Après le déluge, c’est moi

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I’ve decided to come back to it, rather than starting (yet) another blog, because I do feel a kind of continuity with what I was trying to do here. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the SCVWD Board of Directors declined the opportunity to give me a position on the the Independent Monitoring Committee, which is really the only District committee on which I was interested in serving. Absent any officially-sanctioned way of participating in the governance of the District, I decided that I really had no desire to be a gadfly. So I let the blog fade.

But now I’m back. Over the last few years, my passion has really been developing in the area of local, sustainable food systems, and that’s what I intend to focus on here. This blog will talk about:

• Veggielution urban farming project, a new farm at Emma Prusch park in San José
• Village Harvest, which gleans fruit from backyards and small orchards to help feed the hungry
• The box of vegetables and fruit I get every week from the Live Earth Farm
• Other local farms I like, such as TLC Ranch, Pie Ranch, and Full Circle Farm
• Cooking in my own kitchen and from my own garden
• The bustling Willow Glen Farmers Market (and other local markets)
• Other happenings in the Silicon Valley Foodshed.

Fruit

Tuesdays are Village Harvest days, and today was a red-letter day; we picked 3,000 pounds (yes, that’s a ton and a half) of lemons, oranges, grapefruit and kumquats (although these last did but little to increase the total.) We were exceptionally well-organized today, with several new volunteers who had found us from our website, and four houses all next to each other, each with multiple trees groaning (and, in some cases, almost splitting in half) with the weight of their fruit.

Every volunteer is encouraged (and, often, commanded) to take home fruit, and I usually end up with the broken ones. Today I took home a few oranges that had fallen on the ground and split.

They were big oranges, and I got about four cups of juice from them. (Last week, I brought home two boxes of split oranges and ended up with more than two gallons of juice.) I also brought home lemons (because they’re always useful) but none of the truly monstrous ones we picked. And I love kumquats, so a small bag of them, too.

That’s actually a lot of kumquats, even for someone who loves them as much as I do. I’ve already made a batch of kumquat marmalade this year, so I’ll probably macerate these in vodka and make a cordial with them.

Vegetables

We harvested fava beans at Veggielution on Sunday, and I brought home about five pounds.

Favas are delicious raw when they’re still tender and green, but a dinner of raw favas was not in the cards, so I spent about a half hour shelling them

Notice the pale skins on each shelled bean. This is the skin that gives raw fava beans their slight bitterness, and which gets too tough to eat as the beans mature. A handful of beans had skins that were too pale for my liking, so I blanched them in boiling water and peeled them to reveal the inner bean.

Favas are just plain labor-intensive, starting with the thick, upholstered pods that don’t split nicely the way peas or true beans do, but need to be broken open with a fingernail all along their length. The inner skins aren’t difficult to remove, but each must also be split with a fingernail before one can squeeze out the bright green beans. They are delicious, though, and have but a fleeting season in the spring.

I sauteed leeks and green garlic from last Thursday’s CSA box, and added some Italian pork sausage I bought at TLC Ranch’s open house on Saturday. When the favas were ready, I added them to the saute, then mixed in some boiled new potatoes, which I had mashed slightly. I put the whole mixture in a baking dish, and topped it with olive oil and bread crumbs, then baked it briefly until it browned a bit on top.

I tend to make big dishes that use up the entire quantity of whatever ingredient I’m using. This evening, it was all about the fava beans.