mellow yellows

I first tasted dandelion wine when I bought a bottle of it at a folksy gift shop in the Amana Colonies (yes, Amana of the appliance fame). The Amana Colonies is an Amish community dating back to 1854. It was settled by the communally living German pietists then known as: The Community of True Inspiration or The Ebenezer Society. Their tenets included avoiding military service and refusal to take an oath. The Amanas are nestled in the middle of what is now a sea of genetically modified corn and soybeans known as the Midwest, more specifically Iowa.

I had wanted something to drink at my campsite that evening. When I opened the bottle, I anticipated something more magic than what met my tongue. It was cloying yellow syrupy stuff, which resembled soft drink concentrate. I poured it out next to my tent, returning it to the earth where she could compost it. I was sure that I’d never get close to it again.

That was fifteen years ago, and now I have been drinking dandelion wine for about two years. The new stuff is stuff I’ve made myself from dandelion blossoms gathered in Chicago. I’m happy to say that it is divine. I am sure now that the colonists actually keep the good stuff in their private cabinets.

Upon mentioning “dandelion wine”, Ray Bradbury usually comes to mind. However, after I heard a radio interview with him a few years back when he passionately made a case to colonize the moon so we can ditch this trashed planet and survive as a race, I got confused. Enough said.

So the point is, I am going to tell you how to make dandelion wine. I encourage you to do this because dandelions pop up everywhere and every place. They are nearly ubiquitous pioneers in our landscapes of disturbed and deprived soils. Consumed, they are a magnificent digestive, aiding the heath and cleansing of the kidneys and liver. Amongst vitamins A, B, C and D, they have a huge amount of potassium.

As a beyond-perfect diuretic, dandelion has so much potassium that when you digest the plant, no matter how much fluid you lose, your body actually experiences a net gain of the nutrient. In other words, folks – dandelion wine is one alcohol that actually helps your liver and kidneys! Generous, sweet, overlooked dandelion…

When you notice lawns and parks spotting yellow, it’s time to gather. The general rule of thumb is to collect one gallon of flowers for each gallon of wine you want to make.

Enjoy your wandering. People will think you quaintly eccentric for foraging blossoms on your hands and knees. Note: collect blossoms (without the stem) that have just opened and are out of the path of insecticides and pesticides.

So here’s how I make dandelion wine…

I pour one gallon boiling water over one gallon dandelion flowers in a large bowl. When the blossoms rise (wait about twenty-four to forty-eight hours), I strain the yellow liquid out, squeezing the remaining liquid out of the flowers, into a larger ceramic or glass bowl. I compost the spent flowers (thanks dandelion!).

Then I add juice and zest from four lemons and four oranges, and four pounds of sugar (4-4-4 = E.Z.). Okay, now what I think is the best part - I float a piece of stale bread in the mixture sprinkled with bread yeast. This technique is used in Appalachian and some European recipes.

Then I toss a dishtowel over it so the mixture can both breathe and the crud floating around my house stays out. I continue stirring the wine several times a day until it stops fermenting. This takes about two weeks or so.

When I am certain it has stopped “working”, I strain, bottle and cork it up and bid it farewell until months later. In fact I wait until the winter solstice, when I can revisit that sunny spring day by drinking it in.

Transition: as such an effective diuretic, dandelion is also know in French as “pis-en-lit” or “pee-in-the-bed”. Which brings me to YELLOW LIQUID #2 … that’s right, pee!

Pee is 95% water and 5% salts and minerals. When it comes out of the body, it’s sterile. Admittedly, I haven’t drunk my first whizz as part of my yogic practice, however, I habitually save my pee to potentize my compost as well as for making a nitrogen-rich fertilizer for my plants. Our bodies are nutrient factories – let’s value our post-consumption products and offer them back to the Mother.

Us humans pee on average a bit more than a quart a day, at a dilution rate of 1:5 (the recipe). Each one of us are producing more than two gallons of free plant fertilizer a day. Or around 750 gallons a year - which is enough fertilizer to grow 75% of an individual’s food needs for that year.

Did you know that most of the algae blooms - whether in the Los Angeles river, the shore of the Great Lakes, the mouth of the Mississippi and many other waterways - are largely due to agricultural run-off of nitrogen fertilizers applied to our corn-fed nation’s farmlands?

Peeing directly into your compost pile is great. So is collecting it in a jar or a bucket and dumping it into the pile later. Not composting? Then just dilute it fresh (remember the recipe again, 1:5) with some water and use it directly on plants or let it oxidize and turn into a nitrate (i.e. leaving it out until it gets nice and dark) and then apply it undiluted. Not only is this something that has been done for ages around the world, it is still being done. Most people are just hush hush about it.

Why are our municipalities cleaning water so we can flush our toilets with it? The separation of the solid and liquid body waste is an extensive and costly process for the water treatment plant and we pay that cost twice by flushing it all away. We have urine blindness…

Before I sign off, I want to put a bug in your ear – this terrific yellow liquid that our own bodies produce can also produce gunpowder. But maybe I’ll approach that topic in other column – or maybe you’ll just have to do the research yourself.

From Eli:

A recipe from Tree:

In the fall giant puffball mushrooms seem to be everywhere ... forests, roadsides, city parks and empty lots. Safe to eat (as long as they are still fresh and white inside), hard to mistake for anything dangerous, but honestly pretty bland.

Generally, I think they work well as a tofu replacement in most recipes. Puffball bacon is my favorite:

Cut the mushroom into thin bacon like strips

Marinate the strips for several hours in tamari or soy sauce with a touch of maple syrup and a bit of nutritional yeast

Heat a lightly oiled pan (an iron skillet works best) over high heat.

When the pan is hot, fry the mushroom bacon until it is almost crispy.

Flip the bacon multiple times while you are frying. It's inevitable that some will stick to the pan, but the burned bacon bits are pretty tasty anyway.

Let the bacon cool in the pan, and it will continue to crisp a little bit.

I love to use the mushroom bacon to make BLTs, but it works great crumpled over salads, or in any recipe that one might use bacon as an accent.

Enjoy.

from Lynn

I like to think that this dessert is something similar to what Midwesterners were making 100 years ago with the rich fruit of the native persimmon. You are especially likely to find persimmon trees in Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, and Illinois in the woods next to old farms. Ask a farmer friend if he or she has any on their property.

The Native American Persimmon is quite small and seedy. They usually get no bigger than the size of a golf ball. The golden, amber fruit ripen mid-autumn and achieve their wonderful sticky sweetness after a few frosts and they start falling from the tree.

You can eat the persimmons just the way they are or, to use in a recipe, you will need to extract the pulp from the skin and seeds. In order to do this, rinse the fruit in water, and mash through a sieve or food mill. A good harvest of about 3-5 pounds of persimmons should yields about 2-3 cups of pulp.

Old Timer’s Persimmon Pudding

This is a really unusual recipe I adapted from the Bear Wallow book on persimmons. They produce a lot of cookbooks of American folk recipes. What makes this recipe unusual is that the pudding is stirred while it is being baked, making the finished version, a dense, chewy, caramelized masterpiece.

2 cups persimmon pulp
1 cup half and half
½ cup melted butter
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 ½ cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
½ tsp grated nutmeg
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. ground cloves

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. In large bowl, mix together wet ingredients: pulp, half and half, melted butter, eggs, and sugar. Mix dry ingredients separately: flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and spices. Mix dry mixture into wet mixture. Stir well. Pour into a greased 9” x 13” pan and bake for one hour. Stir several times while pudding is baking, making sure to fold the crispy edges into the center of the pudding.

from Peter

April 19, 2007

She was a young Chicago nurse with an enviable snap-to-it efficiency and caffeine-saturated rectitude. She was, incidentally, also popping Tums-like candy. Her fiancé was a resident in anesthesiology, one of the most challenging and well-compensated specialties in medicine. These two were leading the classic hectic lifestyle of the upwardly mobile, and they have long since married and settled in a large mansion in the suburbs.

Years ago, my girlfriend and I were house-sitting for the nurse. While preparing pasta in the underused kitchen, I dug a can of Parmesan cheese out of the pantry. I misread the date: it had expired ten years prior, not to mention “Refrigerate After Opening.” I absentmindedly poured some out into a bowl. It was brownish in color; I nearly ruined dinner with it, since it had turned to dust sometime after its expiration date.

There are these households where the home economy should ostensibly meet up with the discernment and finances of the owners, but in many cases the kitchen is a ghost town, populated by darkness. In the suburbs of Austin, Texas, a few summers ago, I sojourned with and cooked for new parents — one of America's top programmers and his wife, a new doctor.

Concerned about global warming, I resisted the 12-mile roundtrip to the supermarket in their SUV. An exercise for me is always to find and quietly exploit the ingredients that the hosts have abandoned — like the heels of dried bread, to use as filler in a casserole; dried fruit and leftover jams, for oatmeal; and the scrapings from a sauce jar, for some marinade or dressing. This seldom fails to elicit a squeal of delight on the tasting, and then a squeal of objection on divulging the recipe.

But what was this huge tray of purple-brown paste taking up an entire shelf in the refrigerator? I felt the urge to engage in some creative reuse. But I was afraid to taste it, it looked so neglected.

The Texas programmer glanced up from his computer. “I was into making matbuha for a while, up until the baby was born,” he said. He had lived in Israel and returned with a penchant for Middle-Eastern fare. Matbuha is a fairly simple but rich sauce made with red peppers and tomatoes, typically seasoned with olive oil and fresh cilantro. In a class of condiments with tahini, baba ghanouj, and hummus, it is eaten with pita.

“This batch was too spicy,” he explained. But the baby was six months old! I quietly threw out the desiccated concoction to make room in the refrigerator. Still, the pantry shelves were piled high with the costly abandoned ingredients of his experimentation. I ended up leaving Austin with cases of Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce which they now had no use for, tending now to lean towards the Atkins diet.

I had shown the man years before how to make matbuha without much fanfare, from a few fresh ingredients; what had caused him to get so elaborate with the sauces and spices? Surely this is also what had caused him to abandon his efforts, and to move to Atkins, the last resort for many Americans who have lost touch with their natural diets.

There is an emptiness in these homes. “Waste, Want” should be the new cross-stitched plaque adorning these kitchens, these lavish but lonely corners of the homes of some of America’s busiest and most successful people. I have cooked in a hundred of these kitchens. The kitchen is typically an afterthought to the yawning jaws of the TV room, whose wide screen invites anything but scratch cooking.

On the Food Network and elsewhere, we are greeted with a vast and ever-expanding legion of food experts, available 24 hours a day. There is a bizarre hypocrisy on the part of the hosts of these shows. On the one hand, they try to treat informally and casually the everyday preparation of their meals. After all, they’re supposed to be teaching us. On the other hand, these meals are always made with blushing virtuosity, from extravagant ingredients, and served in the matching crockery with the utmost casual pomp.

The Barefoot Contessa will throw together a pasta, but it will always be with shrimp and white wine. The Naked Chef — what enviable names! — will compose something with flair, but it can’t really be done without the finest of fresh ingredients and a zip around London in the old blue Vespa. Emeril or Martin Yan need only utter some humorous syllable and we dutifully cheer and applaud their genius. Between the hoity-toity ingredients and the insufferable elegant simplicity — in both their skill and their creations — we are sighing with admiration but left stuck to the couch, in so much awe that we are afraid to move.

Here in America, we have a bounty of means and such wonderful wholesome ingredients as to put new immigrants to their knees and weeping on their first sight of the supermarket shelves — yes, I have witnessed this poignant phenomenon. These are things which most of the backward world prays to have. Yet, while they pray, we leave it in our refrigerators to spoil.

Let me say a prayer for myself. Behold my religion: I have made a commitment to get my sorry ass into the kitchen every day. Let the astronauts binge on the Space Food Sticks: my food will come less often from a package than straight from the ground, while I have the strength to pull it up and put it into a pot. There is no excuse for someone with two legs and two arms not to cook his own food every day.

If necessary, I shall move the couch into the kitchen so that I can better know that place. It will become my new living room. Most importantly, I must commit to spending liberal time being more aware of my own perishables. The new boob tube in this house will be my own refrigerator-freezer, tuned to my own 24-hour food channel.

Everything will be prepared and eaten perfectly, just as long as it is prepared and eaten. It need not be expertly or elegantly made, only consumed with gratitude. We have discarded prayer before meals, and even where it survives, the words too often have a tinny sound, like the speedy disclaimer at the end of a car commercial. But I will quietly think a little mantra at every bite.

And I will pay my respects to the creatures who in turn created these things on my behalf. For the milk that spoils I will say a dirge for the cow who generously spilt it out of her swollen body for me. For the next rotten egg I will beg forgiveness of the white hen trapped in some cage somewhere. For each slice of discarded bread I will think of a wheatie sweating in his combine, floating away his endless hours across the Kansas gold. I will strive every day not to let these miracles happen in vain.