9 posts tagged “amelia saltsman”

Organic produce isn’t always better, argues the Los Angeles Times’ Russ Parsons.  The organic versus conventional debate is more complex than it seems.  Eugenia Bone teaches us about canning and preserving food in small batches.  Plus, sommelier Stacie Hunt tells us about new wines from some very interesting producers.  The wines are included in two wine flights Stacie put together for Good Food subscribers.  And Amelia Saltsman shares a recipe for Eggplant Caviar.

Russ Parsons and I will be chatting at the LA Times Pavilion on Saturday at 4 pm.  For food and cooking, where else would you go but the Cooking Stage. Here's the lineup:

Amelia Saltsman, author of The Santa Monica Farmers Market Cookbook went to the opening of farmer Phil McGrath's new farm center in Camarillo.  We asked her to tell us about it.

Respect the land

The clouds gathered, but so did the crowds for the recent grand opening of the McGrath Family Farm Center just off Hwy 101 at Central Ave in Camarillo. Farmer Phil, his wife Joanne, and assorted McGrath relatives welcomed friends to the green-and-white barnlike structure where they now offer their picked-daily certified organic produce. On opening day, tables were brimming with spring beets, carrots, Swiss chard, and masses of strawberries that had been brought straight from the field that morning.

Phil McGrath

Farmers are always looking for more ways to place their crops directly into our hands, and the McGrath’s center adds several alternatives to the family’s participation in Southland farmers’ markets. Besides giving daily access to fresh produce to locals and Angelenos making the 50-mile drive up the coast, the center allows the McGraths to efficiently and more sustainably increase sales.

McGrath Family Farm Center

The Center should boost the family’s CSA (community supported agriculture) program by providing a regular Tuesday pick-up spot for subscribers and facilitate out-of-area participation. That is, McGrath Farm delivers, also on Tuesdays, to organizations with a minimum of 30 participating families. Here’s a model to follow: Sinai Temple in Westwood has created a long-standing partnership with the Ventura County farm. (CSA is a direct partnership between farmer and consumer: in essence, you are buying a share in the crop, by paying a fixed sum each week in exchange for a weekly box of the farm’s yield.)

The Farm Center also doubles as an education resource, with regularly scheduled tours, and more to come. Farmer Phil is passionate about how much seasonal, sustainable teaching needs to be done about how we get our food.

The McGrath family has been farming in Ventura County for five generations on what was originally a huge land grant. Three hundred acres remain, most leased out to large organic strawberry and celery production and the eminent domain swath of US 101 that bisects the farm. The McGrath’s work 30 acres.

Alex Weiser and Laura Avery

But, back to the opening day party. There we were, out on the ancient Oxnard plain that has, some say, the best strawberry-growing soil in the world. Farmer friends were there—Bill and Delia Coleman drove in from Carpenteria, and Alex Weiser stopped in on his way up the coast. Santa Monica Farmers’ Market Supervisor Laura Avery and her dog Emma; market regulars Robin Holding and David Clayberg; and my husband Ralph and I carpooled up for the festivities.

Ventura chef Greg Kurtz (www.kitchencrashers.com) was there, turning out sprouting broccoli pasta salad with carrot vinaigrette, and strawberries with a sweet-salty dipping sauce. The veggie-fueled Green Truck served up bison burgers and sweet potato fries. Folks strolled among the rows of nascent artichokes, beets, and carrots and kids played in the soft soil at field’s edge. By 2 P.M., there was a waiting line to check out at the farm stand, and Todd Hannigan and the Heavy 29s, the first of the afternoon bands, had tuned up on a platform nestled near knee-high sprouting broccoli with a backdrop that would make a set designer green with envy—the repeating arcs of the McGrath Farm’s raspberry hoop houses starkly silhouetted against the darkening sky. 

Laura Avery gets an Easter/Passover recipe from Amelia Saltsman plus a taste of seasonal asparagus.  Adrienne Kane suffered a debilitating stroke at age 21. How food gave her a path to recovery.  Clementine owner Annie Miler celebrates Grilled Cheese Month.  What level of denial is involved in eating meat?  Former Freudian psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson analyzes.  Jenn Savedge resolves the dilemma of reusable water bottle vs. disposable plastic. Korean porridge is just right according to Jonathan Gold.  Lataco.com has a March madness best-taco-place contest.  Vote for your favorite.  What kind of flour to use is important in baking says Cindy Mushet.  And Hynden Walch started a co-op out of her neighbor's backyard gardens.

Guest-blogger and cookbook author Amelia Saltsman hosted a few friends to watch history this morning. Of course, the food was excellent!

Ralph and amelia

My inaugural breakfast— 

      How did you mark this historic morning? As is my habit with big moments, I celebrated the inauguration of Barack Obama with close friends and good food. I was joyously mindful as I planned and prepared each piece of my “inaugural breakfast for eight.” I’ll get to the menu in a moment, but just let me say, this may be the first gathering my husband Ralph and I have ever hosted where there was no chitchat and only the barest of niceties—“Claudia, Tom, meet Anne”—before we turned our full attention to the television.

      No surprise, mine was a market-inspired menu—best way I know

Frittata and proteas

to honor this great land is to pay tribute to America’s farmers. Here’s what we ate: red, white, and blue Weiser-potato frittata made with Schaner Farm eggs and enriched with long-cooked Fairview Garden leeks, fontina cheese, and pancetta. I baked my special-occasion, tender whipping cream biscuits (from Margaret Fox’s Café Beaujolais Cookbook) and served them with three kinds of preserves: Harry’s Berries strawberry, my own Masumoto Elberta peach, and in a tip of the hat to the president’s (!) childhood home, pineapple-mango preserves that I had purchased at the Hana, Maui farmers’ market ten days earlier.  I love a breakfast salad, so I tossed Maggie’s farm winter mix with olive oil and a squeeze of Meyer lemon.

      This being winter, 80-degree weather notwithstanding, I turned the granola-and-yogurt concept into a warm winter crisp of Kennedy dried fruits and Windrose Granny Smith apples topped with yogurt and Pudwill blueberries. Coffee and fresh-squeezed Polito Valencia orange juice rounded out our kitchen breakfast buffet.

      I gave thought, too, to flowers—California proteas (there’s that Hawaiian link again), napkins—red

Whipping cream biscuits

and blue, and the talisman I always keep on the kitchen counter —Della Barr’s nearly hundred-year-old pastry cutter that I had used earlier to make the biscuits. Della was an Illinois farm-wife who made the best farmhouse rolls ever. She was my friend Connie’s grandma, and she lived to be 103. 

      Through the ceremony, Ralph and I and our friends whispered brief comments about the swearing-in bibles, Barack’s speech, Elizabeth’s poem, Dianne’s able hosting, Michelle and Jill’s outfits, and Malia and Sasha’s poise and cuteness. I reveled in the deliciousness of being with dear friends on this auspicious day. And then, just like that, it was time for everyone to go to work.  

Red, White, and Blue Frittata 

1 bunch leeks

1 1/2 pounds red, white or yellow, and blue-fleshed potatoes, such as Red Thumb, Russian Banana Fingerling, and Purple Peruvian

2 ounces pancetta, bacon, or ham, cut in small dice

12 eggs

1/4 pound fontina or other melting cheese, such as Winchester Farms mild gouda, grated

1/2 cup crème fraiche

3 tablespoons milk

6 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons olive oil

Kosher or sea salt and freshly ground white pepper 

Trim leeks, and chop. Heat 2 tablespoons butter over medium low heat in a wide pot. Add leeks and a little salt, stir, and cover pot. Cook gently until leeks are very tender, about 15 minutes. Remove cover and cook a few minutes more to evaporate any liquid that may have formed.  

Steam potatoes over boiling salted water until just tender, about 15 minutes. When cool, peel potatoes and slice lengthwise into 1/4-inch thick slices. 

Cook pancetta in small skillet over medium heat until lightly browned, 3 to 5 minutes. The leeks, potatoes, and pancetta can be prepared a day ahead and refrigerated. 

Preheat oven to 350. In a large well-seasoned ovenproof skillet set over medium heat, heat 2 tablespoons butter and 1 tablespoon olive oil. When sizzling and starting to color, add potatoes in batches, season with salt, and cook until golden brown on one side. Add the remaining butter and oil as needed.  

Meanwhile, briskly whisk together the eggs, crème fraiche, and milk with 1 to 2 teaspoons salt and grindings of white pepper to taste. Stir in leeks, pancetta, and cheese.  

Return the pan to medium heat, and place half the potatoes (alternating red, white and blue) browned side down in the pan in an attractive design. Gently pour the egg mixture over the layer of potatoes and add remaining potatoes to pan. Cook until bubbles appear at the edges of the pan, 2 to 5 minutes. Place skillet in oven and bake until frittata is set, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from oven and let stand 5 to 10 minutes. Loosen edges with a knife or spatula, place a large serving dish over skillet and turn out the frittata. Sprinkle with additional salt if desired. Serve at room temperature.  

Makes 12 servings. 

© 2009, Amelia Saltsman

Marcella and Amelia

I was in San Francisco on Friday to see Marcella and Victor Hazan who are on a rare trip to California to promote Marcella's memoir, Amarcord: Marcella Remembers (Gotham Books, October 7, 2008). Marcella, as she is simply known, caps a six-cookbook career and four decades of teaching Americans to cook Italian with this seventh book, her life story. If you’re wondering, “isn’t Amarcord the title of a Fellini film,” the answer is yes. It’s Romagnolo dialect for “I remember,” and Marcella and Fellini hail from the same northeastern region of Romagna.

Marcella Hazan and Peter Mollman

I was the lone SoCal gal in a roomful of Bay area food folk that gathered in the gleaming Purcell Murray kitchen showroom for lunch and conversation moderated by wine writer Jon Bonne. Marcella, elegantly coiffed and throaty-voiced, told stories of her childhood in wartime Italy, and the ever-dapper Victor read aloud from her book to an audience that included award-winning cookbook authors Niloufer Ichaporia and Flo Braker, advertising guru Sandra Hu, and Peter Mollman, the former Harper production exec who convinced Marcella to write her groundbreaking first book, The Classic Italian Cookbook, and who broke the day’s formality by leaping to the dais and regaling us with stories of wooing the reluctant author to take on that first project.

If you want to know how significant Classic Italian is, ponder this: after 35 years and blended with Marcella’s second book, More Classic Italian Cooking, it is still in hardcover print as The Essentials of Italian Cooking.

I was eager to see the Hazans again. I’d had the privilege of working with them several times as a food stylist and assistant and since our first encounter over scallops with roe still attached (for a photo shoot for 1997’s Marcella Cucina book tour) have always sensed their fondness for my student’s eagerness and home cook’s heart.

Over the years they’ve taught me much more than how to make a great risotto. Whether it was at her side in class, parsing a meal shared in a restaurant, or in our bathrobes over morning coffee when we traveled together, Marcella taught me about cooking’s core: how to lay in flavor in stages—through fearless, deep browning (turn up the heat!), seasoning in stages, and gradually adding liquids to braises and soups so that you don’t end up with “boiled” food. “Wet food,” she’d call dishes that were overly sauced or whose cooks hadn’t patiently built up flavor. Mostly, she and Victor taught me to be rigorously true to my subject and ingredients.

Victor Hazan

I’ve started to read Amarcord. There are no recipes, but the dish descriptions I’ve already encountered are road map enough to send me straight to the kitchen.  What resonates most immediately, as always in their life’s work, is the intertwining of Marcella and Victor’s voices. Marcella has always written her recipes and stories in Italian, in longhand. And Victor has always translated them, but also conveyed their meaning in his own way. To know Marcella and Victor is to hear both very distinctive voices cleanly tumbled together on every page; the essence of a 53-year marriage. Now that’s a cooking lesson.

--Amelia Saltsman, Author of The Santa Monica Farmers Market Cookbook

Occasionally we ask guests to post to our Good Food blog.  Today we're happy to host Amelia Saltsman, author of The Santa Monica Farmers' Market Cookbook: Seasonal Foods, Simple Recipes, and Stories from the Market and Farm.

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Amelia Saltsman

I'm just back from a weekend picking Elberta peaches at the Masumoto Family Farm in Del Rey (some 20 minutes south of Fresno). David "Mas" Masumoto —author of Epitaph for a Peach and more—started a sort of urbanite's educational outreach program with this block of trees.

Elberta Peach Tree

I "share" a tree with a friend with whom I split the two-weekend harvesting and yield.

I could talk your ear off about learning which fruits are ready for harvest, how to recognize "breaking color" (woe be to you if you're color-blind), about the parent-like responsibility of caring for the fruit post-harvest (and I'm only responsible for part of one tree!), and the variations in peaches from year to year. Suffice it to say, this year's specimens are huge; some of my peaches weigh almost a pound each!

A Giant Peach

Old-fashioned Elbertas were once the canning peach because they hold their shape and color. Tasting a ripe Elberta reminds me very much of childhood flavors, without the "heavy syrup." They have golden-orange flesh, a buttery texture, and subtle flavor that are wonderful fresh, sliced on cereal, in yogurt, or over ice cream. The soft flavors harmonize with the milk in a comforting way. A very different experience from today's high-contrast fruit. 

This is my third year working with Elbertas, and I've learned to use them in ways that show off shape and color but don't overpower delicateness—very simple galettes and crisps made with peach halves instead of slices, very little sugar, and few extra ingredients.

 Anyway, I now have 15 boxes of Elbertas (200 pounds?), which represent one quarter of this year's harvest from one tree (I have harvest partners). The first thing I do with the fruit is figure out who else I can share them with. The second is to best-guess sort according to which day they'll be at peak ripeness and then hover over them like a worried mom.

 I confess I love looking at them in their boxes—there's a thrill in the sheer volume and potential for amazing flavor that each piece represents. I'd like to freeze that moment if I could, like a miser hoarding her gold. But the clock is ticking. Here's my favorite peach task—peeling Elbertas. Drop them into boiling water for a few seconds and their fuzzy skins slip right off to reveal glistening, Italian egg-yolk-orange flesh. On some fruits, the skin's crimson kiss penetrates all the way to the meat. The peach is tender enough to split apart with your hands, but I give a quick slice with the paring knife and a twist of the wrist to halve the fruit evenly. Then I easily pull out the pits with my fingers. It takes just a couple of minutes to peel and pit a dozen peaches for a great big peach crisp.

Elberta Peach Crisp