farmstands 7-23

The first of the local corn and peaches are in!

Still available: raspberries, domesticated blueberries, squash and brassicas, potatoes, onions, carrots, radishes.

Not yet: non-hothouse tomatoes, sour cherries, blackberries (not sure who's selling them these days), non-red raspberries (likewise), other berries, grapes, apricots, plums.

Gone: strawberries, sweet cherries, lettuce (not sure I ever saw it this year). Green garlic looks like it's all dry now, garlic scapes seem to be gone.

Some kind of cooking post soon.

papaya salad

Papaya salad might be my favorite dish in the world.

Maybe I'm hedging by saying "dish," so that sour cherries, fresh tomatoes, or whiskey can still be my favorite food, I don't know. But I'm telling you, papaya salad is way up there.



If you haven't had it, both "papaya" and "salad" are a little misleading. It's almost like a coleslaw, and feel free to use it as one. The papaya used for it is green - unripe - and shredded before being pounded in a mortar and pestle with lime juice, fish sauce or other source of salt (plain salt or soy sauce is fine to keep it vegan), fresh herbs and seasonings, and often some other vegetables - blanched long beans are common, as are tomatoes and raw Thai eggplant. I tend to use just papaya and tomato for the vegetables - I want the papaya to provide all the texture.

Papaya salad comes from Southeast Asia - it's often on Thai restaurant menus, and is called som tam in Thailand - and is perfect hot-weather food, but like I said, don't feel you have to limit it to other Southeast Asian contexts. Have it on a hot dog. Have it with some boiled crawfish or shrimp. Have it with fried chicken or fish.

This is more about technique than recipe. The two key things are, of course, shredding and pounding the papaya. Well, and finding green papaya in the first place. An Asian market is your best bet, though the Market Basket here in suburban New Hampshire carries it now, so who knows. You may be able to find it already shredded - I used to be able to. If you can't, you can use a mandoline or a very sharp knife, but I tell you what, I am in love with the Kom Kom miracle knife:



The Kom Kom works like a peeler - you pull it across the fruit (after you've peeled it, unlike the above photo) and instead of cutting away a layer of peel, it cuts thin julienned strips. Check it out:



It took me a few years of occasionally trying to make papaya salad to realize that you really HAVE to pound it. You can't just toss the shredded papaya with the seasonings. Pounding it tenderizes the unripe fruit and lets the seasonings seep in. You'd be surprised how hard you can pound it without mashing it.

Ideally you want to pound it in a Lao-style clay mortar, the important aspect of which is that it has a narrow bottom and high sides, which is perfect for this. I know it sounds like I'm saying you need a lot of special equipment. And maybe you do! But a regular mortar and pestle will work too, just not as easily.



This is less than half of the shredded papaya in the mortar. It'll shrink down a lot once pounded:



So everything about this is "to taste," but you want:

Fresh lime juice;
Fish sauce or other salt (salt, soy sauce, shrimp paste, crab paste, mud crabs);
Chile (I used a small red Thai chile);
Fresh herbs (mint, cilantro, culantro, and/or any basil - I also used sorrel this time, and was out of mint);
Other seasonings that appeal to you - I use ginger and lemongrass, garlic is common;
A little sugar;
Other vegetables if you like. I add a few cherry tomatoes. Parts of Thailand also add peanuts.

Pound the ingredients together, making sure the herbs are good and bruised, everything but the papaya (and long beans if you're using them) is pulverized, and the papaya is tenderized. There's a technique that this mortar lends itself naturally to of tossing the papaya a little with the pestle and then banging it against the side as it falls. Soon enough:



Tada.

You want the flavors balanced - a little tart, a little sweet, very green and herbal, a bit spicy (sometimes very spicy).

farmstands 7-2

Not much new to report except that local sweet cherries (Bings or close relatives) have been available for a few days and are very good this year. No raspberries or blueberries yet, though I expect them to be early.

Out in the garden, the fennel is getting crazy tall but the bulbs are still thumb-sized. I don't know if this means that, like with celery, fennel grows taller and bushier than you would guess from what you see in the supermarket, or if at some point the plant stops putting energy into growing stalks and starts putting it into developing the bulb.

farmstands 6-18-14

Just went to Kimballs for strawberries (3.50/small box), and they also had:

Garlic scapes (5.99/lb)
Green garlic, green onions (young onions), and scallions (1.99/bunch)
Heirloom tomatoes and cherry tomatoes ($4/box, obviously hothouse)
Diva cucumbers (2.99/lb, hothouse?)
Various greens (1.99/bunch) - no broccoli raab in evidence this time, probably just sold out
Rhubarb (2.49/lb)

Got a little of everything for $24, half of which was strawberries.

miti cana de oveja

I'll get a photo when I do a larger multi-cheese post, but I wanted to post about Miti Cana de Oveja, a Spanish cheese from Lorenzo Abellan. This is a fantastic cheese.

This week I made my annual birthday-celebratory shopping trip to Wegmans, returning with about a dozen different cheeses, most of them new to me (in addition to fresh wild halibut, flounder, grey sole, and monkfish; dry-aged steaks; MezzoMix soda from Germany; Kinder chocolates; Hartmann hot dogs; and Vegemite). We tried three of the cheeses last night - all three were fantastic, and all three will be blogged about.

But Cana de Oveja (I see it written without the "Miti" more than with, when I googled for information about the cheesemaker) is something of a Holy Grail cheese for me. For a long time, I've wanted to find "a sheep cheese that's like a goat cheese," meaning a young soft sheep's milk cheese that was like the sheep's milk equivalent of chevre. It's surprisingly hard to find, and I don't know enough about making cheese from sheep's milk to guess why. Sometimes traditions are just traditions - you probably could make mozzarella from goat's milk instead of cow's or water buffalo's, for instance, but you don't because those aren't the farmers who first made it.

Anyway, this is my cheese. This is the cheese I've been looking for! It looks exactly like a bucheron - a bloomy-rinded log with a thin brie-like layer surrounding the chalky white core - and it is so, so good. It's tangy, it's milky, and above all, it's sheepy. "Sheepiness" is a milder thing that "goatiness," but it's its own thing too - it's not "goaty, but less so," it's sheepy, and that's exactly why I've been searching for a cheese like this.

Instant favorite. Probably the best non-American young cheese I've had. I'm looking forward to trying it with some fruit or honey. Caitlin liked the richer, less tangy Castelbelbo, a mixed-milk from Italy, more than this, so perhaps I'll construct our cheese plates accordingly in order to sneak the lion's share of this stuff for myself.

smoked chicken salad

Of all the various "chop this up and add mayonnaise" "salads," egg salad is the only one I grew up liking. Tuna salad in particular I just can't stand, and all the other "salads" are too often made gloppy with too much mayonnaise. I never order them out.

But I love chicken salad if I make it myself.

I probably started making it because I love to roast a chicken, and that leads to leftovers. Plus, in Indiana, my butcher used to sell smoked chickens, which made some pretty amazing sandwiches. Of course, now I have a stovetop smoker. To smoke your own chicken (with non-crispy skin, I'm afraid), butterfly it, put it in a stovetop smoker for about an hour, and finish it by putting the smoker in the oven for another 30-40 minutes. (It seems to cook too slowly if you cook it entirely on the stove, which means a dried-out breast.)

So:

One smoked chicken, bones and skin and tendons removed, torn into bite-size pieces.
Mayonnaise. Duke's preferably, Blue Plate is fine, Yankees will probably have to resort to Hellmanns. I am a fanatic about Duke's. It has no sugar or other sweetener, which is really key. It's like the opposite of Miracle Whip.
Tony Chachere's seasoning mix.
3 hard-boiled eggs.
The greens from one or two bunches of radishes, depending on how big they are.
A little onion, green onion, or pickled ramp.

Wash the greens very thoroughly, drop them in boiling water for thirty seconds, plunge them in ice water, and squeeze all the water out of them - when they seem dry, wrap them in paper towels and squeeze again. Chop finely, wrap in paper towels AGAIN, and squeeze again. You don't want watery chicken salad!

Chop hard-boiled eggs and onion.

Now add everything together, and use only as much mayonnaise as it takes to get the egg and chicken to stick together. No more! It's like macerating strawberries in a little sugar, versus suspending them in jelly.

Watercress can be great in there too, or a couple chopped radishes.

green strawberries

Green strawberries aren't a new breed of strawberry like pineberries, they're exactly what they sound like: unripe strawberries. You see them once in a while at some farmers markets, but they're not nearly as common as green tomatoes or chiles - I had to make arrangements with Kimballs to have them picked for me.

The green is really attractive - a sort of ivory green before it starts to yellow as it ripens to red - though that color does not survive cooking the way the deep red of ripe strawberries does. This ivory color is actually a sort of intermediate stage - if you're picking your own, let the strawberries grow a bit to reach this stage rather than picking the fruit as soon as it appears. Those earlier green-green or "unripe unripe" as opposed to "ripe unripe" strawberries are harder with less flavor.

Why use green strawberries? Purely as a change of pace and to better understand the strawberry. It's not like with tomatoes, where cooking green tomatoes is a good way to deal with the glut of red tomatoes you would otherwise have, or a way to use those tomatoes you get at the end of the season that won't have time to ripen.

However, there are some similarities to green tomatoes, mainly that, compared to ripe strawberries, green strawberries are firmer and more tart. The strawberry flavor is still there, just fainter and without the sugar to bring it out. There's another flavor too, which I guess is the flavor of the chlorophyll or whatever's making them green, a flavor that goes away when the strawberry ripens.

So what do we do with these.

The first thing I did was macerate some overnight with some sugar to make preserves - same basic method I use for ripe strawberries: macerate overnight, heat up until they just start to soften, turn off heat, let sit overnight, add more sugar and boil until jam-thick.


The ivory green is gone. The syrup of the jam is a color somewhere between golden raisins and cream soda, and the chunks of fruit show up in colors the paint swatch people might call Sun Belt Peach, Burnt Mountain Dew, and Foreclosed Lawn. It's a tart jam, but it's also surprisingly complex in flavor - far more than green tomatoes can yield, for instance, another difference there.

I've got more green strawberries in a jar of whiskey to make green strawberry bounce, some mixed with rhubarb for a pie, and some macerating in sugar to make green strawberry shrub. Tonight we'll have sliced raw green strawberries in salad and see how that goes.