Ingredients

• 4 peaches
• 1 cup fresh ricotta
• honey
• 2 Tablespoons thyme, picked
• extra virgin olive oil
• sea salt

Preparation

Cut the peaches in half and remove the stones. If they are not too soft you can twist the cut peach to get at the stone more easily. Toss the halved peaches with olive oil and honey and place on a sheet tray, cut side down.

Roast in a 400 degree oven until just soft but not mushy, about 10 minutes. Removes peaches from the oven and let cool.

Place peaches on a plate and put a spoonful of ricotta on each half. Drizzle with additional honey and olive oil, a sprinkle of sea salt and a little thyme. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Photo credit: Bob Krasner

Recipe Source

The Diner Journal

]]> http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/07/recipe-peaches-with-ricotta-honey-and-thyme/feed/ 0 http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/05/3-ways-to-use-leftovers/ http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/05/3-ways-to-use-leftovers/#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 03:39:10 +0000 David Becker http://friendofthefarmer.com/?p=2019 To which School of Leftovers do you belong?

1. Throw them out immediately because you know you’ll never eat them.
2. Put them in airtight containers to be thrown out after they have had a chance to putrefy.
3. Anticipate the quick and easy meal that you can make in one-quarter of the time—thanks to leftovers.

I was a follower of the first and second principals but I’ve recently converted to the third.

When I was growing up my parents prodded me to finish my dinners by invoking starving Biafran children. But even after that admonition I often didn’t finish my meal—and yet I never saw the dish in a new incarnation the next day. All those calories wasted!

Working with leftovers tends to be a great way to stretch a tight budget. It turns out you’re making a huge environmental contribution in the process. More on that in a minute.

The great chefs, like Jacques Pepin, know that to make the most of their food budget they need to be creative:

1. Leftover salmon can be transformed into salmon cakes with little more than Old Bay Seasoning, an egg, onion and old bread. I like to use Panko breadcrumbs for a crunchy exterior.
2. Turkey can be given a second life when served with mole sauce.
3. Almost any vegetable will live happily ever after in pasta primavera.

In the process you save time and money, and feel as smart as any celebrity chef. Take those savings and buy a new book, kitchen utensil, even a new outfit.

Stop Us Before We Toss Again

When you reuse rather than toss you’re cutting down on the millions of tons of food that goes into the waste stream every year. Fully 12% of the entire US waste stream—both residential and commercial—is made up of food waste.

An estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption is discarded, according to a government study. It happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen.

The Department of Agriculture estimated that 96.4 billion pounds of the annual 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. That’s 3,000 pounds per second or one pound per person every day. With 36 million people going hungry, we can do better.

Groups like City Harvest in New York do step in, annually saving more than 26 million pounds of excess food from establishments across the country. A tray of lasagna that was never served, bread that’s a day old, tomatoes with a minor bruise that would be great in sauce or a salad—all can be repurposed.

City Harvest’s 17 trucks and three bikes pick up food from sources as varied as the St. Regis Hotel and Trader Joe’s, 7-Eleven and Goldman Sachs, Le Bernardin and the Delta Shuttle. The food is delivered to 600 community programs at a cost of 22 cents per pound.

Two More Ways to Recycle Leftovers

If you didn’t make that casserole or shred the pork for a sandwich, you still have options. Of course, you can freeze it and feast another day (be sure to put a date on the bag).

Or, turn food waste into lovely compost for your garden. There are small sink-side composting units for urban living and larger ones for those with more outdoor space.

When I calculated how much effort goes into food production and how many people go without, coming up with a simple strategy to transform leftovers into something tasty seemed like a pretty easy thing to do.

Useful Links:

City Harvest

Compost: An Incredible Transformation

How Long Can I Store _________ Before It Is No Longer Safe to Eat?

Clever Composting for Urban Dwellers

75 Things You Can Compost, But Thought You Couldn’t

I am looking for one in particular — the dandelion.  The French named this flower dens leonis, or “lion’s tooth” referring to the jagged points on the leaves. You know the yellow flower or the puff ball after the flower goes to seed.  But dandelions offer more than momentary entertainment or irritation.

Weed ‘Em and Eat

In France people grow dandelions to eat, just as we might grow lettuce. It’s best to collect dandelion leaves in early spring and then harvest again in late fall. As Wildman Steve Brill tells us:

“Dandelion greens are wonderful in salads, sauteed or steamed. They taste like chicory and endive, with an intense heartiness overlying a bitter tinge. People today shun bitter flavors; they’re so conditioned by overly sweet or salty processed food. But in earlier times, we distinguished between good and bad bitterness. Mixed with other flavors, as in a salad, dandelions improve the flavor.”

Some good news, too, for locavores and for nervous parents. There are no poisonous look-alikes for dandelions.

And it’s a rare weed indeed that  has a book named after it:  Dandelion Wine is Ray Bradbury’s recreation of a boy’s childhood, combining moments from his life and his imagination.

“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”

I tried dandelion wine for the first time at Moon on the Pond Farm, where farmer Dominic Palumbo had just steeped a pot of dandelion flowers and was adding orange and lemons to a huge crock.

Dominic Stirs Summer with a Spoon

Then he poured a glass from a bottle of dandelion wine that had been produced last summer.

The wine was light—Prosecco light— and captivating. I wanted more. I could imagine serving it to friends with fish. Or a summer salad with watermelon. Sipping it by a lazy stream as the sun disappears into a warm, steamy night. More.

It’s time to make my own. So I am heading out late Sunday morning to pick a bag of dandelion flowers and try my hand at bottling summer.

Further Reading and Recipes

Jack Keller: More Than 42 Dandelion Wine Recipes

Concentrated Sweetness

But don’t start whipping up a stack of flapjacks immediately: just like any other type of farming, turning sap into syrup takes time and work.

First you’ll need a maple at least 10” in diameter. One tap hole can yield five to 15 gallons of sap, though under ideal conditions a tap may yield between 40 and 80 gallons. Depending on its girth, a tree may support up to three tap holes.

Forty gallons of sap boils down to just one gallon of syrup. To accomplish that boiling-down, some Native Americans heated rocks and dropped them into hollowed-out logs filled with sap. Hard work, but think of the reward.

A “Tree Whose Juice Weeps”

In fact at one time maple syrup and sugar were an important part of the North American Indian economy. When impatiently awaiting the bounty of Spring, a happy distraction is welcome; so are the nutrition and much-needed calories.

In 1663 English chemist Robert Boyle described the process this way: “there is in some parts of New England a kind of tree whose juice weeps outs its incision, if it is permitted slowly to exhale away superfluous moisture, doth congeal into a sweet and saccharine substance.”

Tapping a Sugar Maple Tree, Sharon, CT

Verily I say maple syrup rocks.

After tapping your trees you’ll need a hobby-sized evaporator, ideally something you’re going to use outside or in a sugar shack. Boiling 40 gallons down to a single gallon involves a lot of moisture and fuel. A super-sweet sauna of sorts.

Your sap becomes syrup when it reaches 66% sugar content. You’ll know that because you will already own a candy thermometer. Usually, the boiling temperature is 219 degrees Fahrenheit, or 7 degrees above the boiling point of water. Different altitudes can have different temperatures.

Maple Sap Becoming Syrup

Let’s Get Cooking

An excellent source of minerals like calcium, potassium, manganese, magnesium, phosphorus, and iron., maple syrup is a true organic product and a great way to sweeten dishes quickly with a far more complex flavor than white or brown sugar.  Go with Grade B and you’ll get that richer flavor for a few bucks less per quart.

If there is still snow on the ground and it hasn’t taken a dingy tone, try this quick dessert I first had in Montreal:

Pour hot syrup on a line of fresh snow. Then use a stick to roll up the syrup. According to one site the French call this the “Tire” dessert or Maple Taffy.

I like Brussels sprouts prepared simply, but they rose to another dimension when I added maple syrup.

Toss the Brussels sprouts in the oven with some olive oil until they’re heading toward crispy. Then it’s over to the stovetop where I add salt, pepper and maple syrup.  Some people like a bit of crispy bacon. The vegetal bitterness of the spouts is perfectly balanced by the other flavors. A family favorite that, after a little experimentation, you’ll do with your eyes closed.

Sweet.

Resources

How to Tap Maple Trees and Make  Syrup

Sugars are closely related to starches. In fact, enzymes produced by the plant can convert starches (stored food) to sugars (usable food) when doing so is necessary for the plant’s survival. This is why parsnips are almost always sweeter when harvested after a hard frost: the plant, feeling threatened by cold weather, has started converting its stored food to food that can be used immediately.

Properly selected and prepared, all root vegetables turn sweet. What makes root vegetables so fascinating is the diversity of secondary attributes they possess. In general these fall into two main categories, the sharp and the colorful. The first typifies the flavors of vegetables such as radishes, kohlrabi, rutabagas, turnips and horseradish and comes from a combination of a mustardy sulfurous compound that in nature functions as a defense mechanism. Other roots, while lacking in inner fire, are among the most vibrantly colored members of the vegetable kingdom.

Root vegetables adapt well to both moist- and dry-heat cooking methods. Moist heat, such as that from boiling or steaming, softens the vegetables’ starch and cellulose more quickly and keeps colors brighter and flavors purer and more direct. Dry-heat cooking (primarily roasting) takes longer. The colors tend to be darker and not quite so fresh, and the flavors developed are more complex.”

Excerpted from the excellent book by Russ Parsons How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table

Recipe for Turnip Appetizer