chez pim

Rena's aubergine in tomato sauce, Greek style

I made my favorite eggplant dish tonight for an impromptu dinner with my neighbors. I learned how to make it at my friend Rena's weekend house on an island on the Aegean Sea, hence the Greek Style in the name. Rena and I made this often on those trips, as it's quite versatile. We would make a batch to serve on the first night as a side dish to roasted meat, perhaps lamb from right there on the island. On the second day we might use it as a sauce for a pasta lunch. If we had any left, which was not often, we might spread the -by then- mushy sauce on crusty bread, a perfect first bite to get the appetite going at the dinner table.

We didn't use a recipe when we cooked this on Kea, letting our eyes, nose, and palate guide us along. Although I've written up a recipe here for easy reference, I suggest that you do the same as Rena and I did on that sunny island because, as any great peasant recipe worth its salt, this one will not benefit from following the recipe to the letter. Water, sugar, and acid contents in tomatoes vary quite a bit, so you will have to adjust your ingredients accordingly. Trust your taste and the result will delight you.

Don't be afraid to believe in your own taste, this dish is so simple it's almost impossible to go wrong. The ingredient list is short, tomatoes, eggplants, onion, olive oil, and thyme that grows wild all over the island. How much simpler could it get?

Spinach!?

Chez Pim has a special guest blogger today, his name is Andy Griffin. Andy and his wife Julia operates Mariquita Farm in Santa Cruz county, growing an amazing array of delectable vegetables including rare and heirloom varieties.

Andy was the original owner of Riverside Farms, a pioneer in the bagged baby greens market. Ten years ago he sold Riverside Farms to the company which later became Natural Selections, the company at the very center of the current fiasco. Needless to say Andy has both the knowledge and the perspective to offer a commentary about the situation, and he's agreed to do that here on Chez Pim.

Read it in its entirety. This is the best and most informative piece of writing about this mess I've seen since this whole thing began. It certainly explains a lot of things for me, and I hope it will for you too.

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Spinach!?
by Andy Griffin

Deborah Schot, a reporter from the L.A. Times, called me to ask for an opinion about the e coli outbreak in prepackaged fresh spinach that has killed one person and sickened hundreds more. And yes, I have an opinion. I think the F.D.A. employee that I heard on the radio yesterday urging people to play it safe and not eat fresh spinach is ignorant. Although the victims got sick by eating spinach from a sealed bag it’s wrong to seize on spinach as the culprit in the controversy; it makes more sense to look at the processing and handling of pre-packaged greens in general. Put another way, it’s the harvest procedures that were followed, the pre-washed claim made for the greens, and the bagged environment the greens are in that are the relevant issues, not the specific variety of leafy greens that were actually contaminated at some point during the harvest and post harvest handling. By fingering any spinach as suspicious, even bunched fresh spinach, the F.D.A. isn’t educating anyone, or solving the problem. They’re just spreading fear on a national scale.

The L.A. Times called me because I’m a farmer and I’m quick with a sound bite, but also because I have a background in the baby spinach and salad business. Back in the dark ages when I started farming organically people bought their spinach in bunches and their salad as heads of lettuce. My first career in farming was in the production of the then new baby salad greens and baby spinach. We harvested the crops by hand, washed them, and packed them loose in unsealed bags. In 1996 my partners and I sold our company, Riverside Farms, to the company that became Natural Selections, which happens to be the company at the heart of the current controversy. Their packing plant was once the packing plant for our farm, though it was a lot smaller and less sophisticated back then. Our former label, Riverside Farms, was one of the labels pulled from the shelves this week. Ready Pac and Earthbound Farms, two of the other labels pulled, were labels that I once grew and harvested raw products for so, for me, this bad news has a personal angle.

Green Beans Salad, Somtum style

One night recently I had a sudden urge of a Somtum, Thai-style papaya salad. When I'm in San Francisco, it's easy enough to just zip down to Clement St. and for unripe green papaya, the main ingredient for the salad. Down here in Santa Cruz, on the other hand, it's a bit of a trek over the hill to San Jose.

Not in the mood for the drive, I had to find a suitable alternative, and an idea came to me to use French Haricots Verts beans in place of shredded green papaya. Well, it's not exactly an original idea, I just had the same salad over at my friend Kit's house a while back. She, in turn, got the idea from an old Thai cookbook called "Cooking Thai Food in American Kitchens". The book, which came out in the late '70s, was probably the first book that adapted Thai recipes for the American kitchen. Needless to say it's rather obsolete now, making substitution for things that are by now ubiquitous even in normal supermarkets. But I do have fond memories of trying a few recipes in that book when I first moved to the US and didn't quite know where to find ingredients I needed.

So I made the salad, using thin Haricots Verts from my friend Joe's Dirty Girl farm that I just got. You can use regular green beans for this if you can't find French beans. I don't cook my beans because Joe's Haricots are so young and delicate, and entirely delicious uncooked. If you want to use regular green beans, give them a try first, they might need to be blanched in boiling water to make it just a bit more tender. If you need to pre-blanche the beans, remember to shock the beans in cold ice water immediately after the quick bath in boiling water, to keep the bright green color and prevent the beans from overcooking.

Green Beans Salad, Somtum Style

A wife-saving kitchen, anyone?

I've stumbled on an old copy of the Boston Cooking School Cook Book from 1923, by none other than Fannie Merritt Farmer of that revered classic. Besides the interesting content, which I'll be writing about later I'm sure, the book is a treasure trove of old food ads. I'm going to be posting a few of them in the coming days. (I've got a bit of a computer issue at the moment so no long posts from me for a few more days.)

This one, for example, is an ad for a contraption to make ice cream. I wonder what it's all about. Something perhaps related to using liquid nitrogen which, strangely enough, is hardly new at all.

I've tried to find more information about this particular contraption on the web, but so far my search has turned up nothing. Has anyone heard of this company? Do you know what this Vacuum Freezer thing is exactly?

Auto Vacuum Freezer Ice Cream, anyone?

I've stumbled on an old copy of the Boston Cooking School Cook Book from 1923, by none other than Fannie Merritt Farmer of that revered classic. Besides the interesting content, which I'll be writing about later I'm sure, the book is a treasure trove of old food ads. I'm going to be posting a few of them in the coming days. (I've got a bit of a computer issue at the moment so no long posts from me for a few more days.)

This one, for example, is an ad for a contraption to make ice cream. I wonder what it's all about. Something perhaps related to using liquid nitrogen which, strangely enough, is hardly new at all.

I've tried to find more information about this particular contraption on the web, but so far my search has turned up nothing. Has anyone heard of this company? Do you know what this Vacuum Freezer thing is exactly?

Some dishes from Urasawa