Fiddlehead Facts and Fiction

A couple weeks ago, Enterprise Farm sent us a bag of fiddleheads (which we've enjoyed before). Anna popped one in her mouth while putting the rest of the vegetables away, and then found the note in the bottom of the box:

***Fiddleheads should always be cooked thoroughly before eating.*** Fiddleheads contain a somewhat mysterious toxin that when eaten raw can cause symptoms similar to food poisoning. After a good washing, the greens should always be cooked in boiling water for 15 minutes or steamed for 10 to 12 minutes until tender.

She spat out the partially masticated vegetable, and then helpfully highlighted "toxin," "food poisoning," and "should always be cooked" in the note, which Jack and I found when we decided to eat the fiddleheads a few days later.

We were torn. Fifteen minutes of boiling is not the kind of treatment we would subject any nice tender green vegetable (asparagus, green beans, Brussels sprouts) to, much less our once-a-year fiddlehead treat.

On the other hand. Killing your housemates. Also not our favorite.

To the Internet!

It seems that most of the concerns about eating raw (or lightly cooked) ostrich fern fiddleheads stem from a couple sets of food poisoning cases in 1994. (Oh, actually, here's a more recent case from Alaska.) Because the cause of the food poisoning-like symptoms were not determined, but it is suspected to be a toxin in the ferns that is destroyed or inactivated by heat, we now have these long-cooking requirements. (There may also be some confusion with another type of fern, bracken fern, which does contain carcinogens.)

We split the difference, and steamed our fiddleheads for 6 minutes. Then we mixed them with some homemade hollandaise and fettucine, yum. So, while I can't actually recommend that you not follow well-meaning and Canadian-government-endorsed guidelines, I can add the anecdata that we are still alive and kicking.

(I later asked some fledgling farmers/urban homesteaders for advice, and they also suggested cooking times in the five-minute range.)

Miner's Lettuce

I visited Nathaniel and Ariel at the Farm School last weekend, and they sent me home with a jar of leaf lard, two bottles of homebrew kombucha, a homemade chutney, a shopping bag stuffed with baby kale and miner's lettuce we'd picked, and memories of a fine stinging-nettle pesto. So, score!

Miner's lettuce, or claytonia, is really not at all like lettuce (it has long stems and small leaves). It's a native of California that the forty-niners ate to stave off scurvy. (It's probably more commonly foraged than deliberately grown.) People think it has a kind of spinachy taste and use it mainly in salads; I snapped off the leaves into a glass bowl and let the potluck guests take it from there.

Cold-Oil Sunchoke French Fries

Our first foray into sunchokes, as sunchoke chips, was well received, so when we got a few more in our box a week or two ago, we leveled up to French fries.

I alluded to our new French fry technique last fall but didn't properly describe it. I won't now, either, but the gist is this: Put the fries in a single layer in a pan and add enough oil to just cover them. Then turn the heat on, bring the oil to a gentle boil, and hold them there -- don't stir! -- until the fries look crispy and delicious (maybe 15 minutes). In exchange for your time, you're saved the fuss, muss, and mess of a giant pot of extremely high-temperature oil, not to mention the two-step frying of traditional French fry recipes.

(Here's some fuller explanation of the method from Cook's Illustrated and The New York Times.)

What you see above are mostly potatoes, but that's because the sunchoke fries -- tasting something like a lighter, sweeter, better potato fry -- were first to go.

Mozzarella Making

In exchange for services rendered, Ben got me a cheesemaking kit from the "cheese queen" at New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. It's the very beginner kit, making just two easy fresh cheeses, ricotta and mozzarella, and it claims to include supplies (citric acid, rennet, and salt) sufficient for thirty batches of cheese.

I've tried mozzarella twice now, and I've managed to press the curds into nice soft sliceable mozzarella-tasting balls (I know, they still need more salt). But I haven't figured out how to form curds that are willing to be stretched like taffy (the cheese queen has a microwave method) to achieve the right gooey, stretchable mozzarella texture.

(The problem may be the milk -- I couldn't stomach $8 per gallon for local farm-fresh choices, so I've been using Hood from the drugstore. If you're shopping at the grocery store, organic milks are actually more likely to be ultra-pasteurized -- which spoils them for cheesemaking -- than conventional milks.)

Some friends of ours learned mozzarella coddling properly at a Dave's Fresh Pasta class, and the difference (they brought us a sample) was substantial. I'm hoping to visit some friends -- who have also been having cheesemaking adventures -- at the Farm School for a tuneup before making the next twenty-eight batches.

Triticale

Triticale (trit-uh-KAY-lee) is a wheat-rye hybrid, intended to have the nutritional value of wheat and the ease of growing of rye. It was perfected in the 1960s, so it may be the most modern food we've ever gotten in our farm share (though it perhaps fails Michael Pollan's "Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" rule). Ours was grown by Four Star Farms.

Triticale seems to be used primarily as animal feed, though I've spotted it in co-op-friendly multigrain human foods before (Kashi products, Bob's Red Mill cereals). The Internet is not exactly awash with recipes; many that do exist call for triticale flour or flakes (which we won't be milling at home). Here are a few results for the triticale berries:

Triticale with peanuts and Asian seasonings
Triticale with white beans and kale
Kale and triticale risotto
Triticale risotto

The whole grains look a lot like wheatberries, but they are more rugged and larger (and may require even longer cooking). Bob's Red Mill suggests soaking, then boiling, then letting them rest for a day.

See our previous compilation of wheatberry recipes; I think this triticale will probably end up in a potluck-standard Bittman grain and bean salad.

One Hundred and Five Ways to Cook Cabbage

I was browsing through free Google ebooks, and I happened upon this gem. How to Cook Vegetables by Olive Green was published in 1909. It is exactly (sort of) the CSA cookbook I wish I had -- one that lists inexhaustibly many ways to cook that vegetable that you are so unspeakably tired of receiving in your weekly box. (My particular chore is to cook whatever is left at the end of the week -- that vegetable so unlovely that none of the five of us was inspired to want to eat it in six days of trying.)

Green (a pseudonym) is also the author of such classics as One Thousand Salads, What to Have for Breakfast, and The Spinster Book ("Yet a sensitive spinster is repeatedly astonished at finding her lover transformed into a fiend ...").

Here's a flavor of the recipes.

Mustard

Further on the "vegetables we've never cooked with before" theme, Enterprise Farm sent us mustard greens this week.

"Mustard greens" describes a wide variety of spicy cooking greens, and raw, they were like a promising cross between two of our favorites: arugula (peppery taste you could feel in your nose and throat) and kale (thick stems, sturdy leaves).

I set out to make something like Balsamic-Glazed Chickpeas and Mustard Greens, though I was also assigned to use portabello mushrooms and zucchini in my dish. So: 1) Sear thinly sliced mushrooms and zucchini in a hot wok; set aside. 2) Saute an onion, then add greens and a few tablespoons of broth (I slightly overdid it here), and steam until crisp-tender (and less spicy); remove greens, leaving broth. 3) Add balsamic, soy sauce, and sugar to the broth; reduce; add a can of drained chickpeas. 4) Add back mushrooms, zucchini, and greens to warm through.

I overdid step 4, which meant everything was a little overcooked  and the mustard not really spicy at all. Live and learn.