Wok Meets Chard: Crafting Lusciously Loaded Asian Dishes in New Hampshire

"Oh Lord, please don't burn us, don't kill us, don't toast your flock. Don't put us on the barbecue or simmer us in stock; don't bake or baste or boil us for stir-fry us in a wok."
                                                                                                 -From Monty Python & Flying Circus

"Wok (noun, pronounced wak): 1) a large bowl-shaped cooking utensil used especially in stir-frying; 2) also, a noun to express excitement about dining out for Asian cuisine."

1) Tom thought he could make savory tofu in his wok, much to the skepticism of his college neigbors. After letting the tofu simmer in a strange rice-wine vinegar & Hoisin sauce brew, his tofu became the mainstay of "Friday night munchies" throughout the campus.

2) "Let's go to CHINA FREAKIN' WOK!," Tom's friend Maria shouted after the party let out at 2 a.m.


Gratefully, wok cooking never has to be painful; if anything, the ability to cook, saute, & blend ingredients for a fresh, healthy, and ultimately luscious dish stands out remarkably with stir-frys & myriad fusions. If anything, it's been been proposed by more than one astute mind that the ever-American concept of the "melting pot" came from woks.

Case-in-point: Last night's creation of "Keene King Tofu," a New England Asian eggplant & tofu stir-fry cooked  in a now-cozier house share here in Keene, New Hampshire. Alongside a $3.00 New Mexican wok acquired from a yard sale, some of the following ingredients proved key:

- Cheaply yet freshly purchased Jasmine rice, white-rice wine vinegar, and Hoisin sauce from Shaw's Supermarket;

- A plethora of produce from Midwestern American carrots;

- Mid-Atlantic broccoli & onions;

- New England summer squash & kale;

-Californian & New Hampshire eggplants (including a Blanca Rosa variety);

- Westmoreland, New Hampshire Swiss chard & broccoli, and;

- Californian tofu & red pepper Alongside some dark green Swiss chard.

Oh, and technically three New Mexican dried chili peppers & Kroger's peanuts I brought out from New Mexico.

Once I boiled the Jasmine rice and chopped coarsely yet tenderly all the produce, I heated up the wok in olive oil & garlic magic before throwing in the eggplants to soften, other produce to tender, & finally th red bell pepper & tofu.

Topped off with dry roasted peanuts, the final entree looked something like this:

Debut of "Keene King Tofu," Taken By Matt Young, 08.22.11

A HUGE shout-out to go towards the Keene Farmers' Market, held here in town every Tuesday and Saturday from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. on Gilbo Avenue to host such exciting, entrepreneurial vendors as Sun Spring Farm (Westmoreland, NH), Stonewall Farm (Keene, NH), The Bread Shed (Keene, NH), and many others!

More local & food systems goodness to share as fall harvests start out, as well...

*Note, as my physical address has changed, so has my mailing address. If interested in sharing feedback or further correspondence, feel free to contact via my Gmail address & we can continue the conversation old-school.


New Mexico Green Chiles & How To Be Locally Global

"As with other crops in other parts of the country — we all know about the Vidalia onion, we know about other crops that really have their brand identity in place. New Mexico has that, but it's never been protected the way other crops and other parts of the country have."
                                                                                
                                      -Stephanie Walker, Extension Vegetable Specialist, New Mexico State University

      After a month of hiatus, with most of this time wrapping up final projects, reporting, & blogging for our Santa Fe Youth Food Cadre pilot team, it feels AWESOME to be writing back on other engaging stories of food, foodies, and food systems in action. I still want to share a shout-out to Allie, Amy, David, Emma, Jennie, Kate, Katie, Kimber, Liana, Maria Jose, Rachel, and Susan for shaping one of the more diligent, persistently passionate, and uber-optimistic teams I've ever worked with, let alone on cultivating local food systems in farms, schools, small businesses, governmental agencies, and beyond(!) Thanks, too, to Angela, Bianca, Christina, and Lora of Santa Fe nonprofit, Earth Care, for securing the funding & program management of such a dynamic group!

           Earth Care is actually in the midst of securing matching funding to run a second year of the Food Cadre as of this coming September; if you are passionate about food, food systems, public service, and pretty much anything pertaining to community development, feel free to seriously consider donating for the cause. For more information, feel free to check out the Earth Care's website or to call their lines at (505)-983-6896.

            Now, over the coming weeks, I'll aim to offer more original coverage & resources on what it means to be a "curious omnivore," especially once I settle into a gorgeous slice of southwestern New Hampshire for living & graduate school in the next couple of weeks. Yet, while I'm in the final throes of packing & my final week in New Mexico (sometimes called the "Land of Weird Enchantment"), I figured to leave out with a rather heartening story in a time of much food turbulence.

              Yesterday, a friend of mine living in Philadelphia and working with the Food Trust there shared a refreshing story from National Public Radio's Weekend Edition this past Sunday. Reporter Audie Cornish narrated how in the last week, New Mexican state legislators have taken a forward-thinking, "locally global" step in food security. A step only previously undertaken in the Champagne region of France & other select locations; to keep "Hatch" and "New Mexico-grown" chiles as...well, Hatch and New Mexico-grown, as opposed to cheaper bushels grown in India, China, and Mexico marketed as "Hatch" and "New Mexico-grown." As Stephanie Walker of New Mexico State University points out above, other regions of the United States have acquired & protected the rights to "Vidalia" onions among other bioregional names. Granted, this legislation only applies at the statewide level & faces limitations if Chinese, Indian, Mexican, or other international chile producers ignore the newfound legislation. Federal certification & enforcement would cost considerably more, but as time passes, perhaps there will be more impetus to push for asserting the relevance & niche of "Hatch" & "New Mexico-grown" chiles in the global economic web.

               I'll attach a link to the story below, and if you ever have the chance to trek to Hatch, New Mexico, it's one of the more unassuming and subtly potent towns in the Southwest (if not the whole United States). Chile paintings occupy almost all available wall space downtown and if you time your drive just right, the savoriness of chiles rellenos & steaming New Mexican dishes do fill the air, including at the Pepper Pot restaurant in town (restaurant link included below, as well).

                "It's Law: There's No Green Chile Like A New Mexico Green Chile"

                Pepper Pot

Baskets of Hatch Green Chiles, Anyone?, 08.01.11 

             
                 Over the next couple of weeks in cross-country travels, I'll aim for nothing less than exploring & savoring as local of regional & Americana establishments as I can. Until I report back next, here's to stellar summer eating & feel free to share any resources & stories from your slice of the country; on what it means to be a curious omnivore.
              
              
                                                                                                              

Cultivating A New Mexican Food Ark



Peanut Goodness in New Mexico, Four Bridges Permaculture Institute, Santa Cruz, NM (Photo Taken by Matt Young, June 29th, 2011)



"Most of us in the well-fed world give little thought to where our food comes from or how it's grown. We steer our shopping carts down supermarket aisles without realizing that the apparent bounty is a shiny stage set held up by increasingly shaky scaffolding. We've been hearing for some time about the loss of flora and fauna in our rain forests. Very little, by contrast, is being said or done about the parallel erosion in the genetic diversity of the food we eat."

--Charles Siebert, "Food Ark," National Geographic, July 2011 issue

There's just no way of sharing this full story without admitting the following: It was a weird morning.

Granted, New Mexico in general, let alone the Old Mexico-meets-New Mexico feel to Santa Cruz, an agricultural and trailer settlement on the east side of the Espanola Valley in northern New Mexico, possesses more than enough paradox to go around. Where one can walk into a centuries-old adobe church with intricate santos and comparably-illustrated Catholic decor, a few tenths of a mile up along El Llano Road leads to a literal strip of residential trailers, double-wide modular housing, howling with dogs along dusty lanes. Yet, all of this exhibits another New Mexico, where a significant population resides alongside the fertile banks and alluvial plains of the Rio Grande, even in a months-long drought cycle.

So, alongside the place-based weirdness (at least initially), two wildfires were burning Wednesday morning June 29th within 40 miles of Santa Cruz. The Pacheco fire had been burning since almost two weeks prior, scorching Nambe, Tesuque, and federal lands some miles east and thousands of feet uphill. Nearly due south and west, what would become the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, the Las Conchas blaze continued burning on the outskirts of Los Alamos and through Jemez & Santa Claran tribal lands in the Jemez hills.

Essentially, many of our Cadre members (including myself) found ourselves almost enveloped on all sides by smoke plumes with yellowish-blue-gray haze and wafting wood smoke surrounding us that Wednesday morning. Yet even so, we essentially found ourselves not so much nervous, as curious to hear more from Lorraine on the Four Bridges Traveling Permaculture Institute. I said this would all be pretty strange, no?

Lorraine, an Akwesasne Mohawk from the St. Lawrence river valley of upsate New York, came out to New Mexico two years previously to help organize an indigenous seed conference in Espanola. Somehow, even with years of facilitating farmers' markets, being active in St. Lawrence food systems, and raising six children, Lorraine still felt the urge to move and re-settle in northern New Mexico. In spite of contending with drought cycles unheard of in New York, whole new crop varieties, differences in child-raising among her neighbors, dysfunctional electrical systems, and more, Lorraine said she had no regrets about the decision to move.

With her partner Emigdio, Lorraine has slowly, steadily renovated a once-derelict adobe casita and barbed wire, trash-littered plot into cozy homestead.  Dozens of square feet behind the casita currently house 2-3 varieties of chickens, Alpine goats, rabbits, and turkeys. In front of the house lies a well-tended herb realm, with the reuse of pottery shards to form a walkway to spiral & mandala garden space in the back for raising medicinal stinging nettle, tobacco, clover, and more. With brown all around in the distance, this pocket of green shocked and then soothed our eyes.

Tracing our steps back, we crossed a low acequia and into a field also remarkably verdant. Bindweed, young Russian thistle, and not so preferred vegetation comingled with up and coming Hopi blue corn stalks, Anasazi beans, Tesuque chiles, tomato plantings, basil growth, buckwheat stems, and such. In the foreground, waffle gardens supported more delicate growth with larger holdings in the back lots. As rustic as it may have initially looked, the sheer biodiversity within thousands of square feet just took us all in.

As we then assumed myriad tasks of weeding in the waffle gardens & between rows, planting marigolds, cutting & splicing Chinese elm branches for miniature coyote fencing, and assembling a metal-mesh-framed plot to house nursing goats, self-sufficiency with collaborative, communal workings became more and more realized. By no means did we stop noticing the smoke plumes, but rather we worked as if somehow, someday our steps at permacultural action would at least alleviate having more smoke-plumed days.

The following day, I found myself reading an insightful article in the July 2011 National Geographic, Charles Siebert's "Food Ark," highlighting how we can feed seven billion people via seed storage, heirloom crop & livestock raising & cultivation to create a global "food ark." Lorraine's Santa Cruz plot intrinsically shares much in common with the Whealy's 890-acre Seed Savers Exchange acreage in Decorah, Iowa; or with Cary Fowler's brainchild Svalbard Global Seed Vault tucked under a snow mound on an Arctic island; or with Jemal Mohammed's five-acre hillside farm in northeastern Ethiopia covered with East African onion, garlic, cilantro, sorghum, barley, chickpea, and teff varieties.

All are unique terrestrial zones where their stewards realize how we cannot sustainably manage landscapes or feed populations or even ensure food justice if we face the loss of 1,600 livestock species, over a 75% national loss of varieties in peas, radishes, & more within 80 years, and ultimately jeopardize 10,000 years of human and nature interfacing in agriculture to create such astounding, critical biodiversity (Siebert, "Food Ark," National Geographic, July 2011).

Hence, global actions that can manifest themselves in local pockets, as in Lorraine's Four Bridges Sacred Garden and broader permacultural exercise in Santa Cruz, should give us hope for sustenance and justice. No wonder that when Lorraine showed some of us a few rows of peanut plantings taking root in the dry yet wet enough New Mexican soil, it was nothing short of wonder. Wonder in the belief that even with wildfires burning, soils cracking under heat, and beyond, cultivating food arks could be a nourishing path to food justice.

"Tomatoland": The Global Weirding to Growing Tomatoes

A New Take on the Mutant Tomato, a la Barry Estabrook's narrative "Tomatoland"
 (Photo from Fresh Air's "How Industrial Farming Destroyed the Tasty Tomato", June 28th, 2011)

"In Vermont, where I live, as in much of the rest of the United States, a gardener can select pretty much any sunny patch of ground, dig a small hole, put in a tomato seedling, and come back two months later and harvest something. Not necessarily a bumper crop of plump, unblemished fruits, but something. When I met Monica Ozores-Hampton, a vegetable specialist with the University of Florida, I asked her what would happen if I applied the same laissez-faire horticultural practices to a tomato plant in Florida. She shot me a sorrowful, slightly condescending look and replied, 'Nothing.'"
  -Barry Estabrook, "Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit"

Earlier today, while fixing up a Sustainable Santa Fe website on building up environmentally conscious food systems, I came across an interview with former Gourmet contributing editor Barry Estabrook on the ever lively, illuminating radio series, Fresh Air.

Estabrook's newly-published book, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, highlights how an iconic crop, the tomato, spread from its origins in a slice of western South America & a feared member of the Solanacae (i.e. nightshade) plant family to becoming one of the most "warred against," mass-produced foodstuffs in American history. From once being a mortifying crop, tomatoes are now grown in Florida at a $1.6 billion scale annually, with Florida supplying over a third of the national tomato supply and over 90% of the supply during fall and winter months. For a more thorough ethnobotanical overview, feel free to read "History, Origin, and Early Cultivation of Tomato" from the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.

I will attach a link to the entire Fresh Air interview below. It is especially worth noting the conditions surrounding South Floridian tomatoes, wherein sandy soils, rampant humidity, and other subtropical weather phenomena combine with one of the most illustrative cases of "abject slavery" in the agricultural system among undocumented tomato pickers.

How Industrial Farming Destroyed the Tasty Tomato

If nothing else, we should probably think twice, or however many times it takes, to consider where we not only purchase our tomatoes, but where and how we purchase tomato-derived foodstuffs; need I mention tomato sauces, salsas, stewed tomatoes, ketchup, tomato soup, and beyond(?) Perhaps comes the time we become a bit more adventurous, a bit more curious with how we connect to something so historically luscious and flavor-complex as a fresh, homegrown, sun-ripened (not ethylene-pumped), tomato. Not only growing our own Roma or Princeton varieties, but also crafting our own tomato sauce, salsa, and yes even ketchup from home.

Yes, ketchup that can be stored in Mason jars or other friendly reusables; maybe one won't ever have to fumble their hands in finding a half-empty plastic bottle in the refrigerator or the even more perplexing sight of "ketchup" inserted and sealed shut into mylar...Oh wait, now I hear such a sight is called a "condiment sachet" or "ketchup buster."

I will also attach some rather ingenious recipes and how-tos below, as well as tomato varieties worth growing right outside our backyards & a spiffy eHow video from Jene VanButen of TropicalFruit.com:

Grow and Sell Heirloom Tomatoes

Vegetable Gardening: How to Grow Heirloom Tomatoes (Video)

Canning Tomatoes Recipes: Delicious and Nutritious

Here's to merrier and hopefully juicier tomato feasting! Who knows where The Curious Omnivore will be next, along what feels like a trek through global weirding with hopes for global understanding?

Why We Should Play With Our Food

Hot, Gorgeous Quesadilla Mess Along Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, February 2011 (Taken By Matt Young)

Feel free to take a look, however long, of the hot, gorgeous mess of a roadside quesadilla above. This past February, I traveled out to Los Angeles (CA) to gain a better grasp of southern California and to visit a friend I hadn't seen in two years from college. I found myself enamored of what a singular locale this city is, but far beyond the backed-up lines of tourists photographing Michael Jackson's marker along Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame or even the surrealness of an amusement park lodged out on the edge of Santa Monica Pier. Rather, for my last lunch, my last meal in Los Angeles for this trip, I ordered from a roadside cart, a taqueria-turned-quesadilla dynamo run part-time by an effervescent woman, Migdalia.

"Would you like some jalapeno salsa to top it off?," Migdalia asked in her bubbly Latina voice.

Don't mind if I do, and I found myself giddy to dash on that salsa and dance on the sidewalk when I first saw the mess seen above. The jalapenos, the barely day-old tortillas, the even fresher queso de quesadilla, the juicy carne (roasted meat), sour cream, and at least two other medium tomato-based salsas created a gorgeous, serendipitous amalgamation of flavors. Not long afterwards, the inevitable question arose:

What does it mean to eat? I mean, the full definitive scope of that word eat.

As in tracking how any of those quesadilla ingredients, or how the grain for your al dente linguine, arrived on your plate, let alone the exotic paths of the olive oil drizzling between the strands of your pasta of choice;

Or how a juicy, savory cut of beef sirloin traveled from a cattle herd of sprawling megalopolises with corn-loaded feed lots (or perhaps from a maverick deep in green seas of pasturelands) to your grill;

Or how the mountain of arugula greens first sprouted on river valley lowlands, drifting down to the most urbane of plates?

After years of being an undercover foodie, I've run into too many fascinating farmers, consummate cooks, fantastic fruits, and intriguing food systems far too luscious and critical not to share. While parents or society might have told us not to play with our food, what would happen if we not just played, feeling our hands stick in the curves of rising bread dough(?) What if we also delved into actually adventuring about how our food comes to be, how we relate to that which sustains us daily, and in turn how we cultivate healthier people, healthier communities, healthier bioregions, and beyond?

Hence, while diving back into academia in a few months, focusing on Food Systems & Environmental Media at Antioch University-New England, what could be better than to explore the world that nourishes us? Hopefully, this blog can be the beginning of a long trek immersing in how people, cultures, appetites, lands, waters, and of course food interact- from the most intimate of "locavore" webs to global disseminating of food in the most unlikely of places-- tropical Colombian coffee beans grown in humid belts marketed & consumed while feet of snow piling outside a New England coffeeshop(?!)



If you should be of an adventurous, inquisitive, and especially hungry personality, feel free to join in with The Curious Omnivore.