The Quarter-Acre Farm

by Spring Warren

  Recipe

  Escargot in Two Colors

  After all of the cleaning, the rest of the preparation for escargot is a snap. For the classic French-style escargot I simply do the following:

  Ingredients for French-style Escargot: • meat from 24 snails

  • 24 white button mushrooms

  • ½ cup softened butter

  • 1 TB minced garlic

  • 1/8 cup chopped parsley

  1. Mince the garlic, finely chop the parsley, and mix both into the butter.

  2. As I wait for the butter/parsley/garlic mixture to chill in the refrigerator, I clean my mushrooms. Even though I’m sure other types of mushrooms might well be even more delicious, I used white button mushrooms because they had the most generously sized caps the day I purchased them.

  3. I pull the stems from the caps and put them aside to use as stuffing for the mushroom caps that the snail-squeamish guests would eat.

  4. From my pile of cleaned, cooked, and chopped snails, I take what seems to be a snail’s worth of meat, stick it in the mushroom cap, and then with a melon baller, I scoop out a half globe of butter/parsley/garlic mix and place it on top of the snail meat inside the mushroom cap.

  5. I put the filled caps on my snail dishes, which are stainless steel plates with divots in them to hold the snail-filled snail shells, or in this case, snail-stuffed mushrooms.

  With several of the French-style escargot plates filled, it was time to move on to making the tomato-based snail recipe.

  Ingredients for Spanish-style Escargot: • meat from 24 snails

  • 24 white button mushrooms

  • 3 anchovy filets

  • 2 cups reconstituted sun-dried tomatoes

  • 2 TB olive oil

  • ½ an onion, diced

  • 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper

  • salt to taste

  1. Dissolve the anchovy filets in the olive oil.

  2. Add diced onion and sauté until the onion is translucent.

  3. Add cayenne pepper, and salt to taste, then transfer the onion/anchovy mixture into the food processor with the sun-dried tomatoes and puree into a paste.

  4. Add snail meat to cleaned mushroom caps, but this time top the snails with a half globe of tomato/onion/anchovy mixture, then put them on still more divoted snail plates.

  5. Sprinkle toasted bread crumbs over the tops of all the caps, and when your guests are happy with wine, conversation, and song, put the plates under the broiler on low (about ten minutes) until the food is bubbling hot.

  This makes a great small-dish centered dinner. Along with the snails, I also served home-cured olives, fava beans with shaved pecorino, stuffed chard rolls, fennel celery salad, and baby beets with goat cheese. Except for the cheese, the food, like the snails, hearkened from the Quarter Acre Farm. Which got me thinking, I was so good at snail wrangling, how much more work could a goat be? (Just kidding, Louis)

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MUMMIFICATION: THE ART OF CURING OLIVES

  “They are twisted, they kneel to pray, and they raise their arms, members tyrannized by movement, all elbows and knees. The bent roots suck the golden oil from the heart of the earth for the lamps of the saints and the salad of the poor.”

  —STRATIS MYRIVILLIS, GREEK POET

  I have no doubt that as scientists explore the genome, they will eventually map the location of the gene that compels children to stick their fingers into California-style pitted black olives so that their hands resemble the suction-cupped paws of a salamander, at which point, after no little waving of said paws, they then eat the olives one after the other like an epicurean king kissing crumbs from each fingertip.

  It will likely be the same gene responsible for the fact that some children’s fingers spend half their time lodged in one nostril or the other. I have a photograph of four-year-old Jesse standing on a riser with a construction paper mortarboard and tassel seated on his head, a finger in his nose. His teachers presented the photograph to me on the day of his preschool graduation (along with one in which they’d compelled him to let his nose go solo by clasping his hands in front of him), saying, “We just loved this one, it is so typical.” (Jesse would like me to clarify that he has long since refrained from sticking his finger in his nose).

  I don’t know what happened to the latter picture with the clasped hands, but the former is in our photo album. It has character—unlike “ripe” canned black olives. Other than the perfectly sized hole, the draw of those olives lies in their blandness, a cool, slightly meaty taste overlaid with a metallic tang that might be attributable to the iron gluconate used to dye the olives black.

  As a kid, I thought the California-style olives were so much better (as well as more entertaining) than the green olives—once you sucked the pimento out of it like a lamprey from it’s undersea crevice, all that was left was a hole too small for a finger and the bitter green fruit that, yes, tasted like it wasn’t ripe yet.

  Were it not for my Italian Grandmother, I would have thought those two varieties encompassed the entire, unimpressive olive world. But she happened to marry a Greek man, who would every so often bring Greek olives to our house. These my father would declaim as unfit for eating, but my mother would eat them with great relish out of sight of my father.

  The bizarre things my mother ate before she married my father and learned to cook like my father’s mother, in the German/English tradition, were a litany in our house. Not only had she consumed those weirdly shriveled olives, but also brown butter on spaghetti, anchovies, and baked bananas, for Pete’s sake. We felt sorry for her.

  I apologize now for the sneering. Browned butter (especially simmered with a handful of sage leaves tossed in until crisp) over pasta is delicious. Anchovies, along with salt and pepper, should be considered as an indispensable seasoning. Baked bananas? Bring them on! And Greek olives make practically everything better.

  Especially my Greek olives.

  When we moved to our current house, one of the best things about it was the enormous olive tree growing in the backyard. It had a wide grey-green canopy supported by gnarled reaching limbs, all elbows and knees. It produced thousands of thumb-sized olives that when ripe were deep purple-black obscured with a slight haze. Buff the cloud away and pinprick stars shone on the gleaming surface. For years I did nothing with the olives other than sweep them off the patio we built under the tree, hoping to keep the family from tracking the oily fruit into the house.

  Then I noticed groups of urban gleaners picking the olives off trees that lined one of the main throughways in Davis, and from the trees overhanging the bike paths further out of town. I asked the pickers what they did with the olives. For most of the people I talked to, English was not their first language, and though they did a lot better with their second language than I did with mine (faint praise unintended), it took some doing to get their ideas across. I appreciated the efforts since what these people did with their olives was wonderfully varied.

  Some soaked them in water, changing the baths each day; others soaked their olives in saltwater brine, which seemed to require a less frequent soaking-solution change. There were gleaners who used ashes to treat their olives, and one guy who said he had a yearly tradition of salting the olives in December, then pitting them as he watched the Super Bowl a month or so later.

  I described my tree and the fruit it produced to another gleaner who was a longtime Davis resident. He gave me an envious look. “There was a tree just like that out by Bee Biology Road. Huge olives, and they were good.” He shook his head. “They cut it down.”

  Olives come in more varieties than apples trees do, having been in cultivation for thousands of years longer. Their fruit, or drupes, have been encouraged toward different uses: oil, canning, or dual purpose. The grades of oil, however, came from the method of production (the old method of pressing on grass mats) with the best oil being extra virgin. The final pressing of the dregs produced an oil called “lampante,” that was used for lam
p fuel.

  While in most instances an expert can identify a tree by the fruit of the olive, the most reliable identification is done by examining the ridges in the pit, each variety exhibiting different ridging characteristics.

  The fruit of an olive tree is born on one-year-old wood, so each year the olives’ fruit rises farther out of reach. Olive producers rectify this by severely pruning the tree, curtailing its height and encouraging new lower growth that can be reached by workers. When the olives are ripe, workers beat the heck out of the tree branches with long sticks and special rakes, dislodging olives onto tarps spread at the foot of the tree. This method, however, has drawbacks. Not only may it damage the tree, but it can also damage the fruit, which starts to oxidize as a wound response. This oxidization makes for a less than perfect olive oil which is why growers such as Mike Madison from Yolo Press take the time to pick their fruit gently by hand.

  If the olive grower has a big spread—some Greek orchards have over a million trees—they are less likely to utilize the hands-on approach. They might use pneumatic rakes, harvesters with rotating fiberglass rods, or a machine that is aptly called a “shaker” to gather their olives (my favorite being the one that starts it’s work by elegantly unfurling a tarp at the base of the tree like a frilled lizard unfolding its neck cape). It grabs the tree by the trunk with a mechanical arm and shakes the olives from the branches, removing 80 to 90 percent of the fruit in about fifteen seconds. I can’t help but wonder if anyone has ever grabbed something other than a tree with that machine. Imagine what it could do with ice cream and milk.

  In Chile, Argentina, and Australia, they have a machine called the Colossus, which drives over the full-size olive trees and knocks off the fruit. I imagine the driver of the behemoth machine intoning the inscription from the original Colossus (an ancient 110-foot-tall statue so big that two men could hardly touch fingers when reaching around the girth of the thumb): “Not only over the seas but also on land did thy kindle the lovely torch of freedom . . .” Perhaps fitting since olive oil has fueled lamps for thousands of years.

  My own tree had not been pruned for at least twenty years, perhaps longer, effectively making the tree into what an olive grower would call a “feral” tree. The olive production had slowed, and the olives it did produce hung precariously high. Still, it was dropping enough olives every year for my personal use.

  Therefore, it was time to do something with my wonder olives. I went to the campus bookstore and picked up a pamphlet detailing lye curing, brine curing, and salt curing olives. At the bottom of the page was the author’s name, the one-time olive specialist at UC Davis, the late Reese Vaughn.

  Reese Vaughn?! He and his family had owned our house for almost half a century before we had bought it. He must have been the one to plant our tree. I imagined our tree to be the equivalent of the magic beanstalk, perhaps the result of a seed Mr. Vaughn had found in the midden of an ancient orchard site. Fossilized olive seeds had been found in Crete that carbon dated to 3,500 years old, and while one obviously can’t sprout a fossilized seed, there was a tree in Crete that through tree-ring calculations was estimated to be 2,000 years old. In fact, it is said that the olive tree that grows near the temple of Athena, the Erechtheion at the Acropolis, is the very first olive tree, sprouting there after Athena struck her spear into the ground. Thus, not only were olives birthed, but Athens was as well. Perhaps Reese had brought back one of Athena’s olives and the progeny was in our backyard!

  Goddess tree or no, I was avid to cure my olives, and the method that appealed to me most was salt curing. It was the most straightforward way, for one thing, but it was also a form of mummification. And I knew mummification.

  Sam was an ancient civilizations buff from the age of three. Every night for two years we read Sue Clarke’s The Tombs of The Pharoahs to him along with passages from more scholarly tomes. When he was four, I caught on that he was reading cartouches in order to identify the pharaoh who was buried in a particular pyramid. When Sam was nine, I made him an Anubis costume, the jackal-headed God of the underworld and eater of unjust hearts, for Halloween.

  The point being, a few years into Sam’s lifelong love of the ancient world, I became pretty darn informed about ancient Egypt. I figured that if I were somehow sent back in time and was called upon to act as an ancient Egyptian priest, I could weasel the brain from a pharaoh’s nasal passages, flop his internal organs into canopic jars, and dehydrate what was left of the fellow with natron, no problem.

  With olives, there was no brain weaseling, no organ flopping, just basic mummification. A piece of cake.

  The salt used in mummification, be it for Pharaohs or olives, not only dehydrates the flesh but also makes the situation within the olive’s “meat” inhospitable to bacteria. No liquid, no bacteria, no rot.

  The first time I cured my olives, I layered my olives and salt in cardboard boxes. The trouble with cardboard is that the olives release a goodly amount of liquid as they cure (not only water but the bitter tasting, albeit stellar antioxidant, chemical compound oleuropein.) The bottom of the boxes became sodden and the whole project teetered on the edge of falling apart, a great deal messier than it had to be.

  For the next batch, I made a beautiful peg-joined, hinged-top pine box into which I drilled hundreds of holes for aeration. Into this box I layered salt and olives, thinking of the time, perhaps hundreds of years in the future, in which this pine box might still be used for olive curing by the children of my children’s children, the lovely patina of olive oil and salt marking its century-old planks.

  Unfortunately, while the box was sturdy, I found there was no truly effective way to press down the salt within the box. While the olives desiccated and shrank, tiny caves formed around the fruit, and where the olive flesh was not in contact with the salt, molding occurred.

  With the third batch, I abandoned my no longer useful heirloom-worthy box and used a less romantic but much more utilitarian plastic burlap bag instead. Within the bag I layered bulk sea salt, then a layer of washed ripe olives, followed by more sea salt and more olives, until the bag was over half full. I tied the top closed then stood it in a large plant saucer—which I emptied when the olive “juices” collected there.

  In addition, every day or so I rolled the plastic burlap bag full of salt and olives about, effectively shaking up the salt and collapsing those salt caves around the olives. It worked like a charm. At the end of six to eight weeks, when the olives were shriveled and no longer tasted wicked bitter but deep and warm, I separated the olives from the salt, packed the olives in Ziploc bags, then froze them.

  When I needed olives, I took a bag from the freezer, rinsed the remnant salt from the olives, and packed them in a canning jar with cloves of garlic, sprigs of rosemary, a piece of hot pepper, and perhaps some basil. I heated olive oil and poured it over the olives and herbs, then stuck the jar of olives, herbs, and oil in the refrigerator. After a week, they were ready to use.

  Unlike the guy who pitted his olives watching the Super Bowl, I don’t pit mine until I’m ready to use them. I use a hand-held cherry pitter and pop out the pits, then cut up the olives to use in focaccia, on pizza, or in tomato sauce, or I eat them plain. The deep warm umami taste is the perfect counterpoint for the tangy tomato sauces, the heat of chile peppers, or soft bread dough fragrant with rosemary. Heavenly. Of course, Athena is the goddess of wisdom. She knew what she was doing.

  Recipe

  Olive Focaccia

  Focaccia is delicious, gorgeous, and a whole host of other “ous-es” too numerous to mention here. Focaccia is also easy to make and if you “proof” your yeast (a must-do, especially if you don’t make bread often), not much can go wrong.

  Why proof the yeast? The poor yeast could have expired in the long cold winter of your refrigerator. How do you proof? Add your yeast to a bit of slightly warm water, mix in a tablespoon each of flour and sugar, and you’ll soon learn if it is viable. Within fifteen minutes, live yeast will become go
od and bubbly. Dead yeast will merely drift to the bottom of your bowl like sludge, and sit there.

  Kneading will tell you when you’ve got good dough on your hands. The dough should feel stretchy with a bit of snap, like it has an opinion about its own shape. Once the dough is in good shape, don’t stint on the rising.

  As it rises, yeast is multiplying through a process called budding—new yeast cells bud off the old ones. This process produces enzymes that change the starch in the flour to sugar, then change the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. During rising, the carbon dioxide makes holes. During baking, the alcohol evaporates and makes for even more holes and lighter bread.

  Obviously you do not want to stymie the yeast’s work. Not only do you want light bread, but you also want the flavors that are being formed from the starches changing to sugar and sugars to alcohol.

  Ingredients: • 2 TB yeast

  • 4 cups flour