Joel's Untitled Blog

This past weekend, the Wesley Foundation at U.Va. once again put on its annual Parents' Dinner, which is one part welcoming the parents who are in town for U.Va.'s Parents' Weekend, and one part fund-raiser for the Foundation's Spring Break Mission Trip (this year, to the Gulf Coast).

And despite the fact that I left Charlottesville over a year ago, I couldn't resist the opportunity to go back and help cook, because I love doing it, especially in that kitchen. It isn't a particularly nice or well-equipped kitchen, but I have a sentimental attachment to it and to the community it serves.

This year, Jimbo was largely in charge of the menu, and I mostly just sliced and measured things, but had just as much fun as ever. We made roasted pork loin with herbs and a mushroom gravy, roasted red potatoes, green beans, and rolls, with an apple tart and Chantilly cream for dessert. The apple tart was even made with locally grown apples we bought that morning at the market. At one point, I did burn some croutons in the oven, but I didn't break any dishes, nor did we have a need for the fire extinguisher, so that makes it a success in my book. And I hope people liked the food, too.

The event was slightly complicated by the fact that, due to a miscommunication, we had over-booked the building, and there were two groups using it at once. We ended up serving dinner in the living room - the room farthest away from the kitchen - which proved interesting; at one point, we were preparing plates on a table outside on the patio, to be taken inside and served. But it all worked out in the end, and we were even on time, for once.

It was great to come back, even for a little while, and it was just the sort of vacation I needed. I suppose most people wouldn't consider working for free to be a vacation, but I apparently do.

I finally found the Cascades Farmer's Market: it actually exists! For some time I suspected that the signs advertising a farmers' market on Sunday mornings were just a cruel hoax, because when I followed the signs, they didn't go anywhere. But today I discovered that the market is there, only there's an extra turn you have to make (and no sign to indicate this), and the market itself is in the back parking lot of the Loudon Seniors Center, hidden from view.

For the past year I've been getting most of my produce from Wegman's, which, although it has a fine produce section and occasionally even locally-grown fruits, is not quite as fun as going to the market and buying directly the people who grew it. I also have been growing my own herbs, tomatoes, and peppers, but there's only so much you can do with a third-story balcony.

So today I bought blueberries, bacon, and okra. Okra from the grocery store is usually not worth eating, at least around here, but I have high hopes for this. And I suppose since I bought blueberries, the folks at work are going to expect muffins, so that's probably what I'll be doing tonight.

[Update: I went to Wegman's tonight to buy milk and other essentials not found at the farmer's market, and what do I find on display in the very front of the store? Peaches, from Charlottesville. So I had to buy some of them too.]

This weekend, I started my herb garden for the summer. I bought the plants from a local nursery, and am growing them in pots on my third-floor balcony. This year, I'm growing greek oregano, marjoram, three varieties of basil, curly parsley, lemon thyme, rosemary, chocolate mint, habaneros, serranos, and two kinds of tomatoes. (I've also got spider plants and an African violet, but those aren't for eating.) I couldn't fit it all on one row, so some had to go on a table behind the rest (creating a two-level effect of which I'm sure the Knights Who Until Recently Said "Ni!" would approve). I've never tried to grow tomatoes in a pot before, so this will be an experiment.

After much prayer and pondering, many conversations, phone calls and interviews, trips to Northern Virginia and to the Chicken Ranch in Atlanta, I have decided to take a job with Cigital in Sterling, Virginia. There I will be a consultant, and while I do not yet know the details of what my assignments will be, I'll probably be doing a lot of traveling, looking at code and design documents, and helping companies evaluate the security and reliability risks of their software. The job will start a week from Monday.

That means this will be my last week in Charlottesville. It is sad to leave this place, and I'll particularly miss the Wesley Foundation and the Charlottesville City Market. Hopefully I'll be able to find a good community (and a farmer's market) up there.

So this morning, I went to the market, and picked up some sausage, coffee, okra, green frying tomatoes, corn, and chiles, and carried it all back in the lovely basket Meredith made for me. And then I thought that it would be more fun to share this with other people, so I invited as many people as I could find to come over for dinner. We grilled burgers, chicken, shrimp, and corn, and fried up some okra and tomatoes. We also had salsa made with tomatoes from my parent's garden in Fairfax: surprisingly, the yellow salsa I intended to be the "mild" version ended up hotter than the red stuff I made with habaneros. I had a hard time convincing people to try the fried green tomatoes, but I like 'em, so I made them just the same.

I'll send out my new address and phone number once I know what that will be. It looks like I'll be able to keep my e-mail address and cell phone number for a while, so in the meantime, that will be the best way to contact me, particularly since I'll be traveling a lot. I'll still be in town for most of the week, and I may be asking some of you to come help move things next weekend. And oh yes, there will be ice cream for those who help, so stay tuned.

Today I made a cherry pie for Project Transformation's Family Fun Night. The pie was similar to ones I've made before, and follows the recipe in The Joy of Cooking, and I didn't really alter it in any way, so I won't post the recipe here. Once again, I bought cherries at Chiles Peach Orchard in Crozet, and made the pie in the afternoon to take to the dinner.

The one thing I did try that I hadn't done before is that I tried mixing the dough by hand, with knives, rather than using the food processor. I thought it would be interesting to try doing it the old-fashioned way. (That, and I couldn't find all the parts to the food processor.) So I tried it, and it was actually not that hard, and was fun to do.

What you do is measure out the flour, salt, and sugar, and add chunks of butter. You cut the butter into the flour by taking two knives, one in each hand, and cut in opposite directions simultaneously, not unlike a pair of scissors. I think the dough actually came out a little flakier than doughs I've made in the food processor. probably because I didn't overwork it, and kept larger chunks of butter in it, which helps separate the dough into layers when it is rolled out. I went ahead and wove a lattice top for the pie, this time doing the weaving directly on the pie, rather than doing it on paper and transferring it. The resulting pie came out pretty well, and the interns seemed to like it.

A friend of mine is starting a basket-making business, and she made this basket for me to take to the Farmer's Market (in exchange for a drawing of it, which I was happy to do). If you'd like a basket like this, send e-mail to handmade.baskets@gmail.com, and I'm sure she'd be happy to ship you one.

I took it to the farmer's market today, and filled it with tomatoes, tomatillos, lettuce, goat cheese, and eggs. One vendor even gave me a extra handful of tomatillos for free. I plan to make salsa verde, and possibly a frittata at some point this week. I could actually fit quite a bit of stuff in the basket, and was quite happy to have something to carry everything in. It certainly made the trip to the market easier and more fun.

I was planning to have a meeting of the local food small group today, but I kept forgetting to tell people about it, and by the time I sent out a notice, it was too late. Several of the regulars were out of town, anyway, so perhaps this was doomed not to happen. But I went to the Farmer's market this morning just the same, and bought peas and cherries, and ended up making pasta with ham, peas, and cream for dinner. (I'll come up with something to do to the cherries later.)

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Last week's cooking adventures just weren't enough, so today Jimbo and I went out to Chiles orchard out past Crozet on Jarman's Gap Road and picked strawberries. That's about as fresh (and local) as you can get, and they were much better than anything you'd find in a store, and fresher (and cheaper) even than what you get at the city market. We considered a number of options for what to do with them, but I liked the idea of making a strawberry-rhubarb pie. I had never made such a thing before, and wasn't entirely sure what rhubarb was, but I'll take any excuse to bake a pie.

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On the night before graduation, the Wesley Foundation hosts a baccalaureate dinner for the graduates and their families. I cooked it last year, which was nearly a disaster, but apparently that was not enough to dissuade Alex from asking me again. So this year, Andrew, Jimbo, the Brain, and I cooked the meal, along with many volunteers.

The first course was a broccoli and cheddar soup, along with a salad and sourdough bread. The main course was London broil with mashed potatoes and asparagus, and we had cheesecake for dessert.

The things worth writing about from a local food perspective, however, are the asparagus and the strawberry-chile sauce I made for the cheesecake. We bought the strawberries and the asparagus in the morning at the Charlottesville City Market, and basically made up the recipes as we went along.

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There's still not too much at the market beyond eggs and goat cheese, so this week, the local foods small group made quiche. Our recipe came from The Joy of Cooking, except, as usual, we altered it a little. And then we got a little carried away and made a bunch of pastries, and cheated a little by buying pre-made puff pastry dough. But the quiche was the real thing.

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Today we got the local foods small group started off for real. The market was up and running, and there were people there selling herbs and flowers, baked goods, and various handmade crafts. There wasn't much in the way of vegetables yet, so we picked up some eggs, arugula, and goat cheese, which we used to make frittata. We also decided to have potatoes and bacon as sides, together with some sourdough I had started the night before.

The recipes came from the latest Cook's Illustrated. They listed several frittata variations, but we decided to make our own, combining ideas from a couple of them to use what we found at the market with what we had on hand. We ended up making a frittata with sun-dried tomatoes, goat cheese, and arugula.

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Today the City Market opened, so Matt and I went over to see what we could find. Unfortunately, there was a thunderstorm this morning, and although it was mostly over by the time we got there, most of the vendors and growers either didn't show up at all, or left before we arrived. But we found some locally-grown spinach, bacon, and Italian sausage that I'm sure we'll put to good use. I nearly always run into someone I know whenever I go to the market, and that person is often Deborah, and today was no exception. Deborah remarked that only the truly committed come even in the rain.

Perhaps next week, the weather will be better, the growers will be there, the vendors will be vending, and we'll start up the Local Food Small Group for real.

Today the Local Food Small Group met and made butternut squash soup. We also decided to have mashed potatoes, and naturally, we felt that we had to have habanero-mango salsa to go with the soup. Because what goes better with squash and potatoes than salsa? Well, I suppose there are a lot of things we could have done that would have made a lot more sense, but some of us are insane and really like habaneros. So we did it anyway.

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Last year, we started a Local Food Small Group here at the Wesley Foundation. What we do is we get together on Saturday morning, buy some locally grown food at the farmer's market, and then cook it and eat it.

Why the focus on local food, you might ask? It is better for the environment than food manufactured on mega-farms and shipped across the country in gas-guzzling trucks. It is good for social justice reasons to support local farmers, and helps us remain connected to the food we eat and the community around us. And, of course, it is healthier and tastes better than food shipped half way across the world in a can. And some of us, like me, need to learn how to eat our vegetables.

In addition to trying to eat food that is locally grown, we also try to learn how to cook it together. We are not world-class chefs, but a group of like-minded people who want to teach ourselves how to cook. We try to use recipes and cookbooks that don't simply tell us what to do, but also explain how to do it, and explain why the recipe works the way it does.

We started talking about forming a group like this last fall during a retreat on simple living, where, among other things, we talked about food, and how our choices about what and how to eat play an important role in our lives. That spring, many of us went on a mission trip to Yuma, Arizona, where we worked at food banks and saw a little of how migrant farm workers live, and how lettuce and broccoli are grown in the desert to support America's demand for out-of-season foods at all times of the year. Wouldn't it be simpler and more natural to eat things that are in season, and locally grown, instead of supporting this system of mega-farms?

So after we got back from Arizona, we started the local foods small group. It's a small thing: we're not starting a revolution or anything, and we aren't even changing our own lives that dramatically by eating locally grown food once a week. But it's a start.

Today we made Roasted Stuffed Tomatoes, which is the recipe pictured on the front cover of The Best Recipe's Perfect Vegetables. I bought tomatoes and garlic at the Charlottesville City Market. A friendly farmer threw in eight habaneros for free, despite the fact that I don't have Alex's Virgin of Guadalupe bag. I hear Alex was visiting a farmer's market in Dallas while we were shopping and cooking in Charlottesville, so he (and his Virgin of Guadalupe shopping bag) were with us in spirit. In any case, I'm not sure what I will do with eight habaneros.

We began by coring and seeding the tomatoes, sprinkling the insides with salt, and letting them sit upside-down for a few minutes to drain as much of the juice out as possible, so that the stuffing won't get too soggy. The salt helps suck the juices out through the power of osmosis.

We toasted the bread, dried it in the oven, and shredded it into crumbs in a food processor. We then combined the bread crumbs with grated Parmesan, chopped basil, olive oil, and pepper. (I grew the basil on my front porch, and the Parmesan came from the Main Street Market.) After cleaning the last bit of juice out of the tomatoes, we stuffed them with the bread crumb mixture, and baked at 350 for twenty minutes.

I was happy with the way they came out. Ours did not look nearly as pretty as the tomatoes in the picture: the skins cracked and split a little, perhaps because we used too much force when cleaning the insides out of the tomatoes. But they tasted fine. And we made it almost entirely out of local ingredients. My mother is puzzled as to why someone would ruin a perfectly good tomato by cutting the core out and replacing it with something else, but I was quite happy with the result, and it's a recipe I'll probably try again.

Today we made chicken enchiladas with mole sauce. No, we did not use real moles: mole sauce (pronounced something like "molay") is a Mexican sauce made with tomatoes, chiles, almonds, and Mexican chocolate, among other things. Our recipe was based on one from Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen, although we did not follow it exactly.

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