Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  Add the sun-dried tomatoes, onion, fresh herbs, garlic, and salt and pepper, mix, then add the ground beef and mix well.

  Scrape the mixture into two well-oiled 9 x 5-inch loaf pans.

  Bake for 11/2 hours. Remove and let cool.

  Lisa says:

  At The Braeburn, we specialize in great Pacific Northwest breakfasts and lunches made fresh with only the best ingredients. We use local and organic product whenever available and are fortunate to have a bounty of wonderful farms around us to utilize.

  We make our meatloaf to serve as a sandwich, though it’s also delicious as an entrée alongside herbed mashed potatoes and some local greens. Our sandwich is a 1/2-inch slice of meatloaf (grilled) on toasted Scala bread from the Essential Baking Company, with lettuce, tomato, alfalfa sprouts, and a light spread of mayo.

  Originally from a rural farming community in Vermont, I grew up watching my mother and my grandmother cooking with fresh vegetables and herbs from their gardens, fruit from the patches in the backyard, milk and cheese from the dairy farm down the street, and fresh local meat from the animals raised in the pastures nearby. Living on Whidbey we are so fortunate to have similar farms and product available to us here. My vision when taking over The Braeburn was to utilize as much of that bounty as possible to make the food and menu items here feel like they came out of the kitchens I grew up eating in. Fresh, simple, and homemade with love.

  Lisa’s co-chef is Patrick Boin, whose chicken recipe you’ll find in chapter 6. About him Lisa says, “I can’t tell you how lucky I was to have Patrick walk through my door last year. He has been able to help make my ‘vision’ an actual reality here!” When you read his recipe, you’ll know why she says this.

  Now for an elegant recipe—using mostly local ingredients—from Chef Vincent Nattress, who grew up in Coupeville on Whidbey Island. He worked as a chef and culinary consultant around the world and then returned to Whidbey to live a balanced life with his wife and two daughters. In 2010 he founded the Whidbey Island Slow Food Convivium, which produces an exquisite local feast each year: the Taste of Whidbey. Combining his love of food and of farming, he and his wife bought a centrally located piece of land where they can grow fruits, vegetables, and poultry while she does yoga and he continues as a sought-after fine chef. I picked his salad recipe because Vincent’s passion for Slow Food arises not just from his love for cooking but from his understanding of the links between industrial agriculture, climate change, and peak oil.

  Salad of Fall Greens, Poached Hen’s Egg, Walnut Vinaigrette

  This warm salad is a great way to showcase our range-fed chicken eggs. The thing that is amazing about them, because our chickens are on grass every day of the year, is the color and richness of the yolk. While you could do a salad like this any time of the year, it is particularly good with heartier fall and winter greens, like those in the chicory family: endive, radicchio, escarole to name just a few. These slightly bitter greens make a flavor explosion when combined with the acidity of the vinaigrette, the sweetness of the walnuts, and the richness of the egg, which serves to richen the dressing as it incorporates. Two things to note: First, always buy the best red wine (or any flavor) vinegar you can get your hands on; good vinegar is not expensive and goes a long way, and the good stuff is so much more impactful than lesser-quality vinegar. Second, good walnut oil is expensive and all nut oils tend to go rancid quickly; store it in the refrigerator and always taste before using to make sure it is sound.

  MAKES 4 SALADS

  1 head escarole

  2 Belgian endives

  1 head radicchio

  1 bunch watercress

  1 large shallot, chopped

  1 small garlic clove, smashed

  2 tablespoons good-quality red wine vinegar

  2 teaspoons honey

  1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

  salt and pepper

  1/4 cup pure olive oil

  1/4 cup walnut oil

  1 tablespoon white vinegar (distilled or white wine)

  4 hen’s eggs

  1 teaspoon finishing salt (like Maldon, Murray River, French gros sel, or fleur de sel)

  1 cup walnut halves, toasted

  Cut the escarole, endive, and radicchio into bite-sized pieces and soak them in cold water for 1 hour. This will crisp them up and go a long way to reducing any excess bitterness. Once they have soaked, drain them and spin them dry with a salad spinner. Trim, wash, and spin the watercress as well. All the greens should then be stored well covered with a damp towel in the coldest part of your refrigerator. They will hold well without noticeable browning if stored this way for up to a day.

  For the vinaigrette, combine the shallot, garlic, red wine vinegar, honey, mustard, and salt and pepper to taste in a bowl. Place a damp towel, formed into an O, under the bowl, so that as you whisk the contents the bowl stays put. Whisk the ingredients well to combine, then allow it to sit and pickle for 2 to 5 minutes. Slowly add the oils, whisking continuously, to form a loosely emulsified vinaigrette. Taste the dressing and adjust the seasonings with salt and pepper. As no two oils and no two vinegars are the same, you may have to add slightly more vinegar or slightly more oil. The vinaigrette should be quite bright and acidic, but not overly so.

  When you are ready to serve, bring 4 cups of water to a simmer in a small sauce pan. Add the white vinegar. Break the eggs into a small cup or ramekin and check to make sure there are no shell fragments in them. Stir the simmering water in a circular fashion, so it is moving gently. Carefully add the eggs to the simmering water and set a 4-minute timer.

  Meanwhile, place the greens in a large bowl and dress with the vinaigrette, salt, and freshly cracked pepper. Hold back some of the vinaigrette to garnish the salads. Divide the greens between four plates, making a place in the center of each plate for the egg to land when it is done. Once the timer for the eggs goes off, check to see that they are poached to your liking—I like them quite soft; you will have your preference, but you certainly do not want the yolk fully cooked, as it is going to help make the dressing—then remove them with a slotted spoon and dab them dry with a clean towel. Place an egg on each salad.

  Garnish each egg with the finishing salt and freshly cracked pepper. Sprinkle the walnuts around the salads. Drizzle the remaining vinaigrette over each egg and around the outside of each plate.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Yes! But How?

  A Change of Date

  Tricia and I first presumed we’d start the experiment in August—just four weeks away. On second thought—and there were a series of second thoughts—September looked better.

  First, August meant I might not get to eat at Britt and Eric’s wedding. Even though they’d committed to grow all the food and flowers for their wedding—and it had taken them two years to make good on that—my original bargain was to eat only what Tricia could grow. This was one wedding where I did not want to miss the food.

  Second, Tricia and I were both, frankly, worried about whether I’d have enough to eat and wanted more time to adjust to what we’d set in motion. While I could not have found a better person to provide the bulk of my food than Tricia, when I contemplated a month with no meat, I knew that would tip the adventure too far into the austerity zone. Even with the eggs she promised, even with plenty of hearty root crops like beets and turnips, carrots and potatoes, I still could not imagine a month almost completely without protein from meat, beans, nuts, grains, or dairy. The idea of thirty days of eating only vegetables, reminiscent of the Irish potato famine, got me thinking. Hard.

  Which is how I came up with adapting the challenge from an exclusively Tricia diet to a 10-mile diet. As Tricia and I live six miles from each other (shorter as the crow flies), and the number ten felt nice and round, I suggested we include in our experiment any food grown within ten miles of my home. We’d stick to her food as much as humanly (and humanely) poss
ible, but I was free to seek out meat and dairy within that narrow radius. At that moment I had no idea how far ten miles would get me, but I was sure I could find some locally raised and butchered meat. As I said, there was a sheep pasture by my house, and cattle grazed in a field just up the hill; each spring calves and lambs gamboled around, grew fat on lush grass, and disappeared . . . presumably not just to the toasty barn for the winter. Surely some of that meat would be available.

  Provisioning for the 10-mile month took the entire month of August. Let’s do before-and-after snapshots of how I ate.

  Exhibit A: The Everywhere, Every-Reason-in-the-Book Eater

  Before my 10-mile diet experiment, I was your typical food slut. While I had your standard good dietary intentions, I “ate around,” so to speak. I put all sorts of dubious things in my mouth—like day-old anything and fried mystery meat from street vendors.

  I had (and still have) an inconsistent range of values governing where I shopped, what I bought, what I ate for meals, and what I ate voraciously at odd hours with a glazed look in my eyes. Here are my criteria for what I ate (you’ll notice they don’t make a matched set):

  • Cheese. Anything with cheese. Crackers, vegetables, nachos, toast, salad.

  • Simplicity. Simple to cook. Simple to eat. No multistage recipes. No recipes that take you to the store at five P.M. for a magic ingredient. No multicourse meals. No complex sauces that have a possibility of curdling or running. Simplicity could mean a garden salad or an apple or oatmeal. It could also mean eating ice cream from the carton in a dark kitchen lit only by the light from the freezer.

  • Frugality. How am I frugal? Let me not obsessively count the ways. Frugality isn’t just a set of techniques for me. It has been a lifelong sport, art, science, talent, challenge, strategy, and necessity. It was also part of my Your Money or Your Life persona for two decades; it wasn’t a jacket I could take off. It was a tattoo. As a shopping criteria it can lead me to eating some pretty lifeless food, but combined with simplicity it could mean buying in bulk, buying on sale, buying from the day-old-but-perfectly-good bin. It definitely means knowing what I like and stocking up when it goes on sale. It also means shopping, cooking, and eating such that I rarely throw food away.

  • Healthy. Combine that with simple and you get fresh fruits and vegetables. Combine it with frugal and simple and you get the same foods—on sale. Combine it with dietary recommendations that almost every omnivore follows and you get wild salmon, free-range chicken, and dairy.

  • Ethics. From time to time, some industrial practice or another has so dismayed me that I’ve simply stopped eating that food. When Donella Meadows (coauthor of Limits to Growth) explained her research about the impact of shrimp harvesting on the mangroves in Thailand, I simply stopped eating shrimp. When I read John Robbins’s first book, Diet for a New America, I stopped eating beef for ten years. I wasn’t virtuous in general. I was aware through friends of the hidden costs of these foods—the devastation to ecosystems, the cruelty, the diseases managed by antibiotics, the conditions of the workers. Selective conscience.

  • Low-calorie. Yes, this is a food group. Given my druthers I’d crunch on almonds rather than celery any day of the week, but I stock up on foods I can eat in volume without gaining bulk. You have to eat your celery before you can have your dessert.

  • Preference. This is in a class all its own, and it can trump all of the above when I am in the presence of my favorite ice cream, salad dressing, crackers, nuts, cereal, bread, soft drink, chips, tea, coffee, and tropical fruit—you know, the basic food groups. If any are on sale, then I stock up and get a frugality point or two.

  • Convenience. Road food. Airport food. Fast food. Sometimes a girl’s just gotta eat what’s easy.

  • Comfort. Meatloaf. Greasy chicken from the deli. Rice or baked potato with butter. Cashews. Cocoa. Popcorn. When stressed or sad, these are my baby bottle.

  • Because it’s there. If I’m at a potluck or a party with hors d’oeuvres, I simply must try everything. And go back for seconds.

  I actually felt good about how I ate. It was healthy enough, cheap enough, ethical enough, yummy enough, and free enough of obsession that I could enjoy myself and not overthink it.

  Exhibit B: The Everywhere Shopper

  As a frugality queen in the 1990s, I considered smart shopping my crowning glory. I gushed hundreds of times in the media about how I lived sumptuously on, at that time, well under one thousand dollars a month. “I buy my freedom with my frugality,” I said over and over—and while it’s true, it’s also true that my frugality was a habit, an obsession sometimes, and even a profession. After all, I wrote a best seller on the topic!

  Being frugal, I had no qualms about phoning around to comparison-shop, shopping at those reviled big box stores, reading sale ads, clipping coupons, stocking up on loss leaders, cruising the discounted food bins, and knowing by heart the normal prices of hundreds of items so I could spot bargains. My mind was a nonstop cash register—registering the cost of everything. I was a volume eater and a value shopper.

  Even after moving out of the house in Seattle where I lived with my hyperfrugal New Road Map Foundation team, my habits persisted and I aimed to feed myself on less than two hundred dollars a month if I could—and I did.

  The closest market to my home in Langley is the Star Store, a ten-minute walk from my door. Langley, ten minutes from the ferry but off the main road, is on the east side of the island, yet it faces north. A crook in the coast forms a harbor that drew the original inhabitants of the island to ship logs harvested from the interior off to Seattle to build the city. From those muddy streets and its logging-town roughness a century ago, Langley has evolved into “the village by the sea,” attracting tourists to our galleries and shops on First Street, families to the safety for their kids, and retirees to our bluffs and hills with commanding water views. My house is on one of those hills in a subdivision where modest houses have surprisingly killer views.

  Second Street is where we villagers do our daily rounds. The post office and library are at one end. I’ve been here long enough that if there’s an item too big for my PO box, not all the clerks need my box number to fetch the package. The bank is at the other end of Second, and there too I don’t need to pull out identification to cash a check. Across from the bank is our only general store—a cavernous thrift store linked to our food bank. Several restaurants and coffee shops flank the block between these upper and lower anchors, and if you sit in any of them long enough, a river of friends flows through for a cup of soulful conversation. And then there in the middle is the Star Store. Langley is such a small town that our market has a first and last name, and anyone who just calls it the grocery store is definitely not from these parts.

  Fundamentally the Star Store is where we do our visiting and our business as well as our shopping. The triangle formed by the cheese, dairy, and meat displays is large enough for a good long conversation without completely blocking others. The little space by the two checkout lines is another meeting place, as is, of course, the produce section. Somehow the owners, Gene and Tamar, manage to be eclectic enough to please us all—snack addicts to health-food nuts. Having that price book still in my head, I can do a quick cruise of all the aisles, stocking up on bargains and a few must-have preferentials, like avocados. My menus track their sale ads, one week chicken and sliced cucumbers, another week fish and whatever fruit is a bargain.

  The Star Store is where I most often shop and therefore most often ponder the “organic” question. Here’s my inner calculus as I play Ms. Bobblehead in the produce section. To my left is organic. To my right is conventional. My rule of thumb has been that I buy organic if it is no more than 50 percent costlier than the regular version. Sometimes I push that closer to double the amount, but that mostly happens when I feel flush, virtuous, or am next to someone who tilts my conscience.

  The Goose Communi
ty Grocery Store, a ten-minute drive door to door, is my other market, The Goose came out of a partnership between the sustainability-focused nonprofit Goosefoot and the grocer who runs the store. It’s the rebirth of an old IGA market that had worn, dingy black-and-white linoleum tile floors, a small produce section, and a big dollar aisle. It suited the food-stamp volume-shopper crowd, but island activists asked for something closer to a food co-op with a bit of Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and a fair trade coffee bar mixed in. Pleasing everyone was a tough job—especially if you include pleasing the bean counters (as in money, not beans). The market had to be financially viable or no one would get any of what they wanted.

  How the Goose turned out reflects the needs of the old shoppers looking for value and volume, and the new shoppers looking for organic and bulk. It feels like Costco when you enter. To get to the produce, you have to walk the gauntlet of cartons stacked eight feet high with cutouts revealing the packaged foods on sale—the twelve-roll packs of toilet paper, the jugs of perfumed detergents, the boxes of sugary cereals, the cans of salty green beans and corn, the bags of wrapped candies.

  You turn the corner, though, and you’re in a fresh and bulk food section with more of a co-op feel. The vegetables are tended with care, always trimmed and beautiful. The bulk food manager will get you anything you want, in addition to stocking about five hundred items—literally from soup to nuts—including at least twenty kinds of grains and a dozen kinds of flour, a dozen granolas, a dozen types of dried fruits, and even tea and spices.

  I used to do a lot of my shopping on The Dark Side, which is what we islanders call the mainland, a ferry ride away. My two big stops were Trader Joe’s and Van’s Produce.

  Trader Joe’s—or TJ’s, to those who know him well—has my demographic nailed. The entryway is almost strewn with petals. Pots of orchids and big sprays of colorful bouquets greet the eye as you arrive. None of the floor-to-ceiling cartons of Costco—or the Goose. Free taste treats in the far corner of the store lead you by your nose (and mouth) through the aisles stacked high with artisan breads and packaged nuts, and frozen Yuppie food and vitamins and chocolate and cheeses—most of it easier on the wallet than any other grocery store. By the taste kiosk is an endless supply of coffee, free in two-sip cups. That’ll get your shopper mind revving. Most of what I tended to buy there were preferentials, not essentials—but sometimes Mediterranean hummus feels like a necessity. The clerks probably all take comedy tests as part of the application process because they are charming. Sure, TJ’s business model squeezes their suppliers until only one penny of profit is left in the grower’s pockets, but I just couldn’t get that injustice to stick in my mind once I walked through the portals and felt the pull of flavors plus frugality.