The Way the Kiwi Crumbles

One morning about a month ago, my otherwise-perfectly-pleasant breakfast was sabotaged by this devastating little video:

David played it for me – because he just loves me that much – and I immediately burst into tears. I continued crying for about ten minutes, my sobs interrupted only by unintelligible words along the lines of, “He just wanted to fly!”; “He put in all that work!”; and just, “Why? Why Kiwi?!”.

Since then, David has delighted in exacerbating any slight dip in my mood by Kiwi!-bombing me. He can use his phone to control what appears on the TV in our living room, so more than once I’ve been innocently reading a book on the couch, only to have my peaceful evening shattered by Kiwi! suddenly appearing on the TV.

It was becoming ridiculous. I needed to fix my negative word-association of “kiwi,” but I didn’t know how. Amazingly, an answer was delivered to my door on Tuesday.

In my Plow to Porch box this week, I got not just one kiwi, not just two kiwis, but a full pound and a half of kiwis. That’s freaking twelve kiwis. They’re from Mallard Lake Ranch in Nipomo, CA (distance from me: 70 miles), operated by Don and Jane Criswell, their son, Bob, his wife, and their two children. They bought the ranch in 1988 and use only sustainable farming practices.

Kiwis have always seemed kind of random to me, but as it turns out, they pack a ton of potassium, fiber, and double the vitamin C of oranges. The only thing to be done with a fruit this healthful, in my opinion, is to negate any nutritional value by adding butter and sugar. Duh.

Kiwi-Apple Crumble

The Fruit Mixture
2 fuji apples, skinned and chopped (from Cuyama Orchards in Cuyama Valley, distance from me: 60 miles)
4 kiwi, skinned and chopped (from Mallard Lake Ranch in Nipomo, CA, distance from me: 70 miles) 2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
4 teaspoons vanilla extract

The Crumble
1 cup rolled oats
1 cup flour
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 handfuls crumbled walnuts

I preheated the oven to 350 degrees and began skinning and chopping up the apples and kiwis. I put the fruit in a small sauce pan over medium-low heat and added the brown sugar and cinnamon, slowly stirring it around until the apples were kind of soft. Then I added the vanilla extract and removed the pan from the heat.

While the fruit mixture was heating up, I made the crumble in a separate bowl by just mashing everything together with a fork until it stuck together in little clumps and was, well, crumbly.

Then I poured the crumbly mixture on top of the fruit mixture in a ceramic dish and popped the whole thing in the oven, easy peasy. After 20 minutes, I opened the oven to take a peek and it looked like this:

Erm… not crumbling the way I had hoped it would. So I reached in with a wooden spoon and kind of tooled around in there, 1950s-lobotomy-style, until it looked a bit more mixed up and a bit less dry. After another 10 minutes (30 minutes total), it looked like this:

 

Much better! I have to say, I crumbled the heck out of this crumble. Next time, I’ll use a bit less flour so it turns out a little more moist. I just wish I had some vanilla ice cream to put on top of it!

At least now when David decides to prank me by surprising me with the Kiwi! video, I can comfort myself by binge eating this delicious kiwi dessert. And the kiwi apple crumble isn’t going to throw itself off a cliff just to experience flying… for once in its life… because it only has those adorable stumpy wings… and it put in all that hard work to nail those trees to the side of the cliff… oh, Kiwi! Why?!

Butterface Butternut Squash Pie

When it comes to Thanksgiving, I have mixed childhood memories. I remember carefully making little place cards for every family member’s spot at the table, singing songs about the many things I was thankful for, and having terrifying nightmares for weeks about the electric saw my dad used to slice the turkey.

I was always under the impression that I was super helpful to my mom in the kitchen, but I now suspect that I invented those memories. That’s because I actually have no idea how to prepare any Thanksgiving dish. So if I was in the kitchen at all in years past, I must have been just standing there zoning out or something.

My utter lack of Thanksgiving-preparation knowledge started to worry me when it was decided that David and I would be in charge of pies and wine this year. Wine, no problem. Pies… problem.

My first thought was to just purchase the pies from Simply Pies here in Santa Barbara. Apparently, that was everyone else’s first thought, too, and they had their first thoughts first. Other than making a mental note to have more first thoughts first, there was nothing I could do.

Simply Pies uses only locally produced fruits and vegetables in their pies, and they purchase all their other ingredients (like eggs, milk, and flour) from local co-ops. Lucky for me, one of those local co-ops, the Isla Vista Food Co-op, sells Simply Pies vegan pie crusts. Starting out with a pre-made pie crust made the whole task considerably less daunting.

Butternut Squash Pie

1 medium butternut squash from Jose Alcantar Garcia in Oxnard (distance from me: 37 miles)
Vegan pie crust from Simply Pies
1 cup light brown sugar
3 brown eggs from Chino Valley Ranchers in Arcadia (distance from me: 106 miles)
¾ cup evaporated milk
1 ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons non-bleached flour
1 tablespoon melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla

Anyone who knows me knows that I am terrified of butternut squash. The last time I tried to chop up a butternut squash, I ended up with squash and seeds all over the kitchen and Band-aids on at least two fingers.

So I did some research before attacking the squash this time, and it turns out that if you stick the squash in the oven at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes and then let it cool completely, the skin peels right off and it’s very easy to cut up:

The naked butternut squash

After roasting in the oven, the squash was really squashy (!). I put it in a mixing bowl with the brown sugar and beat it together by hand. All the recipes I found online suggested using a power mixer but I don’t own one. So I came to terms with the idea of having slightly chunky pie and went medieval on that squash with a fork.

So what if the pie wouldn’t look pretty? It would just be like one of those unfortunate girls with beautiful bodies but unattractive faces, whom immature guys sometimes call "Butterfaces" ("She's got a great body, but her face..."). To those guys, I always say that it's better to be a butterface than a jerkface. And this pie was certainly not a jerkface.

Having come to terms with the aesthetic shortcomings of my pie, I blended in all the other ingredients, like so:

I poured the lumpy mixture into the Simply Pies crust and popped it in the oven. I had some batter left over, so I decided to make mini, crust-less pies in a muffin tin:

I did retain one thing from helping my mom with pies as a little girl: after about a half hour, you need to pull out the pie and wrap the crust in a loose layer of aluminum foil, so it doesn’t burn. I managed to complete this task without burning myself, which I count as a small victory.

After another ten minutes (45 minutes total), I pulled the pie out of the oven to cool. I haven’t eaten the pie itself yet, of course, but the mini, crust-less pie-muffin things are totally gone. They were wonderful.

It ended up not mattering that the batter was slightly lumpy – the lumps went away in the oven, and the end result has a smooth, creamy texture and that delicious, autumnal butternut squash taste.

Meghan Apple Seed: EatSeed.com Muffins

In my everyday life, I experience metaphorical seeds quite often. For instance, the reelection of the president on Tuesday --> “sowed the seeds of hope” in my heart. Sometimes I go around --> “planting seeds of doubt” in other people’s minds just to stir things up. But I rarely interact with literal seeds.

That changed when I discovered eatseed.com, a company that believes in the benefits of adding seeds to your diet. You can order seeds a la carte from their website, or join their Super Seed of the Month Club to have a new type of seed delivered to your door every month. Unfortunately, eat seed is based in North Carolina, thousands of miles away from me. So these seeds aren’t local, but they do offer a healthy supplement to local ingredients.

I ordered the Six Seed Super Blend, which includes pumpkin, sunflower, chia, sesame, hemp, and flax seeds. So many seeds. And so many health benefits! Just to name a few:

Pumpkin seeds can help fight depression, since they’re rich in tryptophan, which can increase serotonin levels. Sunflower seeds are high in vitamin E, which reduces the risk of heart disease, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. Chia seeds are packed with omega-3 fatty acids and calcium. Sesame seeds are also high in calcium: half a cup of sesame seeds contains three times the calcium of half a cup of milk, so sesame seeds are great for your bones and teeth. Hemp seeds can reduce cholesterol levels and improve your skin. And, of course, flax seeds (or linseeds) keep you regular. Not “regular” in terms of your personality (that’s a lost cause), “regular” in terms of your poop. Brilliant.

Eat seed features a blog with recipe ideas, but I wanted to come up with one of my own. I started with the obvious: sprinkling the seeds on my oatmeal. It made breakfast look a little fancier, but whole seeds can be hard to digest.

I knew that to get the real benefits of the seeds, I’d have to grind them up and bake. That made me nervous, as baking always does: you have to follow the directions exactly or risk blowing up your oven. The stakes are so high!

I decided to use locally grown apples in the recipe to add sweetness and texture. And also because I really wanted to adopt the moniker Meghan Apple Seed, if only for the hour or so it took me to bake these muffins.

Meghan Apple Seed Muffins

Here’s what I used:
1 cup ground Six Seed Super blend
1 cup old fashioned oats
1 apple, chopped into small bits (from Fair Hills Farm in Topanga Canyon, distance from me: 74 miles)
½ cup raisins
1 cup flour
1 cup brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 egg whites
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

I preheated the oven to 400 degrees. Then I ground up the Six Seed Super Blend in my spice grinder until it became a powder, like this:

I mixed the flour, oats, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, apples, and raisins in with the ground seeds:

 Then I added the wet ingredients and mixed it all up, like so:

I plopped the mixture into a baking tin and popped it into the oven for about 18 minutes, until I could stick a fork into one of the muffins and it would come out dry. Ta-da!

The muffins were absolutely delicious. David and I snacked on them late-night style, then had them again for breakfast in the morning… and for lunch that day. They didn’t taste gross like some good-for-you muffins – instead, the apples, raisins, and brown sugar added sweetness to the healthful goodness of the Six Seed Super Blend.

This successful endeavor planted some seeds of change (!) regarding my fear of baking. But I’m just planting seeds left and right now, since I’m Meghan Apple Seed now.

Roasted American "Feet" (Fennel+Beets)

On Tuesday, I skipped down my front walk to collect my Plow to Porch delivery box. Feeling a bit like a politically correct kid on ChristmaKwanzukkah, I peeled open the top of the cardboard… and was immediately hit in the face by a plume of fluffy, strongly scented greens.

Fennel! Yay…? I think I am not alone in my ambiguous feelings toward fennel. It’s hard not to be excited by something with such a distinctive flavor, but I’m not entirely sure I like that flavor. It’s the flavor of anise, also used in black licorice. I certainly don’t like black licorice, and I’ve only eaten anise as an antidote for bad gas for no reason at all.

Despite its questionable taste, fennel has texture going for it. Its texture is like celery. In fact, I’m going to go out on a crunchy, porous limb and say that fennel is like celery’s flamboyant cousin who causes general confusion at family dinners.

Just as much as a flamboyant cousin, every family dinner needs a terrifying albino neighbor. Lucky for me, my Plow to Porch box also included white beets. At first I wasn’t sure what these white beets even were, but then I received an email from Plow to Porch explaining that they hadn’t received their expected shipment of red beets, so they had delivered these creepy white beets instead.

I’m giving the white beets a hard time, but they are actually quite special. I found some websites that describe them as “novelty” beets – so, apparently, they’d be a perfect gift to bring to your next Yankee Swap – and they have the same nutritional value as regular beets but a milder flavor.

Since it is no longer October, I am no longer bound by my pledge to eat only locally produced foods. So for this recipe, I used apple cider vinegar that was pressed by Trader Joe’s somewhere far, far away and Dijon mustard, whose very name betrays its un-American origins.

To make up for the Dijon mustard’s anti-American background, I decided to add apples – everyone’s favorite American snack – to this recipe. In honor of the impending election, I give you Roasted American (because of the apples) Feet (because fennel + beet = feet).

Roasted American Feet

3 white “novelty” beets, skinned and cubed (from Rancho Cortez in Santa Maria, distance from me: 63.4 miles)
2 heads of fennel, sliced thickly (from The Garden Of… in Los Olivos, distance from me: 33.6 miles)
3 Fuji apples, cored, skinned, and chopped into cubes (from Fair Hills Farm in Topanga Canyon, distance from me: 74 miles)

The Feet Sauce
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp sea salt
2 tbsp honey (from San Marcos Farms in Santa Ynez, distance from me: 30 miles)
1 tbsp Dijon mustard

 

First, I preheated the oven to 400 degrees. Then I had to skin the apples and beets and chop them up into cubes. This was kind of an excruciating task, but I put on the latest episode of The Walking Dead to watch while I did it. This kept me entertained and reminded me that the pain in the butt of skinning and chopping up vegetables is better than the pain of having your butt eaten by zombies.

The fennel heads were easier to deal with: I just sliced them into thick strips. I arranged the apples, beets, and fennel in baking dishes pretty haphazardly:

Then I mixed up the apple cider vinegar, olive oil, salt, honey, and mustard in a bowl and drizzled it on top. I put the baking dishes in the oven for 50 minutes, until the fennel was almost clear and the beets were tender.

While the dishes were in the oven, I grilled up the white beet greens, which were no more pallid than the greens of normal beets, in olive oil. Beet greens are full of vitamins K, A, and C and taste a lot like spinach when they’re grilled.

The finished product tasted yummy in a very autumnal way. The sweetness of apple balanced out the anise flavor of the “feet,” and the combination of textures worked well, too. It seems to me American zombies everywhere could learn a thing or two from this slightly sophisticated preparation of feet.

Oh, My Squash! It's Autumn!

A couple of weeks ago, I was on an epic bike ride (and by “epic” I mean about six miles on my neon pink beach cruiser), when I decided to stop into Plow to Porch Organics on upper State Street. I hadn’t been inside their store since using my Groupon a year and a half ago, so I nosed around all the displays.

As I rummaged through the freezer, trying to decide between flavors of Rori’s artisanal ice cream, I was approached by a friendly woman named Pam Plesons. She’s the owner of Plow to Porch, and she told me all about their home delivery program.

Within minutes, I was signing up for a weekly delivery of the “Small” sized box, which includes enough fresh produce from multiple farms in the area to feed two people for a week. They also offer “Family” sized boxes, if you live in a bigger household, and “Bambino” sized boxes, if you are an Italian baby.

Regular old Community Share Agriculture (CSA) programs offer only whatever that one farm happens to grow, whereas Plow to Porch offers a mixture of fruits, vegetables, and herbs from a variety of farms. You can also sign up online for “extras” like cheese, nuts, meat, fish, etc. on a week-to-week basis.

Yesterday, I received my second weekly box, right outside my front door:

There are very few ways in which Santa Barbara indicates the autumn season. The grape harvest and subsequent wine binging tasting is the most fun way, and the appearance of all different kinds of squash is the most delicious. So I was psyched to see four delicata squash in my Plow to Porch box.

Delicata squash is right up my alley when it comes to cooking preparation, since it’s easier to cut than most other squash and you don’t have to skin it before you cook it. After more than one traumatizing experience chasing a stubborn butternut squash around the kitchen with a carving knife, slicing up delicata squash was a piece of pumpkin pie.

Delicata Squash with Sage

The ingredients

Here’s what I used:
2 delicata squash from Jose Alcantara Garcia in Oxnard, CA (distance from me: 37 miles)
1 bunch sage from Earthtrine Farm in Ojai (distance from me: 33 miles)

(I would have liked to use butter, but I had rubbed the last of it all over my knee after walking into a piece of furniture. I read online that butter stops bruises from forming. For the record, it did not work, and now I just have a greasy, bruised knee.)

Unfortunately butterless, I figured I could always add some olive oil if the squash turned out too dry. First, I preheated the oven to 350 degrees. I cut the squash down the middle and scraped out the seeds so they looked like this:

Then I sliced them into little half-circles and arranged them in a baking dish. I chopped up the bunch of sage into very fine bits and sprinkled them over the top of the squash. I baked it for 45 minutes.

I don’t cook with sage very often, so I was glad for a reason to try it. I’ve always thought sage tastes and smells like a musty old museum – the kind with taxidermied mammals in glass cases. I still think it tastes musty, but combined with the flavorful squash, it was more of a comforting must, like a nice old lady’s sweater drawer.

I sautéed some spinach from Rancho Cortez in Santa Maria (distance from me: 64 miles) as a side. The whole meal was delicious. I’m inclined to think butter was completely unnecessary, since the squash itself had a buttery texture and flavor.

I know what I’m rubbing on my knee the next time I accidentally walk into the coffee table.

Sugar and Salt and Everything Nice

I scream, you scream, we all scream when we realize just how many calories we’re shoveling into our mouths with every spoonful of ice cream. Given how delicious it is, it seems supremely unfair that just one half cup of ice cream – and who eats just one half cup, ever? – has about 20% of the total calories most women need in a day… and 100% of the fat.

(I am so sorry if you’re reading this post while enjoying an entire pint exactly one half cup of ice cream. Please forgive me for ruining it and continue reading.)

Lots of foods have lots of calories and lots of us just do our best to avoid those foods. Ice cream, though, is particularly difficult to resist because it makes you feel so goddamn nostalgic. If you can watch the ice cream truck turning the corner – covered in half-peeled-off stickers of multi-colored popsicles, its incessant chiming music made slightly creepy by the Doppler effect – and not experience the urge to chase after it on your bike with a dollar crumpled up in your fist, well, I would argue that you had no childhood.

I did have a childhood and I sure took advantage of it: on more than one occasion, my siblings and I didn’t make it to the ice cream truck in time and whined until our dad agreed to chase it down in our family minivan. (I am not making that up... so yeah, thanks, Dad.)

So when I saw what appeared to be a particularly classy ice cream truck at the SOL Food Festival here in Santa Barbara, I headed straight for it, my childlike excitement only slightly dampened by a certain amount of calorie-guilt-preparation.

That nagging guilt dissipated, though, when I realized that this wasn’t an ice cream truck after all; it was a refurbished 1966 mail truck, offering ice cream’s hippie health-nut cousin: locally sourced, non-dairy sorbet!

John with the Sugar and Salt Creamery truck.

I chatted to John, the founder and co-operator of Sugar and Salt Creamery, who was standing near an adorable sandwich-chalkboard (chalk-sandwich board?) advertising the day’s flavors:

John told me that all the sorbet is made with locally sprouted, homemade almond milk and produced in downtown Santa Barbara. For the SOL Food Festival, he had used almonds from Fat Uncle Farms in Wasco, CA (distance from me: 150 miles) and fruit from Shepherd Farms, which has land in Carpinteria (distance from me: 11 miles) and Santa Ynez (distance from me: 30 miles).

The Sugar and Salt Creamery truck parks at local events like the Art Walk on Sundays and the Farmers Market on Tuesdays and Saturdays, as well as at Butterfly Beach on Fridays. They’re also expanding their business to local retailers like the Isla Vista Coop, in case you’re not in the mood to hop in your minivan and chase them down.

I ordered the raspberry flavor and was handed a small serving which, if I had to guess, was probably just one half cup:

So good! Almond milk and raspberry sorbet.

If this looks like a very tiny serving of sorbet, believe me: it looked the same in person. But amazingly, it was enough. And this is coming from a girl who once finished an entire pint of Chunky Monkey while sitting cross-legged on the floor and watching America’s Next Top Model (the irony was not lost on me).

The combination of almond milk and fresh fruit made the Sugar and Salt sorbet really special and satisfying, rather than just a less-filling stand-in for ice cream. It was sweet and nutty at the same time, and the texture was creamy but not too heavy. Bonus points for the baby spoon hidden in the bottom of the lid.

Eat Local Challenge 2012

I've gloated about this many times, but just for the record (in case you're keeping one): I'm lucky enough to live in Santa Barbara, where it is particularly easy to eat locally grown and produced foods. It's the reason an otherwise lazy person like me can dedicate an entire blog to my adventures eating local foods and reviewing restaurants and other establishments that use local ingredients.

But sometimes it's just easier to heat up a can of soup or pick up a packaged meal at an inexpensive market. I've been in the process of moving into a new place over the past couple of weeks, so the time I can dedicate to planning local shopping trips and preparing meals using local ingredients has been more limited than usual.

Recently, I read about a project that is just the inspiration I need to get back on the proverbial track. Edible Santa Barbara, my favorite publication ever in the history of time, is sponsoring its 4th annual Eat Local Challenge in conjunction with the Community Environmental Council and the Santa Barbara Farmers Market.

Santa Barbarians (who are generally not as barbaric as they sound) are encouraged to pledge to eat only locally grown and produced food for the month of October. They can set their own limits: "local" can refer to only Santa Barbara proper, or the tri-county area, or all of the state of California. Exceptions can be made for coffee, tea, and other addictions products that are not grown locally.

Although I already make a point of eating a local diet, there are certain products I consume on a near-daily basis that originated in the far-flung corners of the world. Here are a few of those products and how I plan to address them this month:

Coffee: Ugh. No, really, "ugh" is all I can physically bring myself to say on days when I haven't had my coffee. Teaching can be awkward, as can responding to sensitive questions like, "What do you think of my new outfit?" Ugh. Since coffee isn't grown in California, and since giving it up would mean wearing a month-long scowl and alienating my friends and colleagues with glares and half-articulated grunts, I thought I'd have to make an exception. But I recently learned that Goodland Organics is experimenting with growing coffee right in Goleta, California, and selling it at the Tuesday farmers market! I can't wait to pick some up.

Milk: There is no dairy in Santa Barbara county, but Lazy Acres carries milk from dairies in the nearby area. I am also a fan of Organic Pastures raw milk, which is sold at the Saturday farmers market. Don't cry over raw milk, that's what I always say.

Bread: I love the artisan rolls from Solvang Pie Company, and as it turns out, they're made from wheat grown in the Santa Ynez valley. Perfect.

Quinoa: This part breaks my quinoa-lovin' heart. Quinoa won't grow in California, since the climate won't support it. That means I'll just have to eat a lot more legumes. I'm going to try supplementing my veggies with pasta made from locally grown wheat from Solvang Pie Company.

So there you have it: my eating local plan for the month of October. Make your own plan and share it! You can join the Facebook group and RSVP to the Facebook event for moral support. The Google group is also a great resource for ideas about where to find local versions of your favorite foods. Check out this Source Guide for a list of establishments that are on-board the local train.

If, like me, you derive your self-worth some occasional pleasure from tweeting, use #EatLocalSB, @EdibleSB and @CECSB as you track your progress.