From Jeff Cox

When I lived in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, farmstands and farmers’ markets always sold chow chow. I realized that this combination of pickled vegetables came down to our time from the days before refrigeration, when farmers put up jars and jars of their summer vegetables to have all during the cold months from October to April.

Today we have farmers’ markets that are bigger and better than ever. And while freezing and drying are options for storing summer’s bounty, chow chow still is one of the tastiest ways to prolong the season of locally-grown, organic vegetables.

It’s actually a pickle to be served as a side dish with sweet meats like roasted pork, or with sausages or grilled burgers. You can double this recipe, and use other vegetables in the mix, especially snap beans, carrots, celery root dice, and the stems of chard cut to ½-inch pieces, but keep the proportion of vegetables to other ingredients the same.

The name chow chow comes from the Chinese word for food—chow. Hence we have the dish called chow mein, and a military mess hall is also called a chow hall. When Chinese in days gone by brought goods to America, their crates would include spices, preserved foods, and other edibles. Food and more food: chow chow.

6 green tomatoes
5 medium onions
3 medium green bell peppers
3 medium red bell peppers
1 head cauliflower
¼ cup kosher salt
8 cups white vinegar
2 ½ cups sugar
1 ½ Tbl. dry mustard
2 tsp. turmeric
1 tsp. powdered ginger
2 Tbl. whole mustard seeds
1 ½ Tbl. celery seed
1 Tbl. pickling spices

1. Chop the tomatoes, onions, and peppers and place them in a large bowl. Reduce the cauliflower to small (½-inch) florets and add to the bowl. Stir in the salt. Cover and let stand on the kitchen counter overnight. Drain off the liquid.

2. In a large pot, mix the vinegar, sugar, dry mustard, turmeric, and ginger. Cut two 10-inch squares from a roll of cheesecloth and place them together to form a double-thickness 10-inch square. Place the mustard seeds, celery seed, and pickling spices in the center and tie up the ends with butcher’s string to form a bag. Add the bag to the liquid in the pot and bring it to a boil, then turn the heat down and let it simmer gently for 30 minutes. Add the vegetables and let it return to a simmer, then cook for 30 more minutes.

3. Remove the spice bag and pack hot, sterilized canning jars with vegetables and pot liquid and seal. Process according to jar manufacturer’s instructions (usually 15 minutes at a full boil in a canner). Store jars in a cool, dark place.
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See also Jeff’s Farmers’ Market Tips
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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: © Vnlit | Dreamstime.com
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From Jeff Cox

Mint’s sweet menthol aroma and flavor, its calming effect, and its digestive properties make it perfect for the organic herb garden—except that if the soil is rich and constantly moist (such as around a leaky garden hose), it will spread invasively. So it’s best to grow it in a large pot where it can be kept moist and get morning sun, but remain confined. If you are a lover of mojitos, plant two pots. It will grow all summer until fall frosts cut it down.

Types
While spearmint (Mentha spicata) is the most useful and prevalent of the culinary mints, there are other mints to be aware of. The entire mint family of many plants has one feature in common: The stems are square.

Apple mint (Mentha sauveolens) withstands full sun and dry soil better than most other mints. Its big fuzzy leaves carry an apple flavor. They are the best for making candied mint leaves—the tiny hairs on the leaves hold the sugar mixture better than smooth-leaved varieties. To candy them, whisk 1 egg white with a few drops of water and paint this on leaves of apple mint. Then coat the leaves with superfine sugar by shaking it onto the leaves from a spoon and set them aside on a sheet of waxed paper until they dry completely. This could take a day or two. When crisp and absolutely dry, store them in a closed jar in a cool, dark cupboard for up to 6 months. A variegated mint called pineapple mint (Mentha sauveolens, variety variegata) is actually a variety of apple mint and can also be candied.

Peppermint (Mentha x piperita) smells like candy canes. It has a pungency and a sharp, biting sensation that can overwhelm, and so should be used judiciously, especially in peppermint tea, as too much of the volatile oil is not good for you. Pour boiling water over a teaspoon of the fresh leaves to make a light peppermint tea.

The variety of peppermint called chocolate mint (Mentha x piperita citrata ‘Chocolate’) has a bit of the aroma of a peppermint party.

Seasonality
Mint grows between the last frost of spring and the first frost of fall.

Use
Spearmint is what’s usually meant when a recipe simply calls for mint. It is wonderfully versatile; used fresh and roughly chopped, it merges seamlessly with chocolate desserts, punctuates the sweetness of fruit salads, and blends nicely with yogurt and peeled, sliced cucumbers on a hot summer’s evening. Added during the last minutes of cooking to carrots, black beans, and lentils.

Spearmint is used as a jelly or a sauce for lamb, but also try that sauce with other light meats, such as veal. Its use with peas is classic, but try simmering snipped mint leaves with tomatoes, summer squashes, or eggplant.

Or take a tip from the Vietnamese, who use it to make refreshing, uncooked spring rolls, by combining the fresh leaves with bean sprouts, shredded lettuce and chopped shrimp, served with a peanut sauce for dipping. Middle Eastern Tabbouleh depends on mint for its refreshing kick. Sprigs belong in iced tea and, of course, in the mint julep, where the aroma of fresh mint disguises the drink’s potent kick.
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Mojito Cocktail Recipe

Serves 1

Few drinks are as refreshing as a mojito on a hot day—but be careful; they can sneak up on you. Feel free to try other flavor mint leaves, like chocolate mint.

2 sprigs mint
2 ounces silver rum
2 tablespoons simple syrup (see Tip below)
Juice of 1 lime
Mint ice cubes (see Tip below)
Club soda
Lime wedge

Muddle the mint sprigs with the back of a tablespoon in the bottom of a tall glass. Crush them well. Add the rum, simple syrup, lime juice, mint ice cubes, and top with club soda (Schweppes has a good, strong fizz). Stir once with a long spoon, add lime wedge, and serve.

Tip: To make simple syrup, combine equal parts water and superfine or regular sugar, heat to dissolve, then cool. The key to keep a mojito from diluting is to use ice cubes made from spearmint tea. Brew a light spearmint tea and freeze the tea in ice cube trays.
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Moroccan Mint Tea Recipe

Makes 6 cups

Sweetened mint tea has long been the libation over which social interaction occurs in North Africa.

2 cups fresh spearmint leaves, loosely packed, plus more for garnish
2 tablespoons green tea leaves
¼ cup sugar

In a tea kettle, bring 6 cups water to a boil. Place the mint, tea, and sugar in a teapot and add the boiling water. Let it steep for 10 minutes. Strain the tea through a fine-mesh sieve into cups, then garnish the cups with fresh mint sprigs.
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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: © Bvdc | Dreamstime.com
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From Jeff Cox

You hear a lot about eating locally these days. It’s one of the three pillars of eating correctly: 1) eat organic; 2) eat local; 3) eat in season. And all three pillars are important. But let’s take a closer look at “eat locally.” Let’s see what that really means, and why that’s such a good idea. And why, in the final analysis, it may be the most important pillar of them all.

Some aspects are obvious. When we eat locally produced food—grown within our local “foodshed,” as the current argot has it—we shorten the supply line from farm to table. Less gasoline or diesel fuel is used to transport the food from where it’s grown to where it’s bought and consumed. That means less air pollutants from fossil fuels and less carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere on behalf of moving the food to market. So, eating locally produced organic food lessens the amount of greenhouse gases used to produce and transport that food.

Eating locally means supporting local farmers. This means keeping local family farmers on their land. Wendell Berry has written eloquently about the social benefits of strong, local farm economies. They translate into strong local communities. And they are the soil from which real democracy grows. Instead of being cogs in a massive production machine, family farmers are their own bosses. They are people who can voice their honest opinions without fear of losing their jobs. They can tell the truth, and the truth is contagious. It also sets us free.

Family farmers are also locally-focused, practical ecologists and environmentalists. Their environmentalism is not based on ideology, but on an intimate knowledge of the land under their care. They know where the pheasants and the quail lay their eggs, and can protect those spots. They can see climate change right in front of their eyes, as birds return earlier in spring, or plants emerge earlier or later. Instead of bulldozing their hedge rows, which are repositories of many of the elements of the local ecology, they understand the need to protect the hedge rows. That’s where the wild fruit grows, and where small, wild mammals make their homes. The family farmers live and work on their acres—they have every reason to farm organically, from the premium payments their food will bring, to the safety of family member, who will not be exposed to toxic agrichemicals. Family farmers are invested in the health of their land; they are the caretakers who keep the web of life under their protection strong and healthy.

When the person who grows your food is your neighbor, you interact with him or her. Your kids go to school with their kids. You may sit on a county commission or school board together. It is not in a local farmer’s interest to pollute the air, water supply, streams, or land he shares with his neighbors. It is not in his interest to farm in a way that erodes the soil. It is in his interest to be a good neighbor and fellow citizen.

From the consumers’ point of view, locally-grown food is fresher and may be of better quality than food brought in from far away. Because it doesn’t have to withstand the rigors of shipping, it can be one of the more tender and tasty varieties of the fruit or vegetable. It can be a variety developed locally as an heirloom—one perfectly suited to the local climate and soil. Here in Sonoma County, we have Crane melons. These extra sweet melons are an heirloom of the Crane family, grown along Crane Canyon Road. The roots of this fruit go deep in the local soil.

Locally-grown food is by definition available in season. When any fruit or vegetable is at the height of its season, it is most abundant, highest in quality, and lowest in price. Want to cut food costs to the bone? Eat fresh in season and can or freeze enough to last through the months when the food is out of season. In January, tree-ripened peaches from the local organic orchard frozen in a syrup of honey, lemon juice, and water are infinitely preferable to peaches from Chile, and for so many reasons.

Eating locally also keeps the money you spend on food within the community. More goes to the farmers. The farmers spend it at the local stores—it’s hoped. Keeping food dollars in the community is one big goal of the Eat Local movement.

There’s one other very good reason to eat locally-produced food, and that is the development of flavor diversity in foodstuffs. Preserving such diversity is what the Slow Food movement is all about. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the famous sourdough bread is made courtesy of some indigenous yeasts and bacilli that occur nowhere else. Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis naturally colonizes a bowl of flour and water here. The bacilli give San Francisco sourdough a flavor all its own. While San Francisco sourdough in unique to the area, every place in America has the potential to produce unique foods—and most did until the advent of national food corporations toward the end of the 19th Century. A case in point: About 90 years ago, Otto Mossholder, who had a background in cheesemaking, moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, and set about making some cheese on the kitchen stove and ripening it in the basement. Until a few years ago, his grandson Larry and Larry’s wife Lois still made small batches of cheese from their 40 Holstein cows, and still ripened it in the same cellar Otto used. I asked Lois what bacterial culture she uses. “None,” she said. “The mold that affects the flavor of the cheese just developed here—in the basement. Somebody told us that if we moved the business up out of the basement, we would make a different cheese.”

And so a system of farmers returning crop wastes to the land through composting, as organic farmers do, makes a closed loop that can lead to interesting variations in the flavors and kinds of food from place to place across the continent.

The bottom line: to eat well, eat local.
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See also Greg’s Dragonfly Corn (with Organic Herb-Roasted Corn Recipe)
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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.
Images Credit: Carlin, Wendy, and Andrew, Full Circle Farm, Carnation, Washington, from Mud and Machinery by Dave
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
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