake for about 10 minutes.  The outsides will be firm and lightly browned.

Serve immediately with pasta and sauce, or freeze them to save for later.  To reheat, just cook them in a pan with a little oil until they’re nicely browned.

I’m pretty sure everyone has foods like this.  I’ve never worried about risotto, and as a vegetarian I happily don’t need to deal with things like de-boning chicken, but bread always makes me very nervous.  It’s such a staple, not to mention so delicious, that I would love to be able to turn out loaf after crusty loaf.

But whenever I make bread, it never seems to rise like it should, and no matter what the recipe says about the correct consistency – wet and shaggy, or smooth and supple – mine always does nothing but stick to my hands, no matter how much flour I use.  I think there’s an innate bread-sense that I don’t have.

Fortunately, winter is the best time for fresh baked bread, so maybe I’ll take Amanda’s advice and try to “make it my bitch” over the next couple months…

Is there a food that really scares you? Have you been able to conquer it?