Asian Persimmons

I don't really have a favorite food of all time, one that I would request on death row at my last meal. I like seasonal, local food, from my own terroir if possible, and that varies depending on the time of year. In summer, it's my own favorite cherry tomatoes; in winter, it's my own favorite kale.

Right now I'm in Houston, which is not my own terroir, but I still buy locally-grown food at the farmer's market.  Right now what I really, really like is persimmons. I like them everywhere, even when I'm in Tennessee, but in Tennessee I eat wild persimmons that I find on the ground, usually on the road, and sort of warmed by the road and maybe smushed by a car. Sometimes they have a little grit from the road in them. They have a lot of seeds, and I save the seeds and scatter them around my farm, or plant them in a row in the garden hoping to grow a hardy persimmon seedling.

In Houston you can buy locally-grown Asian persimmons. These are quite a bit bigger than the wild native persimmons, and they have only one or two seeds per fruit. Some fruits have no seeds at all! They are a beautiful orange color before they are ripe, and they are rather hard at first, but then they soften and turn brownish, and this is when you eat them. The variety that I bought at the farmer's market did not have much of the astringency of the wild American persimmon, but apparently some of the Asian types are more astringent than others.

The other day on one of my walks around the neighborhood, I saw a neighbor's tree just loaded with these Asian persimmons. None of them were on the ground. I think you pick them here while they are still unripe, and then you ripen, or "blett" them, in the house. That also prevents possums from dining on them before you can get them.

Urban Harvest in Houston sells Asian persimmon trees at their annual fruit tree sale in late January, and maybe I will get one this year. They certainly seem to thrive here. However, I think it would likely be too cold for them on Brangus Lane: they can't take temperatures below zero. Maybe in the near future, though, as the climate warms, we will be able to grow Asian persimmons in the Upper Cumberland.

Pot-au-Feu; National Blog Posting Month

Apparently November is NaBloPoMo, or something like that. The people at BlogHer challenge us bloggers to write in our blog every day, and today we're supposed to write about what we like the most about writing. That is, writing in our blogs, presumably.

The thing I like about it is that nobody edits me. This still seems so amazing to me, that I can write whatever I want to and publish it to the whole world, for free, instantly, with nobody telling me I can't or I shan't, as Dr Seuss would say. It may be the case that hardly anybody reads it. I don't care. It's out there, and it's published. I wonder if the first people to get printing presses felt this excited and liberated about their new-found power to wield a weapon of mass communication!  Probably. But you still needed ink, and paper, and now we don't. And there's no printer to tell us he won't publish our broadside. The Gutenberg revolution fomented all sorts of other revolutions; may our information revolution foster more revolutions. Maybe it already has.

Now that that's out of the way, I can get back to business. Last night I made something really primal: pot-au-feu. Like creme fraiche, it sounds fancy and French. It is French, but it's just peasant food. What you do is you buy some cheap cuts of tough meat and some bones. This won't set you back much. Get some marrow bones too. I got a piece of brisket, some "soup" bones, some beef short ribs, and some marrow bones. I used a recipe from the March 2008 issue of Gourmet as a starting point. IT can be found here.

You roast the bones (except the marrow bones) and meat in the oven for an hour. They turn all nice and brown and smell wonderful. Also you put an onion and a carrot in the roasting pan to roast with the meat.

Then you put the roasted bones and vegetables in a big soup pot and boil for three hours. It sounds like a lot of time, but this makes the broth all beefy and dark and wonderful. You can add some herbs like bay leaf, peppercorns, thyme, and parsley.

Now for the marrow bones. Put them in a saucepan standing up. Pour some of your wonderful broth over them to cover. Boil for fifteen to twenty minutes, until the marrow is soft.  Remove the marrow bones from the broth and keep them warm till supper time, at which point you will scoop out the marrow and eat it, either in your bowl or on a piece of toast. This is the part that's really primal.

(The broth you cooked the marrow bones in will be cloudy. If this doesn't bother you, keep it for another use. If it does bother you, feed it to a dog.)
Now simmer whatever vegetables you have on hand in the beautiful clear brown beef broth. When you're ready to eat, cut the meat off the bones, slice the brisket, put the meat and vegetables in a bowl, and ladle the broth over. Garnish with sour cream and mustard and horseradish.

Tools of the Trade

You don't need to spend a lot of money to get involved in canning. Just retrofit a big stockpot and away you go! There are one or two inexpensive tools, though, that make the job a lot easier. Here's a little video about that.

Row Covers for Fall

I have been using spun-bonded row covers for years on my fall garden. They keep greens and root crops fresh deep into the winter, even under snow. This year I decided to suspend them on hoops rather than lay them directly on the greens, for better air circulation. I made two kinds of hoops: plastic and wire. In this video you can see how I made the hoop houses or low tunnels for the row covers. The plastic tubing hoops are sturdier, but they are more expensive to make than the wire hoops.

Kiwi-Apple Chutney; Canning

I got some locally grown hardy kiwis from a friend with a large hardy kiwi vine, and I decided to make some chutney with the kiwis and some Arkansas Black apples I got from another local grower. I adapted the recipe below from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

It's okay to adapt ingredients and spices a little bit from a canning recipe, but you can't alter the amount of vinegar in the recipe: that determines the acidity of the batch, and the acidity has to be sufficient to make the recipe safe to can in a boiling water bath. So, I kept the amount of vinegar the same and just altered the ratio of kiwis to apples, and I substituted some balsamic vinegar and white vinegar for the cider vinegar called for in the recipe. (Most vinegar has about the same amount of acidity.) I also substituted chopped butternut squash for the raisins, because I didn't have any raisins. I figured the butternut squash would add some sweetness, as the raisins would have.

Here's what I ended up using. This recipe made five half-pint jars of chutney.

4 cups of chopped kiwis
5 cups of peeled, cored, diced apples
1 1/2 cup chopped onions
3/4 cup white vinegar
3/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup peeled diced butternut squash
1 large clove of elephant garlic
1 teaspoon peeled diced fresh gingerroot
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper

Combine the kiwi, apple, onions, vinegar, sugar, brown sugar, squash, garlic and gingerroot. Bring to a boil and simmer for thirty minutes. Add the spices, and simmer another ten minutes.

Sterilize the jars and lids. Ladle the chutney into the jars, leaving a 1/4 inch clearance. Wipe the rim with a wet napkin. Put the lids and bands on the jars and place them in the canning kettle. Process for ten minutes at a rolling boil.

Remove the jars and cool on the counter. Check to see that they all sealed.

Soup Cooked in a Pumpkin

Ever since I saw an article in Martha Stewart Living years ago about gilded pumpkins containing soup, I've wanted to make a pumpkin with soup inside, minus the gilding, which just seems de trop. It turns out that Chef Marian, of The Victory Garden Cookbook, had a recipe all along in the chapter on pumpkins. Today I tried it, with an adorable small pumpkin that was given to me by a friend. It was grown by the farmers who run her community supported agriculture share.

It turned out to be quite easy to cook soup in a pumpkin. I made a little video about it. The pumpkin is a Tan Cheese pumpkin, and it's very tasty. You start out by cutting a top out of the pumpkin and scraping the seeds out, just as you do to carve a pumpkin for Halloween. You oil the inside of the pumpkin and bake it in the oven, empty, with the lid on, for 20 minutes at 400 degrees. Then you take it out, add a little rice and sauteed vegetables to the inside of the pumpkin, plus chicken broth to fill the pumpkin, replace the top, and roast again for 45 minutes to an hour, with the soup inside.

First Sweet Potato of the Season

The deer have been getting in my garden and eating the sweet potato vines at night. They jump a four and a half foot fence to do this. All of the vines have been completely defoliated, but amazingly, the roots seem ok. I dug one up the other day and ate it. I guess it had had enough time to get big before the munching started.

I have spent the last few days increasing security around my garden, because shortly after they ate all the sweet potato vines, the deer started in on the okra plants. Who would have thought that they'd eat hairy old okra leaves? I looked up deer and okra, and found out that, lo and behold, people actually plant okra to LURE deer!  And to make them grow big for hunting season!

At first I tried the easy way to "increase security": putting pieces of Irish Spring soap in panty hose legs and hanging them around the garden. (I buy the knee-high panty hose boxes at Walmart especially for this purpose, and no other purpose.) This worked for one night. The next night, they were back in the garden, bad smell or no. And the soap truly does smell horrible.

So then I had to resort to a more labor-intensive strategy:  I wired long pieces of bamboo to the posts of the fence. Now the posts were sticking up about 2 feet higher than the top of the fence. So I could take some 20 gauge tie-wire and put two strands of that above the top of the wire mesh fence. Now the fence is effectively about 6 1/2 feet tall. This seems to be working: there was no deer snacking last night. As a further deterrent, I took a page out of my friend Wendy Williams's book and tied some aluminum pie pans to the two strands of wire above the old fence. They move in the breeze and make clacking sounds, which is supposed to scare the deer.

Deer are interesting. Keeping them out is kind of a psy-ops situation: you have to make the fence look scary to jump over, as if they might become entangled in it if they try. It doesn't have to actually be a strong fence, just a wiggly, stringy, high fence. Very light nylon mesh fences that are about 7 feet tall, and practically invisible in the landscape, apparently keep deer out pretty effectively. Deer aren't like cows, horses, or pigs, which would go right through a fence like that.

I think these deer are invading the garden for the first time in years because of several factors:  it is very dry, and there is very little lush vegetation around the neighborhood. There was a pasture full of Johnson grass hay growing all summer nearby, but two weeks ago it was all cut down and baled, and because there has been no rain, it hasn't grown back at all. So suddenly the deer became very hungry, and they saw a buffet full of their favorite foods--beans, sweet potatoes, and okra--on the other side of the garden fence.  Another factor might be the fact that deer populations were very low a few years ago when I built this fence. There had been an epidemic that killed a lot of them. But slowly their populations have been rebounding.  That's good, but to paraphrase Marie Antoinette:  let them eat grass!  There's plenty of that around my garden too.