Newsletter – October 4, 2012

If I did not have my annual catering job on Friday (I make the food for the Landscapes for Landsake preview party) I would probably be sitting here right now trying to think how best to convey why the Presidential Debates irritate me so much. Or I would be writing about how little I care that the super rich feel unloved when anyone dares talk about the outrageous and destructive level of income inequality in this country. Or I would be pondering what my seething anger at the deer eating the carrots says about my relationship with nature. Or I would be wondering why we so often talk of nature as if it were something apart from–even opposed to–us when surely we are as natural as emus or fungus. Or I might be composing a pseudolyrical piece on newts. Or explaining at great length why all of my recipes involve olive oil and garlic. Or explaining at great length why old farmers drive so slowly. Or speculating on why, contrary to what you would expect and to what other root vegetables do, beets grow so large when there’s no moisture in the soil (and grow so poorly in a wet year). Or complaining for the umpteenth time about carrot weeding. Or about slugs. Or thistles. 

But I have to make appetizers for 150 people so I will leave the fatalistic, dispeptic philosophizing to you and get back to rolling out tiny tart shells and piping out tiny choux pastry puffs and rolling up pickled root vegetable spring rolls, which are a nice thing to make if you happen to have any daikon and kohlrabi on hand. Should that be the case, you could julienne the vegetables and mix them a tablespoon or so of salt and let them sit overnight. Drain and rinse the vegetables and pat them dry. Put enough vinegar to cover the vegetables in a pot along with a thinly sliced clove of garlic, peppercorns, perhaps some hot pepper, perhaps a piece of ginger,and spices of your choosing such as cloves or bay leaf or allspice. Bring the vinegar slowly to a boil and turn off the heat. Let the vinegar sit until it has cooled and pour it over the vegetables. Let this sit for at least a few hours. You can just wrap up the pickled vegetables in spring roll wrappers as they are, or you could mix them with soy sauce and sesame oil and maybe some crushed peanuts or sliced scallion or diced hot pepper or some chopped herb such as cilantro or mint or parsley or all of those (that is what I recommend) and then wrap that mixture in your wrappers. Or even better, let the people eating the spring rolls  wrap their own, which, sadly, I will not be able to get away with for the Friday event.