I hesitate to admit that yesterday’s visit was my first ever but, indeed, that is the truth. We live so close to the Interstate Farmers Market that my not going every week is unforgivable.I do believe, however, that I will be making a regular habit of cruising down to the market on Wednesday evenings. Though the market is small – smaller than any other area market I’ve seen – there are some really, really great things to be had over here.

Since we’re skipping town and since there really is enough food in the house, we had only planned to buy some fruit. More than anything, I just wanted to check the scene out. I should have prepared better for my own weaknesses when faced with gorgeous produce and aromatic prepared foods. I should have left my dollars at home. But then, you see, I would not have made the following discoveries:

• Sticking with our original plan, we did pick up some fruit – a pint basket of Hood strawberries and one of cherries from Leopold Farms. This morning, the strawberries are turning the syrup in my breakfast bowl. The cherries are blood-colored and taste nothing – nothing – like cough syrup. Since they’re so ripe, the strawberries will need to be eaten today. I am preparing myself for a happy, satisfied stomachache.

• We probably made a full lap through the market before stopping again in front of the Serious Bread table. Yesterday they had pita breads, toasting breads, and BAGELS. Honest-to-goodness boiled deep golden brown bagels. My heart stopped. We bought half a dozen – two each poppyseed, everything, and cinnamon raisin. We took our berries and our bagels and our frozen lemonades from the Mocha ‘Roma cart, and we sat in the grass and listened to a couple of old guys with guitars singing a truly horrible cover of “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

Unable to wait until breakfast this morning, or even until we got back home, I insisted on splitting a poppyseed bagel and – oh good grief! – it was good. Aside from the cornmeal-free bottom, it was just perfect: really chewy and dense and flavorful on the inside; and the crust was dark and smooth and crisp. At last, I know where my bagels are coming from.

• Sun-warmed, quenched, and sated, we headed back towards our bikes, but our progress was arrested by the stand at the end of the lane, adjacent to the two old guys with guitars. The vinyl sign strung across the the canopy scaffolding, in front of which three women served the eager throngs, said “Micro-Mercantes,” which suggested to me a lot of things – micro-credit, social welfare, independence for women – but nothing about what was attracting so much business. I noticed the jug of horchata on the table, then the two huge steamers on a propane stove, then the iced squeeze bottles of red and green sauces. Then I saw the sign that read, quite simply, Tamales. Chicken, pork, vegetable. $3.00.

We bought two each of the chicken and pork varieties and took them home for our supper. I wrapped them in a moist kitchen towel, microwaved them for six minutes, minced some fresh cilantro, and served them alongside the sauces that accompanied them home. These, friends, are the best tamales I have found in Oregon. The masa was moist and corny and totally made with lard. (As uncomfortable as that may be to think about, lard makes tamales so delicious.) The meat in both was shredded, and well soaked with sauce – spicy red for the chicken and mellow tomatillo green for the pork. They were so flavorful, so tender.

The only thing I would have done to make them better is to buy more – which I’ll do, next week at the market. I recommend you check out the scene, and the Oregon Farmers’ Markets Association, right here.

UPDATE:

So we went back to the market yesterday. We brought some folks with us, promising them these spectacular tamales. The Squeeze and I worried all day, in fact, that they’d run out at the Micro Mercantes stand. We rushed to get their early. We came hungry.

The tamales, friends, were totally different. The fillings were different (both puerco and pollo were in a smoky red sauce and there were no tomatillos to be seen), and the little bundles were much more masa than they were meat. We were disappointed. We’d never rave about the food we had yesterday.

There were different people working the stand than the folks we remember from our first visit, and I’ve reasoned that everyone under the Micro Mercantes banner does things a little bit differently. My advice to you: look for the squeeze bottle of tomatillo sauce, and give them a second chance if you’re not instantly blown away.

What is it about cooking and eating outside that makes food taste better?

Simple salad with greens and nasturtium from my garden.

Chicken legs, yellow corn, and asparagus grilled in the backyard fire pit.

Thanks to the Squeeze for the rockin’ photographs.

As for the rest – for “part two” is all about remainders – many berries were carefully prepared to ride out the Fall and Winter in the freezer, some berries met their end in the dehydrator, others are being made into fruity wines.

To freeze fruit is to limit its potential usefulness later on, which I find difficult. When dealing with seasonal, highly perishable berries, however, I think it’s a must. Your berries, especially the raspberries, black berries and the like, will never come out of the freezer in nearly as nice a conditon as they went in – you can only have fresh berries for a few moments, you see. The formation and later melting of ice crystals destroys the structure of the berry. Once you’ve defrosted, the best you can hope for is a floppy, slightly waterlogged raspberry. I do not mean to suggest that freezing berries is not worthwhile, only that one ought to be aware of the unavoidable degradation in quality at the other end. Previously frozen berries are great for baking into muffins, scones, pancakes and waffles. They as positively indispensable in smoothie-making and make pleasant additions to certain warm-weather cocktails (perhaps in the place of ice cubes?).
The manner in which you will freeze your berries depends on projected future use.


The current (July/August 2007) issue of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine features a double-page, nearly exhaustive article all about How to Freeze Summer Produce. They believe that the best way to freeze fresh berries is in sugar or sugar syrup because both inhibit ice crystal formation. I have attempted neither technique, my primary objection being that I do not want to douse my fruit in sugar. I suppose that I could rinse them once they’ve defrosted, but since my method works just fine for me, I’ve stuck with it. Plus, it’s much simpler. I do just this:

1. Clear space in the freezer for a cookie sheet – preferably the kind with a lip around the edge to prevent spill – and for whatever containers you’ll eventually use to store your frozen berries. Real estate in my freezer is very tight so for me, this was the hardest part.
2. Pick over your berries. Use the already-smushed ones for jam, puree, cobbler, or sauce. Compost the moldy ones and those yet unripe.
3. Arrange berries on your cookie sheet in single layer and place in the freezer. The cooler your berries are when you freeze them, the less condensation and ice will form on the outside. If you’ve gone u-picking on a warm day, it’s best to wait until your stash is at least down to room temperature before putting them to freeze.
4. Once your berries are fairly solidly frozen on the cookie sheet, toss them into a heavy duty freezer bag (or some other preferred storage container), label and date, and shelve.

According to Cook’s Illustrated, zero degrees (or below) is an optimal temperature for your home freezer. Airflow, too, is very important. The more air you have moving around your product, the more quickly it will cool and the less damage it will sustain when defrosting.

The bulk of my frozen berries I left in whole-berry form as I suspect they are safest that way. I did, as an experiment, make some raw raspberry puree which I froze flat in a quart-sized heavy duty plastic bag. Now I have a thin little raspberry brick standing in my freezer, hardly taking up any space at all. I suspect it will be very delicious swirled into some wintertime oatmeal, or added to a smoothie, or made into sauce for ice cream.

The last method I employed in preserving the fruit whole was dehydration. Again, it is important to think about what you have in mind for your fruit down the road, and pick a method that is in line with those ends. I chose to dry my left over cobbler cherries because I absolutely love cooking with dried cherries, perhaps more so than with fresh ones. Dried cherries go just about anywhere a dried cranberry can – sprinkled over my salad, baked into cornmeal cookies, cooked down to fill a bar cookie. I bought my food dehydrator – a magic chef or something – on eBay for about seven bucks. It’s the basic home-use model: round, six trays, a lid and a fan at the bottom that circulates warm air throughout. Much, much fancier models exist, but this one suits my purposes adequately.

I washed, dried, halved and pitted my cherries before laying them out in a single layer in the machine. They took, with only minimal babysitting and one shuffle, about two days to dry. So long as they are stored in an airtight container, I see no reason why they would ever spoil, but I doubt they will survive the year before being devoured. There will be more cherries in a mere eleven months, after all.

I could not resist the siren call of strawberry wine. I made raspberry also. I am a wine novice. I own one how-to book and one recipe book, both of which I have only skimmed. I understand the basic principles and techniques, I think, but am ignorant of the subtleties. I know that there is a way to check the sugar and alcohol content – I may even own the tool for it. I also know there is a way to kill the yeast before bottling to make sure that corked bottles do not explode in my basement. I do not do any of these things in my winemaking, however. I seem, uncharacteristically, to lack some measure of fear or respect that might prevent me from doing such an incomplete job of it. Yet despite my failure to compulsively and exhaustively follow the recipe’s instructions, my first three batches of wine seem to have been reasonably successful. Two – the apple and strawberry – have been bottled, and the raspberry, bulk-aging in my linen closet, was even perfectly drinkable a mere month after it was born.

I will not herein attempt to explain home winemaking. I will say that, the way I have done it anyway, each step is simple and if you have a good chunk of time and don’t mind smelling a bit like cheap hooch once in a while (when racking or bottling, say), nothing should get in your way. All of my equipment and specialty ingredients – food-grade buckets, gallon jugs, rubber bungs, airlocks, a giant funnel, yeast and yeast nutrient, acid blends, corks and a corker – ran a little under a hundred dollars, though I am sure you could acquire all for less.
And while I wait for my closet-wine, I have even begun to dabble in flavored vodkas as well. Dreaming still of the Vault’s habanero “martini,” I have dried three of said peppers and tossed them into a vodka bottle to steep, quite unsure of what will come out the other end. With the remainder of the spirit, I’ve attempted a blueberry vodka (presently submerged with a vanilla bean and lemon juice, the alcohol in the liquor slowly leeching all of the berry’s beautiful color away) and a strawberry-and-vanilla fortified wine (strawberries, vanilla, white wine, sugar, and vodka). All of these I plan to let sit for one month and then taste.
For a more comprehensive – yet totally accessible – introduction to making wine at home, please check out Julia Brews & Julia’s Brews.

     In an undergraduate class at Portland State, straightforwardly titled Persuasion, I formally learned that scarcity makes things more desirable: eclipses of the sun and moon, real Love, Mason Jennings’ acoustic album, Simple Life. For me, more pressing than astronomical events eternally playing hard-to-get, however, are the Fruits of Summer: the berries, the stone fruits, the figs (oh, Lord, the figs). Remember how all of this wonderful produce we love to munch year-round actually has growing seasons? Maybe you can get overpriced, under-ripe strawberries in May, but they’re not worth it. They are only placeholders for summer strawberries. Those out-of-season imposters are white in the middle, unripe, and juiceless. They have no scent and do not yield to the teeth. They look enough like a strawberry to jog something in your brain, maybe fooling your palate into thinking that you’re ingesting the real thing, but you’re not. They are a sad waste of resources. Therefore, in my life as a cook and eater I have resolved to eat what’s in season – as best as I am able (I am powerless for the rest of the day without my apple in the morning, I’m afraid) – and then move on as the weeks roll by. Accordingly, lately I have been gorging myself on summer berries.
     I’ve made two trips to Sauvie Island, where the nearest U-Pick farms are around here, and come home with around fifty-five pounds of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, marionberries and cherries. The night I brought my first batch home (which was followed by a flurry of processing, though I did not get through the whole lot right away) I had nightmares – proper nightmares with screaming and everything – about not getting to my loot fast enough and letting some of them go moldy. My concern in the dream wasn’t so much that I had lost money or missed out on eating those delicious gems, but more so that I had allowed something intrinsically valuable go to waste, that I was responsible for the mishandling of an important gift. In my dream I heard myself say, Oh, I was such a fool to have taken so many when there are others who would have used them up. This is really how I talk in my dreams sometimes.
     I did not, in reality, lose a single berry to the Musty Fuzz. Rather, I have taken my treasure, washed and dried, chopped and mashed, boiled, dehydrated, canned, and bagged and turned my sixty-plus dollar investment into small jars and bottles of priceless, distilled Summer.
     Project, First: Jam. I have some very strong feelings about jam, and these I shall presently share.

• 1. Jam should taste like the fruit from which it is made.
• 2. Jam should be strong enough to hang together on a piece of toast, but should not at all remind one of gelatinous substances such as flan or Jell-O.
• 3. The purists use all sugar and no pectin when making jam, which requires a whole heck of a lot of sugar and a great deal of heat. Made this way, the jam’s more sugar than it is fruit. I prefer a little bit of pectin and a whole lot less sugar.
• 4. Jam should not have too much junk in it. It is tempting, I know, to want to add ginger and vanilla and raisins and walnuts and wine and SweetTarts to give your jam a signature flair. Of course, there are exceptions to this persnickitiness (red wine with strawberries, for example; and toasted, ground walnuts with figs), but generally I very firmly believe the simple and plain is best. Go figure.

     I have thus far made two batches of raspberry jam, blueberry, strawberry, drunken strawberry, blueberry, marionberry and a rasp-marion mix. The recipe, included in the Pomona’s Pectin box, is roughly four cups of mashed berries, between two and four teaspoons of pectin, some calcium water (to activate the pectin) and between three-quarters and two cups of white sugar. The pectin makes it easy to gel, and home canning isn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.
     Project, Second: after the jam came a cobbler or two. I’m not sure what’s tastier than baked fruit topped with a sweet biscuit. As far as I can tell, the cobbler camp divides into those who would cook the biscuits separately, and those who would cook the biscuits with the fruit. I grew up in a house that believed in baking the biscuits with the fruit, spreading the eventual topping on the bottom of the baking dish, pouring the fruit mixture over, and letting the cakey biscuits rise to the top in the oven. The other method, with which I have only recently begun experimenting, is to par-cook the two components separately – fruit on the stove and biscuits in the oven – and unite them only in the dish’s final minutes in the oven.

Berry Cobbler, two ways
Upside-down Method

ingredients:
1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons (2 ounces) salted butter
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup milk
2 1/2 cups stewed berries with juice*

procedure:

• 1. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.
• 2. Cream 1/2 cup sugar and butter until smooth and fluffy.
• 3. Stir in sifted dry ingredients alternately with milk.
• 4. Pour batter into prepared pie tin or casserole dish.
• 5. Put drained berries over batter.
• 6. Sprinkle remaining 1/2 cup sugar over.
• 7. Pour 1 cup berry juice over all.
• 8. Bake 45 minutes @ 375ºF, until topping is golden and edges are browned.

Serves six.

**Stewed berries = fresh or frozen berries + desired amount of sugar + flavorings (also as desired: vanilla, wine, ginger…). Heat until berries are just cooked. Simple as that.

Separate Biscuit Method
Biscuit recipe borrowed from The America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook

ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons white sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into half-inch cubes
1 cup buttermilk

Stewed berries, as in above recipe. Cook longer for this recipe, allowing the liquid to thicken a bit. You may choose to add some cornstarch.

procedure:

• 1. Preheat oven to 425ºF.
• 2. Prepare baking sheet with parchment paper or Silpat mat.
• 3. In the workbowl of a food processor, fitted with the metal blade, combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Pulse to combine.
• 4. Sprinkle butter cubes over and process until the mixture resembles a coarse meal.
• 5. Transfer to a medium-sized bowl, add buttermilk, and toss (with your fingers or a rubber spatula) to combine.
• 6. Scoop batter (with a measuring cup, ice cream scoop, large spoon) onto baking sheet. The original recipe says 1 1/2″ ice cream scoop will yield 12 biscuits.
• 7. Bake until lightly browned on tops and bottoms, about fifteen minutes. Do not turn the oven off.
• 8. Put filling into your pie tin or casserole and arrange par-baked biscuits over.
• 9. Bake the whole lot for about ten minutes, until the biscuits are a deep golden brown.

     While I am not a convert over to the separate biscuit camp, I think my loyalty comes from time and conditioning rather than thinking that one method is intrinsically superior to the other. I have been an upside-downer all my life and to make such a drastic change in my cobbler consumption twenty-something years in might just be too big a shift for this old gal. Try both – goodness knows there’s enough fruit around – and tell me what you think.

     Hang around for Red, part two, in which I shall discuss freezing, drying, snacking, and winemaking.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. With a very sharp knife, cut corn kernels from the cob. This should yield about five cups of kernels. Reserve the cobs.
2. In a large, heavy stockpot, combine the olive oil, onion and shallot and cook over medium-low heat, covered, until the onions are translucent.
3. Stir in the corn and cook for about 4 minutes longer.
4. Stir in the garlic, peppers, and cumin seeds and cook, stirring occasionally, until the cumin is very fragrant.
5. Add the salt, sugar, stock, milk and reserved cobs.
6. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook, covered, until the corn is very tender, about 20 to 30 minutes.
7. Remove corncobs and puree at least 50% of the soup. I recommend using an immersion blender, though a food processor or blender will get the job done just fine. If using either of the latter two, exercise caution moving the very hot soup around.
8. Season to taste with black pepper.
9. Garnish with freshly minced cilantro and a squeeze of lime juice. Serves about six.

I know not whether I have actually succeeded in the canning part – they seem sealed…I followed the directions – but I can say that the stuff inside is good and I am counting on it being good also in the dead of Winter.

I’ve done classic strawberry jam, drunken strawberry jam (berry + red wine), spicy peach preserve (cinnamon and nutmeg), mangolime & coconut sauce (think of it warm on crepes, waffles, or pancakes) and framboise-marinated pears. The pears will come out in December, hopefully having turned deep purple, to feature in my Pear Frangipane Tarts. They are my very first holiday tradition. There are more peaches ripening, and more pears too. Back in school, I made a very warm, very sweet, very strange Pear Lime jam with habanero peppers. I have no idea what a gal, under more normal circumstances would do with it, aside from melt over venison maybe. It’s tempting to recreate, but when will I ever have venison again?

In any case, this new endevour is certainly keeping me occupied whilst I wait for the winemaking book (and cash enough to get going with all the stuff). Kinda makes me want to go find a creek to keep my butter cold in…