From Greg Atkinson

When asparagus stems are trimmed away, I find it hard to throw them out; there is so much flavor in them! The frugal peasant in me comes out and I save the stems to make soup. The secret to success is to strain the soup after it’s coked to remove the stringy fibers. A hand-cranked food mill comes in very handy here, but if you don’t have one, pressing the soup through an ordinary mesh strainer will work.

Makes 4 servings

2 tablespoons organic unsalted butter
1 medium onion
½ cup organic rice
8 ounces organic asparagus stems (about 3 cups), chopped into 1-inch pieces
2 teaspoons chopped garlic
4 cups organic chicken broth
½ cup heavy cream (optional)
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1. Melt the butter over medium heat in a heavy soup pot or Dutch oven, add the onion, and cook, stirring now and then, until the onion is soft and translucent, about 5 minutes.

2. Stir in the rice, asparagus stems, garlic, and chicken broth. Bring the mixture to a boil, reduce the heat to low, and simmer until the rice is very tender, 20 to 25 minutes.

3. Transfer the soup in small batches to a blender, and blend until smooth. Force the purée through a food mill or a large strainer pressing hard on the solids to extract the soup. Discard the tough fibers left in the strainer. Add cream, if desired, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve hot.
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See also Greg’s Essential Ingredients
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Greg Atkinson is author of West Coast Cooking, and The Northwest Essentials Cookbook, and lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Greg is Culinary Director of OrganicToGo.
Image Credit: © Elena Moiseeva | Dreamstime.com
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
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From Gene Logsdon

I found Harland Hubbard in an article in the National Geographic in the early 1960s. He and his wife, Anna, were what was called at that time modern homesteaders who had first become well-known for building their own shantyboat and floating down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to bayou country, a trip that lasted over a year. Now they lived on the banks of the Ohio in a house they had built themselves, mostly out of lumber cut from their own woodland or snagged as it floated by on the river. They did not have electricity. They cut their own wood for fuel. They raised all their food, or caught it from the river, or traded for it with neighbors. The only steady income they had was rent from a house Harlan had built in town in younger years. Their life was both rigorous and elegant. Harlan made some money from his paintings and his books. The couple provided their own entertainment: nature watching, reading, and music.

For a while, I talked about living the same way, causing Carol’s parents some consternation.In their first years of marriage, they had lived much like the Hubbards but viewed with alarm the idea that their daughter and grandchildren might have to do likewise. I was reminded, more than once, that, unlike the Hubbards, I had children to raise. So I went to Philadelphia, accepted the manacles of financial security, and forgot about the Hubbards.

Fourteen years later, Wendell Berry introduced me to the Hubbards. They lived only a few miles from his farm. Wendell and I were both writing for the Rodale Press, whose publications were seeing a dramatic rise in circulation. This was the golden age of Organic Gardening magazine. Literally millions of people were subscribing to it because they had gotten the audacious notion that they wanted more control over their lives. The magazine was suggesting ways to gain that control. Like the Hubbards, these readers thought that they wanted to go where they could own a little land free and clear, live more healthfully, more at nature’s pace than the nine-to-five regime, produce their own food, do for themselves what they had been paying others to do for them, and make enough money at some small business or craft to get by. In other words, they were motivated by the same kind of idealism that had influenced the early pioneers. They were agrarians. They found in the publications of the Rodale Press the kind of information they were looking for.

It was in this heady atmosphere of hope that, at Wendell’s suggestion, I was assigned to write an article about Harlan and Anna Hubbard. I remembered them from the National Geographic article and accepted the assignment eagerly. Keep reading→

From Jeff Cox

OATS (Avena sativa)

It seems to have become a cliché that childhood mornings used to begin with a bowl of steaming hot oatmeal and mothers told their children that the porridge would “stick to their ribs.” But that’s no cliché to me—it’s exactly what happened almost every schoolday morning during the cold winter months. My dad made the oatmeal from old fashioned five minute Quaker oats (he called them “Dr. Cox’s Cream Oats” because he’d stir them while cooking into a thick, hot, gummy mass) while my mom delivered the admonishment to eat them because of their rib sticking qualities. In my imagination, I pictured my thorax as an empty cylinder plastered all over inside with sticky oatmeal, and casually wondered how that could possibly benefit my health.

Now that I’ve grown up (an arguable proposition if you talk to my wife), I know why organic oats—available in bags or bulk in most organic-oriented markets, like Whole Foods–are just the thing to start a schoolkid’s (or anyone’s) day. They have the largest percentage of protein of any grain—from 12 to 20 percent. Their fat content (five to nine percent) is the highest among the cereal grains, and it’s almost entirely unsaturated fat. It contains the most calories of any grain. Only rye and whole wheat among whole grains have more soluble fiber—and then not by much. Oat bran, where the fiber is concentrated, is the richest source of soluble dietary fiber. To top it off, oats are high in folate.

If you are an aficionado of oats, you must travel to Akron, Ohio, and stay in the Crown Plaza Quaker Square Hotel. The hotel is built into the original grain silos of the Quaker Oats Company, which invented rolled oats in the 1870s. The lobby is full of rolled oat memorabilia. This was an extraordinary advance in the consumption of oats. The folks at Quaker took steel cut oats—the chunks of grains that take 40 minutes to cook—steamed them to stabilize the fats and oils so they wouldn’t turn rancid, then sent them through roller mills that flattened them into oat flakes that cooked up bright and sticky in five minutes. The company still sells tons of them and they’re still just as good for you now as they were 130 years ago.

Most oats are grown in northerly climates such as the upper tier of states in the U.S., lower Canada, Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, and especially Russia, because they are a cool season, moisture-loving crop. Often they are planted in the fall as a cover crop to hold the soil together during fierce winters, after which they wake early in the spring to produce a crop before the heat of summer. I remember as a kid walking through fields of spring oats and finding myself crawling with an insect we called oats’ lice—thin, little, black bugs that did us no harm but were creepy and bothersome. I also remember the neighboring dairy farmer’s sons tossing me into a bin of oat chaff in one of the cruel tricks they delighted in. The itching and scratching didn’t stop until I got home and into the shower.

By the way, those steel cut oats from Ireland and Scotland don’t have to take 40 minutes to cook. Soak them in water overnight and you’ll be able to cook them in 10 minutes after draining them the following morning.

Besides the familiar oats we use as breakfast porridge, in granolas, in cookies, in breads, and pastries, there’s another species called Avena byzantina, or red oats—but they’re seldom found in American markets.

Oats came late to our tables. The earliest evidence of their cultivation dates from about 1,000 B.C. Wild oats have the bad habit of dropping their seeds as soon as the husks open, making harvests chancy at best. Early farmers kept seeds of those wild oat plants that held their seeds in the seedheads longer than most, and eventually had strains of oats that they could reliably harvest before the seeds shattered to the ground. The Greeks had a sweet they called plakous, made from oat flour, honey, and cheese, but the Roman considered oats barbarian food until they conquered Celtic Britain, where they found oats to be an easy-to-grow and nutritious grain. Oats have been identified with the British Isles ever since, especially in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. The English consider oats to be food for horses.

Nowadays, the Japanese sweet drink called amazake can be found made from oats as well as the traditional rice. Oatmeal stout is a thick, dark, delicious, viscous ale made with from five to 10 percent of oats in the grist. It doesn’t impart a taste of oats to the brew, but it does add a creamy texture that’s quite appealing.

A drink called “oat milk” should probably be renamed an “oat smoothie.” It consists of four cups of cold water, a ripe banana, two cups of cooked oatmeal, a teaspoon of vanilla, a pinch of salt, and a tablespoon of maple syrup, all whizzed up in a blender until entirely smooth, and then refrigerated. Shake it before drinking. It is delicious.

Oatmeal is also used in a variety of women’s skin care products, including detoxifying masks, skin rubs, and so forth.

A dish that’s associated with oats is haggis—a Scottish invention that’s obviously created from materials at hand, like sheep and oats. To make haggis, one obtains the large stomach of a sheep along with one of the smaller stomachs called the “king’s hood.” One then also takes the “lights,” which are the lungs, plus the liver and the heart. These innards are called “the pluck.” The pluck and the king’s hood are boiled for an hour in a large pot with the windpipe hanging over the edge of the pot, allowing impurities to disgorge themselves as they will. The cooking liquid is then reserved. When the meats are cold, the windpipe and gristle are cut away, a third of the liver is grated, and the heart, the lungs, and the king’s hood are minced. A half-pound of beef suet is chopped and added. Three handfuls of rolled oats are toasted on a cookie sheet in the oven, then mixed with the meats, a little salt, and black pepper. This is mixed into a soft consistency with the liquid in which the pluck was boiled. The mixture is then stuffed into the large stomach bag, but only half full, as it swells when cooked. The stomach is then sewed up with strong thread. A large pot that easily accommodates the stomach has a trivet placed in the bottom and the stomach placed on it. The pot is filled with water to almost cover the haggis. The water is brought to the boil and boiled for three hours. The stomach should be pierced occasionally to allow air to escape and then served on a platter without garnish or sauce.

If, as with me, you’ve always wondered what haggis is all about—this is it. No wonder the Scots invented Scotch.

Chewy Oatmeal-Coconut Cookies Recipe

These delicious cookies have a caramel flavor and a chewy consistency that makes them irresistible.

1 ¼ cups 5-minute organic rolled oats
½ cup packed brown sugar
¼ cup shredded coconut
4 Tbl. sweet butter
1 large egg, beaten
1 Tbl. all-purpose flour
¾ tsp. vanilla extract
½ tsp. grated nutmeg
¼ tsp. salt

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Butter two baking sheets. Combine the oats, brown sugar, coconut, flour, nutmeg, and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together the melted butter, egg, and vanilla, then mix these into the dry ingredients. Drop teaspoonfuls onto the baking sheets about three inches apart in all directions and flatten with the back of a fork. Bake for about eight minutes, or until nicely browned. Remove the baking sheets to the countertop and let the cookies cool for a couple of minutes, then transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely before stacking. Makes about two dozen cookies.
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See also Jeff’s How Organic Are Organic Bananas?
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Jeff Cox is author of The Organic Cook’s Bible and The Organic Food Shopper’s Guide, and numerous other cooking, gardening, and wine books, and lives in Sonoma County, California.
Image Credit: Hamster eating oats © Blotty | Dreamstime.com
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
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