Our official Christmas dinner would be on the 26th, when my brothers returned from visiting with their in-laws, but I’d planned a Christmas day mini-feast for my mom and dad and me. I’d bought a plump ‘Amish’ chicken from a local butcher shop, and took stock of what was on hand in my mom’s cupboard: potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, spaghetti squash. But about the details of my menu I dawdled. “I’ll just run to the grocery store in the morning to get what I need” I thought.

When I got up on Christmas morning I made a quick list, just a few items to fancy things up: some fresh herbs to stuff inside the chicken; some mushrooms to sauté with the spaghetti squash; chicken stock for extra gravy; a green veggie for an additional side dish.I hopped in my car and  headed for the store. But every supermarket was surrounded by a vast, empty expanse of parking lot.  My errand was in vain. I was incensed. I just couldn’t comprehend that there was nowhere to get my hands on some fresh parsley.

I still needed to get dinner on the table though, so I calmed myself down and got to work. And I realized pretty quickly that a dinner made from what I had on hand was going to turn out just fine. This was, after all, the Midwest. No one was going to care if the roasted chicken wasn’t thyme-scented.

There was milk and butter to make the mashed potatoes creamy. There was brown sugar, butter and flour for a tasty, streusel topping for the sweet potatoes (made from this excellent Epicurious recipe). Without mushrooms, I turned to a trick my girlfriend taught me to give the spaghetti squash a boost: slowly caramelized onions. I found carrots and maple syrup in the fridge and made glazed carrots. There was plenty of gravy for the three of us from the pan drippings augmented with a splash of the potato water. I had homemade applesauce I’d brought from home and sourdough bread from my Brooklyn neighborhood. And to keep true to my Mennonite roots I made a relish tray from the Amish cheese and sweet pickles my mom had on hand for the next day’s big feast. For dessert there were Christmas cookies. Mini Christmas Dinner was a robust, simple, homey success.

And what’s more, since I didn’t have herbs to wash or mushrooms to slice or any of my other fancy extra touches to deal with, dinner was simpler, more manageable, and made it to the table on time (well, the chicken roasted a little slower than expected, but that’s a different story). The relative simplicity of the meal meant fewer dishes, lowered stress, and a reliable serving time. And it really didn’t short-change the flavor of the meal. It’s my culinary lesson for the new year: sometimes simple is the way to go.

Farmers Market Winter Warm Up
Wednesday, December 7, 7 – 10 p.m.
The Bell House
149 7th Street, Brooklyn (between 2nd and 3rd Ave.)
Tickets, $40
www.grownyc.org

Join farmers market operators, GrowNYC’s Greenmarket and Harvest Home for an end-of-season party to wring out a soggy year and plant some hope for a strong harvest in 2012. Warm up to winter and dance our regional farmers into the night with music by Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens and Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band at the Bell House.

All proceeds benefit the Greenmarket and Harvest Home farmers who were hardest hit by Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee

• Featuring live performances by Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens (8 p.m.) and Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band (9 p.m.)
• ‘Cookbook Library’ silent auction, featuring 25 new titles by Mario Batali, Melissa Clark, Paula Wolfert and many more
• Passed hors d’oeuvres by Great Performances featuring seasonal bounty, as well as cheese, pickles and baked goods provided by local farmers marketproducers
• Cash bar, with $3 Brooklyn Lager on special all night

I was in bread heaven. Every variety was delicious, and much more interesting than the sandwich loaves I’d learned to make from the Joy of Cooking. Once, I overheard one of my Carroll Gardens neighbors – an affluent newcomer, not one of the long-time Italian residents – actually complaining about the bread from these bakeries – not as good, apparently, as what she was used to getting in Manhattan. I was appalled. “Spoiled yuppie,” I thought. “Can’t appreciate anything.” How could anyone want bread better than this? What bread could be better?

Five or six years ago my brother Joe wore out his hip and went in for a new one. Housebound during his recovery, he passed the time making bread, following the recipe for Pain au Levain in the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking cookbook. On a visit to his place I tasted one of these loaves, and I was shocked. My brother is a good cook and an experienced baker, but even so I was surprised by the rich, deep flavor of the bread he’d made.

To leaven his bread, instead of packaged commercial yeast he’d used a levain – a sourdough culture made only whole wheat flour and water left out to capture yeast from the air. The flavor of that bread stayed with me, and this summer I resolved, once the weather cooled, to try and make my own. I raised my own levain, carefully feeding it twice a day until it was bubbly & lively, then began using it to bake my own loaves. I’ve just finished my forth batch, and am very – and increasingly – pleased with the results. It’s a hearty bread with more depth of flavor than I find even in my beloved neighborhood Italian bakeries. It’s the sort of bread, I guess, that my Manhattan-expat neighbor was pining for.

Pain au levain has been my introduction to artisanal bread-making: using natural leavening in place of commercial yeast, and using slow, traditional techniques for proofing, kneading and shaping the loaves. A loaf of pain au levain takes all day to make, with lots of hands-on attention required during much of that time.

These days the fancier food shops all sell plenty of Brooklyn-made artisanal bread. I can walk up the street to the Brooklyn Kitchen and buy a beautiful loaf from Roberta’s or from Scratch Bread. But I’m happy to be making my own. It’s cheaper (though probably not by all that much: keeping my levain fed and healthy ensures I’ll go through a $5 bag of King Arthur flour every week or two, whether I’m baking or not), and there’s a lot of satisfaction in a pulling well-formed loaf out of my oven. But more than that, what really draws me to baking bread this way is how alive and natural it is. My bowl of bubbling levain is a mini-garden, and I’m cultivating flavor and nutrition that’s been coaxed from the very air of my kitchen. Like eating produce grown from the soil of my backyard (if only I had one), baking with my levain seems more than a little miraculous.

I’m only at the very beginning of what I’ll learn about these venerable old breads and their techniques and traditions. I’m excited about what I’ll discover, and happy to know I’ll be eating lots of great-tasting bread along the way.

Making the broth is simple: puree corn kernels together with a bit of water and a chopped shallot (onion will also work if that’s all you’ve got). Strain this through a sieve and flavor it. I’ve used this broth to cook a few different kinds of fish, but flounder has come out my favorite. Its flat fillets poach quickly, and its delicate sweetness matches well with the sweet corn broth. If you can’t find flounder, halibut or sole or just about any whitefish will work.

White rice makes a perfect accompaniment for this dish since it soaks up the extra broth nicely. In these photos though, I served it with roasted thin-sliced potato and zucchini disks, presented in a sweet delicata squash shell. Pretty, and tasty, but not as good at soaking up the extra corn broth, which really tastes too good to waste.

Try as I might I never succeeded in getting a good photo of this dish. On the plate, I promise doesn’t look nearly so much like cafeteria food these photos might make you think. I’ll have another chance soon though, even after the last of this season’s corn is picked. I expect this dish to work quite well with the corn I put up for the winter in my freezer.
Read the Recipe for Corn Poached Flounder Fillets Here

Also: we will be accepting cash, credit and debit donations at the Info Tent all day to benefit farmers impacted by Irene (http://www.grownyc.org/relief). Please show your support. Find us between 8am to 3pm on Union Ave. btwn Driggs and N. 12th St. For more info visit: http://www.grownyc.org/greenpointgreenmarket

Good afternoon Brooklyn. Below is a list of tomorrow’s events at your local Greenmarket, continued post-Irene information, and upcoming events happening in the city with Greenmarket. We hope to see you all out tomorrow. It’ll be a beautiful day for sure.

Tomorrow (Saturday Sept 17) at 11am come by the Information Tent to learn how to make and sample some Punjab Corn Chutney by Drake Page of The DP Chutney Collective. http://thedpchutneycollective.blogspot.com/ Market open from 8am – 3pm on Union Ave btwn Driggs and N. 12th St.

Upcoming Benefit Events for Greenmarket and our Farmers:

Sunday, September 25, 2011 – Dine Out Irene
At Participating Restaurants in New York City
Dine Out Irene is a one-time event on September 25, 2011, benefiting New York-area farms that have been hard hit by the hurricane. Participating restaurants are asked donate up to 10% of the day’s sales (brunch/dinner, or both) to aid local farms. The funds will go directly to GrowNYC and Just Food, who will distribute them to area farmers that need hurricane relief. Dine Out Irene is still recruiting restaurants to join the effort. If you are a restaurant and would like to participate, please contact Gabriella Gershenson at dineoutirene@gmail.com. For a current list of participants, visit dineoutirene.com.

Saturday, September 24, 6-9 p.m. – Rogowski Farm Barn Dance and BBQ!
Rogowski Farm
329 Glenwood Road, in Pine Island New York 10969
Adults $10.00 / Children age 6 to 12 $5.00 Children age 5 and under – free
Join in on the fun at Rogowski Farm for a real good old fashioned barn square dance & BBQ offering you a slice of Americana from years gone by for everyone to enjoy. Food fresh off the BBQ will be for sale before and during the dance. Music and dancing start at 7 p.m.

Sunday, September 25, 1-4 p.m. – Warwick Farm Aid
Warwick Valley High School
89 Sanfordville Road
Warwick, NY 10990
Warwick farmers were hit hard by hurricane Irene and we will be raising $25,000 by 9/25/2011 to benefit our local farmers. From 1:00 to 4:00 will be an open house with family events, music, story tellers, and more. The main concert is 4:00pm to 9:00pm. Please join us for a day of music, fun, and most importantly support for our local farmers.

Sunday, September 25, noon – 6 p.m. – 8th Annual Bradley Farm Party
Tickets, $20
317 Springtown Rd
New Paltz, NY 12561
Featuring great southern BBQ and pierogies made with Ray’s potatoes, live music, hayrides and a new petting zoo. This year, we may even get to play chicken sh*t bingo!

Monday, September 26-October 2 – Dine In Irene
Location: Your Home
Shop your neighborhood Greenmarket for the best of the harvest produce, then invite your friends over for dinner. Charge by the plate for your party, or host a potluck and ask guests to bring a market-sourced dish and a donation. All funds collected will be donated by the various Dine In hosts to the Greenmarket farmer relief fund. Register your Dine In on www.bloggerswoborders.org/dineinirene.

Dear Greenmarket Community,

We will learn about the full extent of the damage caused by Tropical Storm Irene in the days and weeks to come, as the waters begin to recede from upstate farms. The Black Dirt region is still flooded, Sullivan County and Ulster County have seen significant damage, and there are parts of Greene County that no longer exist. We estimate that 80% of Greenmarket farmers have been impacted, with about 10% reporting severe loss – 80-100% of their products. This couldn’t have happened at a worse time of year – as you know, September is when our farmers make the money they need to sustain their farm businesses. It is too late in the season to re-plant, and in addition to the great summer harvest that typically arrives in September, these farmers have lost their winter storage crops as well – beets, onions and squash – the products that sustain year-round sales.

Markets were open at 5 a.m. the day after the storm, and we are encouraging residents to support regional farmers first and foremost by shopping at Greenmarket. Some of the farmers you have forged strong relationships with over the years may not be back at the markets this season due to the aftermath of the storm, but we will do everything we can to ensure that they return to market in the spring of 2012. In the mean time, we don’t anticipate that our markets will be impacted in terms of the quality or the variety of products you have come to expect.

We have set up a donation page on the GrowNYC website, which you can find at www.grownyc.org/blog. We plan to have a message board up on our website by this weekend, where those seeking assistance (volunteer help, or in-kind donations) and those who are ready to volunteer can be put in touch. If you have any questions, please reach out to our office: 212-788-7476.

Greenmarket farmers are a resilient group of individuals, who have weathered many storms prior to this one. Thanks to an incredible community of shoppers and supporters, we’ll help our regional growers get through to a strong recovery.

Also, tomorrow at Greenpoint/McCarren Park Greenmarket, we will be doing several fun surveys, along with frying up some amazing zucchini blossoms with Brooklyn’s own Carina Molnar, local food lover extraordinaire. Swing by the information tent and check us out! Cooking demo will start at 11am. Union Ave. between Driggs Ave. and N. 12th St. For more information visit: http://www.grownyc.org/greenpointgreenmarket

But wilted greens is a problem there’s a solution for. And it’s a simple one. Just wash out your sink and fill it with ice water. Untie your bunch of greens and drop them in. Wait 30 or 40 minutes. Pull them out of their chilly bath and drain them on clean kitchen towels. Problem solved: your greens are proud once more.

“Oh why bother,” you say. “They’re the same leaves even if they’re wilted, aren’t they? Can’t I just chop them up and cook them like they are?” You can, of course, especially if you feel like you must punish yourself for not wrapping them up better in the first place. But in a more forgiving mood you’ll agree that perking up your greens in an ice water bath makes them easier to handle, makes them cook better, and gives them back their crispy texture and fresh flavor. It’s worth the time and the ice cubes.

Fiddleheads, along with ramps, are among the very first green things to appear in the farmers markets after a long winter of apples and turnips from cold storage.  And like ramps, fiddleheads are foraged, not farmed.  They’re truly a crop that’s more organic than organic: not only are they grown without agricultural chemicals, they’re grown without agriculture! They simply appear, as soon as the sun and the soil is warm enough. To maintain the crop year after year, the forager needs only to pick some, not all, of the delicate fern-tops, so that the ferns will live on to grow again next spring.

Batter-frying fiddleheads poses a problem: how to coat them with batter without hiding their distinctive, curlicue shape? I started by thinning out the batter with a little carbonated water, but still when dunked into it the fiddleheads became shapeless blobs that could’ve been beer-battered chunks of anything. While I stood scratching my head, my girlfriend Karol devised a smart technique: instead of dunking them completely in the batter, she swirled them gently in a thin layer of batter poured onto a plate. Perfect: this allowed just enough batter to cling to the fiddleheads, while still letting their spiral figures show through.

The aioli was simple and straightforward and relied entirely on ingredients I had on hand: garlic, salt, an egg yolk, olive oil and a lemon. My dream to was to make a seasonal aioli from spring garlic, but I couldn’t find any, not even at Dean & Deluca, so this time around ordinary garlic had to do. Since I didn’t have garlic greens to give it a spring-green hue, I improvised with some finely chopped chives. The result was fresh tasting and just garlic-spiked enough. Making it was so easy I’ll think twice before picking up that next jar of flat-flavored mechanical mayo from the grocery store.

The final dish was a real springtime treat – or, in this case, a pre-springtime treat. I hope to try the recipe again as soon as I find some locally-harvested, truly seasonal fiddleheads at the market – if spring ever gets here!

Here’s the Recipe for Beer-battered Fiddleheads with Green Aoili.

“Yogurt cheese” is just yogurt that’s been drained and pressed to give it a thick, spreadable consistency. I use it like cream cheese as a spread on banana bread or scones or biscuits for a quick breakfast. Unlike cream cheese it’s spreadable at fridge temperature. And it’s got all those famous yogurt health benefits in place of the stabilizers and preservatives needed to hold together a package of Kraft’s Philadelphia brand. I think it tastes better too: fresher, brighter, less gummy. Its tangy flavor is less neutral than cream cheese though, so it may not be ideal for some of those favorite cream cheese recipes.

To make it you need a large piece of cheese cloth, a colander, and something heavy – say, a big can of tomato sauce. Lay the cheese cloth in two or three layers inside the colander, leaving plenty of overhang at the colander’s edges. Set the colander over a large bowl and pour 1 quart of plain yogurt onto the cheesecloth. Take one of the overhanging edges and lay it flat over the yogurt; repeat with the remaining edges so that the yogurt is completely covered. Set a small plate on top of the folded cheesecloth and set the weight on top of the plate. Set aside and allow to drain for 3 or 4 hours or overnight in the fridge. Remove the yogurt cheese from the cheesecloth and keep it in a sealed container in the fridge. (I still haven’t figured out what to do with the sour whey that drains off. It’s got to be good for something.)

Mostly, I’ve eaten the unflavored yogurt cheese as-is, relying on the scone or banana bread underneath it to supply the extra tastiness. The possibilities for flavorings are endless though. I mixed maple syrup and finely chopped walnuts into one batch with great success, and I sweetened another batch with some chopped farm-canned apricots. Simply spreading the unflavored cheese on toast and topping it with a layer of marmalade works great too. Vanilla and honey are flavorings I haven’t tried yet but that  surely would work very nicely. And what about savory flavors? Roasted garlic? Sure! Curry powder? Why not? And I’ll bet a handful of chopped dill would make it ready for that ultimate cream-cheese-replacement test: lox. Stay tuned to see if it works!