Poor Man's Feast —

This is the time of year that many of us love to hate: Christmas is long over, and while the calendar is spotted with the odd holiday Monday, most of us (at least in New England) spend the weeks from now until early March grumbling over the grayness. Everything feels dead; the trees are bare, the roads are icy, and the garden is asleep. This is probably why the seed companies send out their catalogs right around the time that we all start resembling Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

There is, of course, one place we can all go to feel good in that slightly fake, mildly medicated Fantasyland sort of way; packed to the rafters with gorgeous produce–bright, perfectly formed tomatoes, stunning pineapples, piles and piles of fresh fruit and vegetables, lovely lilting muzak–it lures us mere mortals in in the dead of New England winter like Tantalus’ dangling grapes. Where is this place and what do you have to do to get in? Nothing. It’s the supermarket. Get into your Hummer and take a ride over.

I’ve made a recent commitment to myself to try, even now, to eat as locally and seasonally as I can. Which means, in my neck of the woods, that I’m faced with, as my grandmother would say, bupkus (loosely translating to goat s**t). If I eat one more squash, it’s going to come out my ears. Although we don’t belong to a CSA (we can’t; there aren’t any near where we live), and although our two local farmer’s markets have been shuttered since October (what is that about? why can my friends in Maine still shop for fresh produce in mid-winter while I have to go out of my way to avoid my local fluorescent-lit supermarket), we’ve recently discovered a nearby food store that still manages to provide some pretty spectacular seasonal goods, like hearty greenhouse-grown greens, and gorgeous, local garlic of all kinds. And in my house, where there is garlic, there is, always and forever, Kathy and Veet’s Garlic Salad.

Almost thirty years ago, Susan spent her weekends visiting friends in upstate New York; Kathy and Veet left city life behind, and put down rural roots for themselves and their small family, which included a hideously nasty goat named Jodie, and two sheep, called Dot and Spot. Money was scarce, and when it came time to make a salad for dinner, they grabbed whatever was growing abundantly in their garden: radishes, carrots, pole beans, greens of every and any type–but always spicy mustard greens–and garlic. A lot of garlic. Combined with a splash of cider vinegar, olive oil, and a heavy dusting of freshly grated cheese (sometimes Parmigiana, sometimes aged goat, sometimes sheep), the resulting salad is an incomparable blend of flavor and texture, raw spice, heat, and sometimes, sweetness (depending on the season). And in the depths of winter, this is the salad I want, as often as possible.

Kathy and Veet’s garlic salad–created out of necessity at a time in the 1970s when gas lines were long and cars were enormous, politics were vicious, and the economic environment was hideous–conjures up a fragrant, green oasis in the midst of chaos, which is why they moved to the country to begin with. We have no idea where they are, but their salad lives on in our home and the homes of our friends, all year round–even in the dead of winter.

Kathy and Veet’s Garlic Salad

The proportions here are embarrassingly flexible and in truth, the salad rarely comes out the same way twice. In our experience, much depends upon the quality of cider vinegar you use, the freshness of your greens, and whether or not you use white, grocery-store garlic, which will yield a much more pungent, biting flavor, while larger, local garlic generally is sweeter and nuttier.

Serves 4-6 garlic and greens-lovers

1 small bunch Romaine lettuce, torn into bite-sized pieces

1 small head red or green leaf lettuce (or other, heartier lettuce), torn into bite-sized pieces

6-8 Mustard green leaves (depending on your heat tolerance), torn into bite-sized pieces

4-6 cloves fresh garlic, peeled

1-2 cups blended chopped fresh tomatoes, cucumber, snap peas, carrots, radishes, in any combination*

2-1/2 tablespoons cider vinegar

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmigiana

salt and pepper, to taste

1. Toss greens together in a large wooden salad bowl. Using a garlic press, crush the garlic directly over the greens, add the remaining vegetables (if any) and toss well.

2. Drizzle on the vinegar, and toss. Drizzle on the olive oil, and toss. Sprinkle on the cheese, toss again, and add salt and pepper, if you must.

* During winter months, these additions are omitted unless we’re lucky enough to find fresh carrots and radishes locally.

Every year over Christmas break, I devote myself to one kitchen project that takes a long time to complete and is seriously labor intensive, or both; one year it was making preserved lemons (a failure). Last year, it was making cassoulet (a success). This year, for reasons I don’t quite understand, it was bread.

Not just any bread.

Sourdough bread.

For the last 10 days, I’ve had an assortment of bowls and one large Mason jar sitting on the shelf above my stove, filled with mixtures in varying states of disrepair. One gave off a noxious, yeasty odor so foul that the dog just stood in the doorway of the kitchen, refused to come in, and stared at me, wagging. The contents of the bowl had to be thrown out, and I considered burying it in the backyard. Another, which seems to be more promising, is a concoction of water and unbleached flour, whisked together, and stirred a few times a day; it has to be treated a bit carefully, and I’ve been following strict rules about scooping out half of the sludge and replacing it with newer sludge. Every day. For a week.

Sometime during the course of the holiday, I got it into my head to read The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, which is all about whole grain baking, and this is what I’m aiming to do, ultimately. We live very close to a wonderful food store that sells a spectacular loaf called a 12-grain sourdough miche; it’s remarkable. It’s chewy but soft with a crunchy but still supple crust, and filled as it is with grains and seeds and twigs, it manages to be light as a feather. It’s produced by the Bantam Bread Bakery, which is one very good reason to come to Connecticut (among others). It’s also around $7.50 a loaf, and in my house, it’s gone in about a day and a half. So, on the one hand, I would like to be able to turn out a sourdough whole grain miche that is a close facsimile of the one that comes from Bantam. On the other hand, I’d be happy to just settle for producing something that doesn’t weigh 9 pounds, or has the consistency of a doorstop.

Anyway, I cozied up on the couch with the book, and read a few chapters; one of the starter recipes called for little more than rye flour, a single granule of yeast, some water, and time. It seemed too good to be true, so I put the starter together. Twelve hours later, it was supposed to “look like pancake batter,” and it did, if the pancake was the kind I used to eat in Woodstock in the late 1970s. It actually looked like brown Quick-crete, and had a thick rime of dried whole grain skin on its surface. The book said to just mix the stuff back in, so I did. Twelve hours later, it had a second thick rime of dried whole grain skin on its surface. So I mixed it back in. Again.

The starter, studded with onions, as directed.

A bad idea.

“Why don’t you just use Jim Lahey‘s recipe?” Susan asked. She had recently brought home Lahey’s wonderful book, the appropriately titled My Bread (since everyone and their brother has furtively laid claim to the no-knead process that catapulted Lahey and his Sullivan Street Bakery to fame, on the wings of Mark Bittman’s Minimalist column in the New York Times); we’ve had a lot of luck with Lahey loaves–they’re impressively stunning, chewy, and easy to put together, assuming you don’t mind that pesky little 18 hour waiting period.

A recent Lahey loaf. How pretty!

“Because I want to experience the time and work that goes into producing a sourdough loaf,” I told her.

“But Lahey’s loaves also take time,” she responded.

And she was right. That’s the thing about bread that I find so intriguing: unless you use a bread machine–that heavy contraption that showed up in the early 1990s, was all the rage, and now is sitting in more attics across America than Cabbage Patch Kids–bread baking takes time. Even if you aren’t kneading it, it still takes time. Think about this bit of dharma: the no-knead method of bread baking is considered the quick-and-easy, no-sweat, shortcut way to creating something delicious. It’s what most of us want: the remarkable, artisanal-style result without the labor required to produce the real thing. I mean, let’s not kid ourselves–this is a metaphor for the way most of us live. We want the glory without the work. This method has fooled thousands of people (myself included) into thinking that bread baking is a simple exercise that can be thrown together mindlessly. The truth is, of course, that just because it offers us an easy way around an otherwise labor intensive process, it still requires patience; a lot of patience. Quick and easy? No way. The joke’s on us.

And if it’s sourdough you want, you’re in for a long, long wait. If it’s whole grain sourdough you’re after, you might as well pitch a tent for a month or two. Trees grow faster. The fact is that bread baking–no-knead or sourdough– forces you to slow down, to stick close to the kitchen, to focus on something other than yourself and the work you have to do, the news, the movies you’re planning on seeing, and all of the resolutions you intend to keep in the coming year. You have no choice with bread. Like any good co-dependent relationship, if you don’t give it what it needs, it won’t give you what you want.

Last night, after 3 days of stirring the rye starter, I decided that it was time to make a loaf. I grabbed my largest bowl, dumped in 3/4 cup of starter along with a yeast/water mixture and a few cups of whole wheat flour, like the recipe told me to. I tried to stir, but was unsuccessful. Susan brought up the Kitchen Aid stand mixer–the one with the same horsepower as a Volkswagon–and we attached the dough hook, plopped the dough into the bowl, flipped the switch, and stood there, watching it go round and round. Eventually, the mixer started to give off an acrid sort of odor–the kind that small engines emit right before they explode.

“Maybe it’s supposed to be this way,” I said, reading the recipe. After all, the consistency was exactly as it was meant to be, according to the description.

I shaped the dough into three “hearty loaves” and baked as instructed. Here is the result: