Caroline Cummins is Culinate’s managing editor. She lives with her husband, her cat, and her chicks in Portland, Oregon.

Fine feathers

Not all chickens look alike

By Caroline Cummins

May 13, 2008

When my parents were kids, they were occasionally given live baby chicks as Easter presents. Apparently in the 1950s it was considered OK to dip these little fluffies in vats of dye, so that you could then give your daughter, for example, a living bird that had been dyed a bright pink, or your son a baby-blue bird.

These holiday presents usually didn’t last very long, keeling over and peeping out their last within a few days. You’ve got to wonder about the chemicals, exactly, that went into those dyes — and the youthful trauma my parents and other baby-boomer kids went through when their living Marshmallow Peeps gave out on them. Sad.

Orange-and-black feathers on a teenaged Araucana chicken.

But when my husband and I got chicks of our own, we realized that, pastel peepers or no, pretty much everybody has the same mental image of what a chick should look like — yellow and fluffy — and, in turn, what the Platonic ideal of a chicken was supposed to resemble.

This ideal chicken (which presumably lives on that ideal American farm with the big red barn and green-gabled white farmhouse) has a pair of bare feet, reddish feathers, and a small head with beady eyes. Tack on a really big comb and tail feathers and you have the ideal rooster. (And in this ideal world, roosters only crow once, at dawn, and only to wake up the kindly farmer.)

This sort of chicken — otherwise known as the Rhode Island Red — is indeed common in America. But chickens are like other domesticated animals in that there are many, many variations. Our chicks, for example, were black (the Australorps) and brown (the Araucanas) — not yellow, ever. Now that they’re teenagers, the black birds are growing black feathers, while the Araucanas are growing either black-and-white feathers or black-and-orange feathers. Their chick fur still fluffs out around the feathers, giving them a hazy look. And it feels strange to run a finger down a still-furry head onto the harsh, plastic feel of a tiny feather.

When grown, our chicks will resemble the Ideal Chicken in overall shape, if not color. But for kicks, we occasionally riffle through such oddities as the Stephen Green-Armytage books on chickens: Extraordinary Chickens and Extra Extraordinary Chickens. Both books feature chickens shot in fancy photography studios, and boy, Green-Armytage shot some fancy (and funky) chickens. (The online bird retailer My Pet Chicken has some crazy avian photography, too.)

Should you desire a bird top-heavy with feathers, the Polish breed is for you. Prefer feathers on your chicken feet? Try a Silkie. Want curly feathers all over? The Frizzle is your feathered friend. Cross-breed these babies, and you can have birds sporting bizarre feathers all over. And if you just want a plain ugly bird (sorry, but they are), get yourself a Turken, otherwise known as a Naked Neck.

Our chickies may have loooong necks, but mercifully they’re covered in feathers.

Beijing duck

‘What is the essence of the duck?’

By Aliza Wong

May 9, 2008

My son, Luca, was excited to be in Beijing. Because as exciting as the walls and temples were, as thrilling as the acrobats and opera promised to be, Beijing meant one very important thing on his Chinese agenda: duck. And I had promised him that the duck in Beijing was the very best duck in the world.

Crisp, fat-glistening skin wrapped in paper-thin pancakes, moistened with the sweet tang and salty slurp of hoisin sauce, cut by the green-grass crunch of slivered green onion. And then later, succulent meat, sweating juice from the roasting temperatures, glistening with the fragrant natural oils of the bird, dark, sugar savoriness punctuated with a deep chew.

We love duck. We were in Beijing. It was like all our worlds had collided.

Ducks at Li Qun waiting to be cooked.

After much research and consultation (asking the extended Wong family their advice about the best duck restaurants is an exercise in long-winded philosophical debate — “What is a duck? What is the essence of the duck?”), I decided that we would go eat “authentic” Peking duck in the hutongs at the very famous restaurant Li Qun.

For some reason, travel to foreign locations always involves the word “authentic,” and I wonder what that word means. Do tourists to the United States go looking for an “authentic” hamburger the way we go searching for “authentic” pizza margherita?

Li Qun, by all accounts, was the best place to go for an “authentic” Peking-duck experience. And it was an experience. A whole experience. First, we had to explain to our taxi driver that we needed to be left in a specific area of Beijing where several rickshaw bicycles awaited dinner guests. Then, we needed to communicate to the rickshaw drivers that we — my husband, my son, and I — wanted to be carried in only one rickshaw.

He looked at us aghast — he was a slight slip of man and we gave him an exhausting workout. (Feeling guilty that we were going to consume more food after our combined weights had caused such perspiration, we gave him a very big tip.) We wound through the dark brick buildings, turning left, right, and round and round in the ancient labyrinth until we arrived at a small gray edifice, doors open, windows lit, voices welcoming — Chinese chefs and waitstaff shouting, foods, times, tables, international languages, laughing abbreviated by chewing. We walked into the heady perfume of roast duck: smoke, oil, flesh.

Li Qun is a humble place. It has none of the flash we associate with Chinatowns, none of the dragons, the gold, the red, the lanterns. It is Chinese because it is Chinese, not because we imagine it to be Chinese. It had brick walls, concrete floors, tables that wobbled, and chairs that tipped. Tiny rooms with two or three tables at the most sometimes rocked with animated discussion and then alternated with bouts of long silence as people ate their stomachs full of duck.

We began with some appetizers: duck livers, vegetables. And then the accompaniments arrived. First there was the sauce, then the green onions, then the cucumbers, then the salt, then the pancakes. And finally, accompanied by a chef, the glistening, golden, gleaming duck. He walked her down the restaurant in all her glory. People at other tables turned and looked, pointed, smiled. He presented her to us, primped and primed, and then motioned that he would do his work at the other table.

We all turned to watch as he carved the bird, slicing thin strips of crisp, malleable skin, golden and bronzed. Then he sliced into the flesh, beads of sap at the incision, moistening the meat as he divided up the bird, breast from thigh from leg. He delivered us two plates, one with the skin, the second with the meat, and then walked back towards the kitchen, tossing the skeletal remains into a bin filled with other bones that would later be made into a rich, pungent broth.

Luca waited patiently enough as I put a pancake on my plate. I dipped the tiny spoon into the chocolate-brown redness of the hoisin and scooped up just enough to spread a thin layer on the pancake. I laid a few slivers of green onion on top of the sauce, and then I chose some pieces of skin, some meat with my chopsticks. “More,” Luca said.

I picked up another piece of skin. “More,” Luca said. I picked up another piece of skin. “More,” Luca said. He giggled.

I rolled the pancake together, closing off an end, and I handed it to him. He bit into it. Chewed thoughtfully. “Mmmmm.” He leaned back into his chair, duck pancake in hand, satisfied.

Peking duck in Beijing.

As I prepared another pancake for myself, laughing at my husband as his weirdly shaped duck package dripped meat and skin and juice and onion — aesthetics are not of primary concern when it comes to food pleasure for him — I pondered on the Wong discussion of the philosophical meanings of the duck.

Here is my philosophy of the duck. When I went away to college in Massachusetts, I was the first of my family to go. And though my family has always been very loving and supportive, we are not demonstrative types. We did not do the touchy-feely, the warm and fuzzy. And so when I left for school, phone calls home were the first regular “I love you’s” I heard. I always knew. There was no need to say it. Until I left, and then there was.

But the saying of “I love you” was only secondary to the more important demonstration of love and affection in my family: food. Planning my trips home to Portland never really included extensive discussions of who I wanted to see or where I wanted to go. Instead, planning my trips home always began and ended with the all-important question from my father: “What do you want to eat?” And then the list would begin. My father is an amazing chef. And the list was long. And it always included duck, my favorite.

My father makes the most delicious duck you have ever tasted. Sometimes he makes pancakes, sometimes he splits the skin from the meat, sometimes he leaves the bones in. It doesn’t matter. His duck makes me salivate as I write this now. It is mythical. It is legendary in Wong circles. (And there are a lot of us out there.) Going home means duck. And home means an amazing display of love on and around the dinner table.

I finished making my first pancake, perfect size, perfect shape. Seated at a table with two of the most important people in my life, my husband and my son, surrounded by the charming simplicity of the hutong, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I bit into my pancake. And though I had traveled thousands of miles to take this bite of “authentic” Peking duck, I found that I had taken that journey only to be transported home, longing for a morsel of my father’s cooking. And that is how in faraway Beijing I somehow found my way home.

Anne Zimmerman works for a small family-run winery in McMinnville, Oregon, and is writing a book about the food writer M.F.K. Fisher.

The beauty of leftovers

A single person’s best friend in the kitchen

By Anne Zimmerman

May 7, 2008

One of the unrealized joys of living alone is leftovers. I love them, and can’t understand why others don’t. Some people look down on leftovers. For them, leftovers are the foods that you no longer find appealing but know that you should eat, or the meal that tasted so much better the first day it was cooked. They relegate leftovers to sad Tupperware squares and eat them cold and half-heartedly at work, perhaps a day or two after they were originally made.

I look forward to leftovers. I like making enough good food to last me a couple of days. On Sundays, I pick weekly recipes for their alluring qualities and their staying power. Recipes must be charming and full of enough flavors to satiate me over several nights. They must be flexible — a dish that can be paired with salad, meat, or nothing at all, depending on my whims. They must be genuine.

All leftovers deteriorate just a bit after a couple of days, but there are recipes out there that really do improve with a bit of time. Recipes that are capable of coming back to life with a splash of olive oil, a big pinch of rocky salt, and a swift turn or two with the pepper grinder.

Add a garnish of freshly chopped herbs to perk up leftovers.

For me, leftovers are like a small gift of time. I arrive home at night, tired and hungry. I open the fridge, peek inside containers, and set the skillet on the stove over very low heat. I pour myself a glass of wine — a short or long pour directly correlates to the kind of day I’ve had. Perhaps I eat an olive or two, a handful of walnuts, maybe a chunk of cheese. I spread my leftovers in the pan. Tonight it is a spring pasta of orzo with lots of sautéed yellow squash, fresh herbs, big shavings of Parmesan, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Often I add a tablespoon or two of water (or less!) to moisten and eventually slightly “steam” the food.

Then, I wait. I open mail. I flip through catalogs and dog-ear pages with things I like, knowing I’ll never return to order them. I open magazines and bend the covers so they wrap back around the spine. This way I can hold the magazine with one hand and the round bowl of my just-full-enough-wineglass with the other. I sit.

Soon enough I hear the frying pan begin to talk, a sputter and spatter here and there that lets me know that things are beginning to heat up. One piece of advice: With leftovers, you must be careful about the heat. You want them warm, maybe even hot, but not scorched, burned, or dried through. Unless you are careless or otherwise involved, this delicate balance is an easy thing to manage. And then soon enough you have it — dinner for one on a plate. Hot, homemade, and (hopefully) delectable.

It is a great thing to prepare food for one’s self, but better still to do it and have it feel effortless, even luxurious.

Leftovers are like my guilty secret — something I plan for, something I dole out to myself nightly if I’ve been very good. I love to cook, but what I love more is to come home after work and to have dinner more or less ready and waiting for me. Yes, sometimes it feels shameful to put so little energy into my dinner. Yet it is also infinitely better then take-out, a deli sandwich, or a frozen and lifeless microwaved pod of a meal. I get the ultimate pleasure — a good, home-cooked supper without the stacks of dirty dishes, the time spent waiting for it all to be done, or even the necessary dinner-table diatribe and minute conversation (though sometimes I miss that).

These are my leftovers, and I’m not sharing.

Caroline Cummins is Culinate’s managing editor. She lives with her husband, her cat, and her chicks in Portland, Oregon.

Chicken runt

When livestock turn into pets

By Caroline Cummins

May 7, 2008

My good friend Margot de Messières, a painter who divides her time between the East Coast and Bulgaria, grew up on a hobby farm in rural Maryland. Her parents, in fact, served as inspiration for my husband and me when we decided to get chickens, because they were city slickers who had taught themselves how to farm by reading books on animal husbandry. Heck, we thought, if Susan and Olivier can swing it with library books, so can we. (And now you know: If you’ve tried to check out such sexy titles as Poultry House Construction from the Multnomah County Library lately and been stumped, it’s because we’ve got ‘em all.)

Aggressive teenage chickens in their red-lit cardboard home, looking a bit like the bikers in the movie “The Road Warrior.”

Several years ago, I visited Margot at the family farm. It was late spring, and the de Messières sheep flock (all six of them or so) had been nurturing their baby lambs for a few weeks. Most were, frankly, feral, hiding behind their moms and skittering away if we approached. But one little white lamb was terrifically friendly, coming right up to us and sticking its head under our hands, like a dog asking to be petted. You could pick this little guy up and hold him like a baby, and he was perfectly happy.

He, of course, had been the runt of the litter, born sickly and unable to nurse much. The de Messières family had had to bottle-feed him, which naturally turned him into a tame, friendly pet. Normally the year’s lambs would get sent to the local butcher and returned home as lamb chops. But not this lamb. Everyone was too attached to him, and he was too attached to them. The solution? A local sheep rancher who needed adult breeding rams was going to add the lamb to his permanent flock.

At my house these days, we’re facing the same dilemma. Five of our six chicks are no longer cute and fluffy; they’re turning into punk teenagers, with adult feathers sticking out at awkward angles and the aggressive, hyper, moody behavior to match. But Stevie, the sick chick, hasn’t kept up. We feel sorry for him/her, so we pet him/her more often. Which means — duh — that Stevie is turning into a pet.

Stevie taking a nap on a human stomach.

After his/her first bout of illness-induced time in solitary, Stevie spent a few days with the rest of the chicken flock. But that didn’t last; Stevie wasn’t getting better, and the chickens were harassing him/her again. So back Stevie went into solitary, this time with water laced with a sulfa drug.

A week or so later, Stevie is a little bit better, but not enough to hang with the big guys, who meanwhile have grown to about twice Stevie’s size. And Stevie has gotten into the habit of taking naps in our arms.

Which is very cute and all — had you realized that chickens blink upwards with their lower eyelids, which have big dark eyelashes on them? — but the problem is this: If Stevie turns out to be a boy, we’ll have to give him away or, well, eat him. Sad either way. And if Stevie turns out to be a girl, her chances of being a productive egg-layer have been greatly diminished by her prolonged bout with illness. (We’re not sure, but we think Stevie might have a common intestinal parasite called coccidiosis. Yum.)

So: Do we give away/eat the manly Stevie? Or do we keep her as a pet, even if she doesn’t lay any eggs?

Correction: Margot has informed me that the pet lamb was a she, not a he. And after my visit, the family dubbed her Dinner. From Margot: “The farmer who took her didn’t think it was so hilarious, so he changed her name to Dina.”

Nutritional combinations

Some foods go together for good reason

By Cynthia Lair

May 2, 2008

We enjoy classic culinary combinations such as Champagne and caviar, meat and potatoes, salsa and chips. There are thousands of these pairings that make for joyful eating. Most are based on complimentary flavors, but there are also nutritional reasons behind some of these long-standing marriages. I want to talk about three whole-foods couples that have been paired together in dishes for ages, for reasons that go beyond taste.

Whole grains + legumes

Most grains are lacking the amino acid lysine, while most beans lack methonine. What one lacks, the other one has. Together, they provide all eight amino acids.

A sandwich of white-bean-spread with vegetables on whole-wheat bread provides all eight amino acids.

Vegetarians need to pay attention to this combination in order to meet protein needs. Black beans and brown rice, black-eyed peas and cornbread, tofu and soba noodles, lentils and whole-wheat bread, chickpeas and quinoa are all yummy examples of this important dietary combination.

Nightshades + dairy

The nightshade plants (tomato, potato, eggplant, peppers, and tobacco) are high in alkaloids, which, according to some, may subtly remove calcium from bone. Dairy products have enough calcium to make a baby calf double its bone structure in six months — maybe more calcium than we smaller, slower-growing humans need. I believe the two have been kept together in dishes to balance their effects. Eggplant Parmesan, Caprese salad (mozzarella and tomato), baked potatoes and sour cream, chili with grated cheese, and spaghetti with marinara and Parmesan are delicious representations of this important pairing. Those who eat no dairy products need to be wary of eating too many nightshade vegetables to guard against calcium loss.

Soy foods + sea vegetables

The cultures that have used carefully crafted soy products in their diets have also included plants from the sea. Soy foods are thought possibly to be de-mineralizing and possibly to lower thyroid function. Sea vegetables are amazingly rich in minerals, including iodine, which stimulates the thyroid. Maybe that’s why they’re usually found together in traditional cuisines. Miso soup with wakame, tofu served with nori flakes, and hijiki seasoned with tamari are three examples.

I’ll bet you can think of more. Keep these couples together. Don’t let them file for divorce on your plate.

David Mas Masumoto is an author and a farmer in California’s Central Valley. These posts are excerpted from his book Heirlooms.

Culture of fog

Embracing the mist

By David Mas Masumoto

May 2, 2008

Editor’s note: We are pleased to feature the work of David Mas Masumoto, a farmer and writer in California. Occasionally we will feature excerpts from Masumoto’s books in the Dinner Guest Blog. Most of the excerpts, like this one, are in letter form.

Dear Kenji,

As a transplant from outside the Central Valley, now working at the University of California, Merced, you are spending one of your first winters here. Like this institution, you plan to stay here a while. But because you are new to the Valley, I’m not sure you understand the culture of fog.

Fog: a cloud on the ground formed when humid air is cooled, causing water vapor to condense into tiny drops. The moisture hovers in the stationary air, locked in a holding pattern until outside winds push out the cold air or the sun heats the ground enough so the moisture “burns off.”

Heed my warning, Kenji: There will be days when the fog is so thick you can’t see beyond a few feet in front of you, and there may be times when the sun hides for weeks.

Fog: treacherous, dangerous, a cold, unforgiving character that tricks newcomers. People drive too fast; traffic accidents blanket the countryside; fresh skid marks are painted daily; and cars and trucks pile up with fatalities. We’re forced to adapt to the curse of going slow, a pace that doesn’t seem to fit with the larger world.

Schools still mind the weather in the Valley. Foggy-day schedules delay the start of school, some kids (and a few teachers) cheer while bus drivers groan. We’re compelled to accept nature’s timeline, a piece of our rural past not to be dismissed.

Peaches and nectarines need this winter cold. Fog helps keep temperatures below 45 degrees and the “chilling hours” necessary for trees to slip into a deserved dormancy and awaken renewed. And why not farmers? I’m convinced the American work pace, with little time for vacation, is unnatural and unhealthy. Fog helps remind me that down time, extended morning breaks, even naps and respites, are not necessarily evil signs of weakness.

Trees in fog.

Fog remains a test for new arrivals. They love it or hate it. The blistering heat of summer and the bone-chilling fog create a world of absolutes: hot or cold — accept us or leave us — with seemingly little tolerance of anything in between. Our fog contains a hardness, reflecting a disconnect with the rest of the state. Outsiders believe we in the Valley are lost in the fog. (Have you heard a similar whisper when you told others about your relocation to UC Merced?) Meanwhile, Valley natives seem to enjoy the isolation and separation from those living along the “left coast.”

Fog arrives as early as November and sticks around until February. Visitors swear at the fog, proclaiming this is why our valley is a place to bypass. Even our residents have few romantic images of cool, misty evenings with diffused city streetlights beckoning intrigue. (Although I have been tempted to write about the mysterious luster of a lonely country farmhouse and barnyard light glowing in the late-night fog, beginning my great American novel with the line “It was a dark and foggy night . . .”)

But Kenji, I trust you’re learning to work in the fog. I sense you understand how farmers can trudge into hazy fields in winter and lose themselves in a wondrous world. Robbed of sight, the other senses are heightened. The hum of traffic can be heard in the distance, barking dogs warn of strangers, even birds continue their songs in winter. Listen to the moisture drip, drip, drip from leaves like a natural timepiece, a perfect slow pace to work while reflecting. Forced to use other senses, we find the surrounding world stirs with new life.

I recall one Christmas day when my grandmother journeyed out to prune vines, a 70-year-old bundled up to snip, clip, and slice in the fog. I located her by listening to the snapping of grapevine canes accompanied by the screech of trellis wires. Hidden in the fog, she seemed content in her work, a moment of peace in her adopted land, even during that holiday.

Fog reminds me that this is a land of work, places where people still value productivity and hand labor matters; we’re still blue-collar and real. Hard, honest work speaks about our character as we labor in the fog.

Perhaps we need an initiation ceremony for newcomers, exposing them to the traditions of fog — how to drive in it, how to work in it, how to maintain your sanity when you don’t see the sun for hours and days. (The first winter my wife, Marcy, came to the Valley, she didn’t see the sun for 15 days and grew restless, almost depressed. Her moods matched the gray sky. It was a test of love, I suppose, for she chose to stay.)

My initiation program will reveal stages of acceptance. First, the recognition of the wet chill wrapping its cold fingers around you. The Valley: dense and damp, robbing you of the sense of sight, a symbol for a lack of vision? Then will come another side, trusting your other senses and an odd sense of security, a feeling of solitude while working in the fog. Perhaps fog protects us from outsiders and allows us time to ponder while life slows down.

I’ve heard of leadership retreats with participants hiking at night without light; the personal training of leaders as they maneuver through uncharted territory, trusting their senses, listening to instincts, separating the fools from the thinkers, distinguishing the overly cautious or wild from those with the wisdom to slow down and think.

Can’t our relationship with fog be a metaphor for development in the Valley, our fields of practice for smart growth and sustainable planning? Perhaps it’s OK to slow down in the race to develop our lands instead of communities rear-ending each other and creating massive traffic jams. Can we move forward steadily but paced?

I hope we one day create our own culture of fog, with legends of our spirit and songs to celebrate our beliefs. Perhaps even a fog festival? (Yet skeptics would comment, “How can you interact if you can’t see each other?”)

For the moment, our stories may be hidden, a secret even to those who live here. One day though, I imagine UC Merced, Fresno State, and our other institutions of learning rising out of the Valley’s fog. While we may be invisible in the fog of winter, we’re working to prepare for spring.

I’ll take my stand in the fog. This is who we are, part of the story of the Valley. As for those in the rest of the state who disdain our culture, perhaps they are the ones lost in the fog.

Your friend,

Mas

Ania Catalano has been a natural-foods chef, teacher, and consultant for more than 18 years.

How to cook with agave nectar

Sweet somethings

By Ania Catalano

May 1, 2008

Although agave nectar can be used straight out of the bottle as a sweetener for drinks or as a syrup for waffles, pancakes, or oatmeal, its true beauty is revealed when it’s used in a recipe, where it produces the most amazingly delicious, naturally sweetened muffins, ice creams, and more.

When adapting recipes to use agave nectar, reduce other liquids by about one-third, and use 25 percent less agave nectar than sugar. Also, reduce the oven temperature by 25 degrees to avoid burning your masterpieces! Sometimes a little trial-and-error results in great new recipes.

Agave nectar has a long shelf life, and doesn’t need to be refrigerated, so it’s easy to work with.

Some people like agave nectar on oatmeal.

Flavors will vary slightly by the variety of agave nectar you choose: light (the most neutral and best in baking) or amber (more caramel flavor, great out of the bottle).

Some agave nectars are raw, which means they never reach 118 degrees in the manufacturing process and have many beneficial enzymes still intact. This feature is appreciated by raw foodists and health enthusiasts.

The best part about using agave nectar is that you can make gourmet-tasting desserts with deep, satisfying sweetness that make you feel good after eating them, instead of giving you a sugar rush . . . and then a sugar crash. It’s a perfect way to wean the kids, and the whole family, off the conventional-sugar habit.

Sarah Gilbert works full-time as editor of several financial blogs for AOL. She lives with her three small boys and husband in Portland, Oregon; she also keeps chickens.

Mostly green

Of peanut butter and paper towels

By Sarah Gilbert

April 30, 2008

I do wish they hadn’t started with the paper towels.

I was at an “Eco Party” put on by a local do-greener organization, the Northwest Earth Institute. We had printed out checklists about our green habits. The first few questions were making me feel warm and accomplished: Do you have a reusable shopping bag? (Yes! A good dozen of ‘em!) Is it with you when you need it? (Yes! I even made a bag that holds other bags. From an old shirt and tie that I bought at the Goodwill Outlet. You can’t get much more reduce-reuse-recycle than that!) Which of the following have you not purchased in the past two years: paper plates, coffee filters, paper napkins, disposable cups (ooh, I’m on a roll), paper towels . . .

Eww. Right. The paper towels.

For the record, I’d biked to the Eco Party, an almost-five-mile trip from my house to the lovely one in which it was held. I’d brought my own snacks, maple-syrup-sweetened hazelnut butter cookies made with nearly all-local, all-organic ingredients. My water bottle was a Sigg, filled with tap water; my coffee thermos was still half-full of Stumptown's most delicious direct-trade, single-estate coffee. I’d even brought a couple of reusable shopping bags with me, as I had to stop on the way home to buy unbleached diapers for my son.

(And if you want to know, everyone else had driven to the party. Don’t let on that I was judging, even a teeny bit.)

Buying bulk organic peanut butter.

But I have a paper-towel habit that’s pretty awful, and no one could really seem to get their head around why I overused so. I tried to explain about the three boys, the abundance of messes that involve pee, poop, or mud tracked in from outside, the task of cleaning the bathroom (with vinegar and water only!) in a house with three very young children and one adult child who all tend to color outside the lines. As it were.

I was relieved when we got through that and started talking about some other habits. I had just that day figured out the magic of buying bulk organic peanut butter and canola oil, of bringing your own jars to the market. Mine were recycled honey jars, filled with Portland wildflower honey only a few weeks ago until that honey was baked into breads and cookies and scones and poured with abandon in tea and on bagels. You weigh the jars before you fill them, and write the weight on them with a little wax pencil there in the store. You can even bring in jars that are partially full, if you haven’t quite used up your peanut butter.

And can we talk about peanut butter? It’s quite the topic. Hopefully I can solve all your green problems right here and now, and maybe that will be my absolution from paper-towel sins. It turns out that conventionally grown peanuts are truly awful for you; pesticides tend to concentrate in seeds (please don’t get me started on cottonseed oil, as you may as well just put a couple of teaspoonfuls of weed-be-gone in your salad dressing), and peanuts are so much cheaper to produce when grown with lots o’ pesticides. And the chemistry works against peanuts in every way; pesticides end up in the soil, and peanuts grow under the soil, with highly permeable skins. The poisons just seep into the protein-packed legumes, and soon you’ve got a prime growing medium for a special kind of fungus that releases an aflatoxin — a dangerous carcinogen.

So the peanuts that are at the center of peanut butter are highly poisonous. Then, to make peanut butter palatable to our sugar-crazed nation and to give the butter a nice spreadable texture, major manufacturers mix ‘em with high-fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated soybean oils — and now you have the unholy trinity of everything that is wrong with our food system right in your sandwich. And there are people who dare to tell you that PB&J sandwiches are better for the planet than other kinds of sandwiches.

Some local mamas and I had just finished moderating a heated debate on how hard it was for some of us to give up the Jif and Skippy and Peter Pan of our youth. It’s sweet, it doesn’t separate, it spreads nicely on soft white bread. There may have been an attendee or two at the Eco Party who copped to buying Jif, but I’ll allow them to go public with their confessions on their own terms.

I have a decidedly non-radical and deliciously sweet alternative that is good for you, and the planet, and I promise it does not taste like toe jam. Call it your atonement for decades of your worst peanut-butter transgressions. Take a spoonful of peanut butter, out of your jar that you have taken to a natural-foods grocery store or food co-op that lets you pour freshly ground organic peanut butter right into your reusable container. Take a spoonful of honey out of the glass jar you have found somehow at a farmers’ market or organic food mart. I like about two parts peanut butter to one part honey, and I like my peanut butter refrigerated, but to each his own. Mix in a bowl or plate until you have a nice spreadable consistency. Make a sandwich, have a spoonful, don’t worry about the planet, just save yourself.

And I’ll promise to work on the paper towels.

Caroline Cummins is Culinate’s managing editor. She lives with her husband, her cat, and her chicks in Portland, Oregon.

Birds of a feather

Chickens don’t like to be alone

By Caroline Cummins

April 29, 2008

As most poultry books and fowl lovers will tell you, you can keep chickens for all sorts of reasons. Third on the list is usually “fun,” since chickens make social, goofy pets. Second on the list is typically “your garden,” because chickens will both eat your annoying weeds and bugs and provide you with plenty of fresh, compostable manure.

Tops on the list, of course, is eggs. Raising city chickens a few at a time for meat costs money, effort, and time, and doesn’t produce much meat in the end. But raising a few hens as pets, gardeners, and egg providers is a nice trifecta of chicken-keeping. The eggs are the freshest possible, and since your birds presumably spend at least part of their lives outdoors eating green stuff, worms, and insects, the eggs are also the healthiest possible.

A sick chick in solitary confinement.

All good things. But anybody who thinks that raising chickens is on a par with, say, keeping a goldfish is plainly cuckoo. Chickens take work. They take up space and time. And they take money out of your wallet, most of it to the feed store. In seven days of chicken ownership, we made three trips to various shops and spent approximately $200 on birds, feed, and such motley gear and supplies as feeders, waterers, and heat lamps.

Our time at home is filled with trips to the mudroom, where the chicks peep away in their cardboard castle. We stare into the box, watching the birds do their thing, wondering if their thing is normal or not. As urbanites whose bird exposure has mostly been a) pigeons, b) sparrows, and c) the occasional raptor glimpsed on a wilderness hike, we’re not exactly avian experts.

Fowl books and storekeepers will say things like, “Keep your chicks in a box under a light bulb. If the birds are too cold, they’ll huddle under the light; if they’re too hot, they’ll avoid the light.” Logical, right? Except that our six birds do things like pile up in a corner, away from the light, and go to sleep. Does that mean they’re cold? Hot? Or just having a slumber party?

Topical poultry medicine.

If we hadn’t been watching the box on the evening of day 5, we might not have noticed one of the Araucana chicks having obvious gastric distress — or the other chicks suddenly ganging up on it, pecking away with casual regularity until they drew blood. Had these cute little fluffies suddenly turned into wolves, culling the diseased from the herd? We didn’t know.

What we did know was that one bird was sick, and needed to be segregated. So we built a second cardboard box and put Sicko in it; separated from his buddies, he promptly threw a cheeping fit, squawking loudly through the night and flinging himself against the wire ceiling of his solitary cell. By Friday, this thumping routine — reminiscent of Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape” — had given him a bloody beak in addition to his earlier wounds. Hooray.

Flipping through books and webpages in our efforts to solve our sick-chick problem, we decided that we needed to fool the chicks into not seeing red anymore. First, we bought a brooder light — a serious piece of lampware, with a 250-watt red bulb — that would give everything in the chick box that sexy glow of carmine. Second, we bought a bottle of Blu Kote, a topical medicine dyed a deep indigo, that we could use to treat Stevie and mask his ailments from his fellow fowl.

Third, we put Stevie back in the big cage with the wolves — and watched. He walked around. The other birds walked around. They checked each other out. And then they stuck their beaks — dyed purple from poking against Stevie — into a corner together, and went to sleep.

Whew.

Jerry Murray has made wine in New Zealand, Germany, and the United States. He is now winemaker and vineyard manager for Patton Valley Vineyard in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. He also posts on his own blog, Vintners Voice.

Farmer in the vines

The heroes of the vineyard

By Jerry Murray

April 28, 2008

I think our culture needs to rethink just who we designate as our role models and heroes. We are constantly bombarded with images of people who are famous for simply being famous, and I think this attitude is spilling over into food and wine.

We have television networks that have elevated chefs to celebrity status. Chef Gordon Ramsey gets as much air time as Brad Pitt, it seems. The same thing is happening in wine, too. We are developing a culture of rock-star winemakers.

I am not saying that chefs or winemakers don’t deserve the praise and attention they are getting. Both professions require serious commitment, and both promise lifestyles centered on long hours in less-than-glorious working conditions. No, I don’t have anything against chefs and winemakers finally getting their due, but I do wonder how long they intend to hog the spotlight and deny it to those who make them look good.

I wonder when farmers are going to become our role models and heroes?

I am a winemaker, and I am proud of it. I also manage the vineyard from which I harvest the grapes that I make into wine, and honestly it is the farming that I am much more proud of.

The dirty little secret in both food and wine is that you cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. No matter how talented a winemaker is, he or she cannot make a great wine from anything less than great fruit. I believe this so much that I will stand on any soapbox, anywhere, in nothing but my steel-toed boots, and yell it at the top of my lungs.

The vineyard Jerry manages.

Growing wine is all about creating and maintaining a balance in the vineyard. A balance that is constantly threatened by weather, disease, and the vines’ own innate tendencies. I not only have to keep my vines healthy, I have to do so under constant threat of disease. Imagine there being a disease that you WILL get if you didn’t put on a specific lotion every 7 to 10 days. Imagine that even if you did put on this lotion, you might still get this disease. Imagine that this disease is capable of destroying you for an entire season. Now you start to get the idea.

At the same time that I am defending my vineyard from infections, I also have to manage its growth. I have to keep the vines’ growth going upward and do this by carefully using wires to keep the vine shoots separate so that their leaves overlap as little as possible. I have to remove the leaves from around the fruit manually so that the clusters get plenty of sunlight, crucial to preventing disease and developing flavors in the grapes themselves. When the shoots get too long, they have to be “topped” with a machete to a height that prevents them from casting a shadow on the vines in the rows next to them.

When it comes to quality wine, more grapes are not better. Excess clusters have to be removed. The remaining clusters have to have their “wings” and “shoulders” removed, as these parts of the cluster will ripen at a different rate than the rest of the cluster and impact wine quality. The vines are constantly being physically adjusted, by hand, to keep the canopy of leaves open so that air and light can penetrate. Fruit not getting enough sun will be susceptible to disease and will not ripen properly and will result in poor-tasting wine. Fruit getting too much sun will taste cooked and be tannic and bitter.

Then there is the vineyard floor. Directly beneath the vine I want no weeds, as they will grow into the fruit and increase the possibility of disease. The weeds must be removed.

Between the rows I want some vegetation to attract beneficial insects that will work for me and keep pathogenic insect populations under control. Too much vegetation will compete with the vines for water and nutrients and reduce their ability to grow. A balance must be met.

The soil must have enough nutrients to support the vines’ growth, but too many nutrients will make the vines grow vigorously, reducing fruit quality (and thus wine quality) and increasing the potential for disease.

In my case, I want to do all of this without the use of herbicides or synthetic pesticides, in a sustainable manner, relying on expensive hand labor. There is no recipe or book to follow; each season gives me a new set of challenges to meet. Complacency will result in failure. Even the best efforts will not, in some years, be enough. Mother Nature is ambivalent about my success.

If my efforts and abilities as a farmer are good enough, I will bring into the winery fruit with the potential to become great wine. If the wines reach that potential I, the winemaker, will get all the credit even though I, the vineyard manager, is much more deserving of it.