Food

Concord grape solution

| Green Card Gardener

Although I have been terribly neglecting my two Concord grape plants (note to myself: read up on grape pruning this winter), they are quite plentiful. Now I am facing the same question as last year – what should I do with them? The truth is, I don’t care much for raw Concord grapes, nor for grape jelly. I planted the grapes for our daughter who has since flown the nest.

My attempt to make fruit leather last year yielded a sticky mess so I had to come up with a new idea. Schiacciata, the stuffed Italian flatbread is made only during grape harvest, sounded good yet it seemed to be rather sweet. I envisioned something more savory. Also, Concords are so juicy that I was afraid they would make the flatbread soggy.

It came out just the way I hoped and I know I will want to eat this again when grape season is over. So now I will freeze the grapes in customized portions. Getting stuck with a bunch of concord grapes isn’t so bad after all.

Stuffed Flatbread with Concord Grapes, Red Onion and Rosemary

I use a round cast-iron pizza pan as a baking stone. Since I don’t have a pizza peel, and I don’t master the art of swiftly transferring a large piece of floppy dough onto the hot stone, I placed it on a large piece of parchment.

When I first made this, I seeded the grapes – a painstaking task. Pushing them through the food mill is much quicker and easier.

 2 teaspoons dry yeast

½ teaspoon sugar

2 cups all-purpose white flour

1 cup white whole-wheat flour

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for brushing

1½ cups Concord grapes

1 large red onion

1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary

Kosher salt

1. Mix the yeast with the sugar and ¼ cup warm water and stir to dissolve. Set aside for 10 minutes until it foams.

2. Put the flours, 1 cup warm water, the salt, olive oil and yeast mixture in the kitchen machine with a dough hook (if kneading by hand, mix in a bowl, then knead the dough on a clean work surface). Knead at low speed until the dough is smooth and elastic and detaches from the bowl. If too dry, add a bit more water; if too sticky, add more flour by the tablespoon.

3. Take the dough out of the bowl and oil the bowl. Put the dough back in the bowl, turn it once to coat evenly with oil, and cover the bowl with a kitchen towel, or cover it loosely with a lid. Let rise for 1 hour.

4. In the meantime, preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Oil a gratin dish. Cut a large piece of parchment paper, slightly larger than the size of your baking stone.

5. Wash the grapes and slip off their skins. Place grapes into a bowl and place a food mill on top. Push the grapes through the food mill and extract as much of the pulp as possible without crushing the seeds.

6. Slice the onion thinly and mix them with grape pulp and skins. Roast in the preheated oven for 30 minutes, turning them a couple of times until they are soft and start to brown at the edges. Remove from the oven and cool. Turn off the oven but leave the oven door closed and place the baking stone on the middle rack of the oven (this will already preheat the stone for later).

7. On a lightly floured work surface roll out the dough about ¼ inch thick and to about double the size of your baking stone. Spread the onion grape mixture over half of the dough. Sprinkle with rosemary and salt. Fold the empty part of the dough over the stuffing, flatten it gently, and pinch all around to seal the edges.

8. Transfer the flatbread onto the prepared parchment paper. Diagonally slash the top every inch or so with a sharp knife. Brush with olive oil and let rise for 30 minutes.

9. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. When the dough is ready to bake, remove the baking stone from the oven. Transfer the parchment paper with the flatbread onto the stone. If you have a lot of excess parchment, carefully cut it off with scissors. Put the baking stone in the middle rack of the oven. Spray the flatbread with cold water and bake for 30 minutes until lightly browned. Remove the baking stone from the oven and slide the flatbread off the stone onto a cake rack to cool.

Of mice and fairytales

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Fairytale eggplant and asters

On Sunday I barely missed what would have been my most traumatic gardening experience. The pole beans on the first two teepees needed picking, and since the vines had started to form such a thicket I asked my husband to come along to lift the vines while I cut off the beans.

When I had quickly harvested some beans for dinner the week before I had noticed a nest made of newspaper scraps almost at the top of one of the tepees. Smart birds, I thought, taking the newspaper mulch from around the tomato plants, and I simply picked around it.

The nest soon started to get in our way when we were picking on Sunday so I suggested we check if it still had anything inside. My husband took it down and instantly threw it over the garden fence down the hill.

“What was it?” I asked.

Pause.

“Tell me.”

“You would have screamed so loud all our neighbors would have called 911. It was a mice nest. One of them was looking straight at me.”

He was not exaggerating. Mice and other rodents, dead or alive, small or large, freak me out in capital letters. Living in the country for more than a decade has not diminished my phobia, on the contrary.

I know there are always mice around outdoors, but as long as I don’t see them or their traces, I can manage. But sticking my face into a nest and having a mouse stare at me would have been too much. If I had taken down that nest, I am sure I would have had such a shock that I most likely would have had a hard time setting foot in the garden for a good long time.

Upon my insistence we stripped the teepee of all the vines and cut off all harvestable beans. Now when I go to the garden, I clap my hands several times before opening the gate. I know it sounds ridiculous but it makes me feel better.

To end this post on a more positive note, the China asters that I planted as cutting flowers are blooming. I gave them a sheltered home inside the garden to protect them from voracious rabbits.

And, I have started to harvest Fairytale eggplants! I fell in love with those beauties at Field to Fork, an event I organized last year in August with the Master Gardeners. Designed to inspire more people to garden, we grew different fruits and vegetables in containers. One member of the group had Fairytale eggplants and I couldn’t wait to try them myself.

Fairytale eggplants are hybrids, meaning a cross breed between two parent plants. Unlike heirlooms, you cannot collect the seeds for next year. Frankly I do not understand the hype about heirlooms, and the demonization of hybrids that often goes hand in hand with it. Mankind has been breeding plants for thousands of years. If plant hybridization gives you crops that are resistant to a disease or a pest, and/or yield a result as delicious and beautiful as Fairytale, what’s the big deal? I think one of the reasons why hybrids are often shunned is that some people confuse them with genetically modified organisms (GMO’s). They are not. Seed companies that have signed the Safe Seed Pledge, thus reassuring their customers that they not knowingly buy or sell genetically engineered seeds or plants, do sell hybrids.

Fairytale eggplants do not require much preparation. Even without salting they are not the slightest bit bitter. I cut them in half, brush them with a mix of garlic and olive oil, and sprinkle them with salt and pepper. Then I put them under the broiler and turn them once until they are slightly browned from both sides. Fairytales truly deserve their name.

Pepper plenty

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It is as if the peppers are trying to make up for the poor zucchini and cucumber harvest this year. As always, I start cutting off all bell pepper blossoms in early August so the plants put their energy into the peppers that are already there, and I don’t end up with oodles of tiny green peppers at the onset of frost in October.

A bumper crop of bell peppers is not a problem – I freeze them and use them all winter long for various dishes and my Red Pepper Spread. But what to do with all those jalapeños from one single plant? After I used them for salsa, and froze and dried some (they are not turning red as expected), I was running out of ideas, especially since my husband does not like hot foods. Then I found a fabulous recipe for Bread and Butter Jalapeños. After I tried the first bite I instantly regretted that I had only made half the recipe. They were gone in a few days. I even ate some straight out of the jar, something I usually never do. Now I am collecting all the jalapeños for canning a large batch.

Yesterday I felt a slight disappointment rising when there was only a handful of jalapeños, and was reassured seeing plenty of more growing. Interesting how one great recipe can make you change your perspective.

Cooking in bed

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This is not what you might think. It is a simple and ingenious trick to cook the creamiest rice pudding. I learned it from my aunt on my last trip to Germany.

Rice pudding was one of my staple dishes as a student. It was cheap and filling, and I usually ate it the way it is often eaten in Germany: warm, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, and with peaches from the can. Getting it right is not so easy though. Like risotto, cooking rice pudding needs close attention so it does not scorch, and it often ends up too dry so you have to stir in additional milk after cooking, and more milk after the rice pudding cools and stiffens.

Not so in my aunt’s rice pudding. Actually it is not her invention but the way farmers’ wives did it. The rice is added to the boiling milk, cooked only briefly and then the pot is tucked in under a duvet or comforter and left for at least one hour. When you open the pot, all the milk is on top and you initially think it is a complete failure. But then you stir it and all the milk gets absorbed. The rice pudding stays nicely creamy even after chilling – no need to add any milk later.

Last week our daughter was home with a toothache. That and the delicious and juicy peaches from the local orchard (no more canned peaches for me) just called for rice pudding!

I fetched a duvet from its summer storage and made sure that the bedroom door was closed so the dog would not break into the makeshift cooker and for sure singe his nose – the pot was piping hot when I took it out. The rice pudding was so yummy that we gobbled up a large batch of it, and I made some more today. Nowadays I prefer rice pudding chilled, especially in the summer.

I think it’s not worth putting the duvet back in storage.

The recipe can be found in my cookbook Spoonfuls of Germany.