I always meant to try making cassoulet, a slow-cooked stew of beans and flavorful meats and poultry prepared, with many variations, in southwestern France. Often cassoulet includes duck or goose confit. Here’s a Paula Wolfert recipe for cassoulet in the style favored in Toulouse.

I may not have to spend a week making cassoulet after all. Chef Ouita Michel of the marvelous Holly Hill Inn in Midway plans to cook a special cassoulet made with fine local ingredients. I bought tickets after I read Ouita’s description of the dish and the meal, excerpted below (links are my additions):

On Friday, November 14, we are celebrating the coming change of seasons with a cassoulet dinner, one of my favorite dishes for the fall.  Not only is cassoulet a delicious meal, but it provides a wonderful experience of sharing, beginning with friends gathered around the warm, bubbling meal to crack the crust.

Cassoulet has humble peasant origins in Southern France.  It’s a slow-cooked, rich stew of various meats, white beans and herbs.  The dish is named after the pot in which it is traditionally baked - the cassole - which is shaped like an inverted cone - designed to maximize the area of the delicious crust.

We began the preparation of our Holly Hill cassoulet more than two weeks ago by curing and slow cooking plump geese in duck fat for confit.  Local producer Patrick Kennedy from Stone Cross Farm has provided his juicy pork belly and Nancy Cirigliano and Kathy Meyer their fabulous lamb.  All these meats, plus a special garlic sausage from France, are slow cooked with white beans to make this most comfortable of comfort foods.

(Even though this sounds like a meat lover’s paradise - and it surely is - we are also preparing a vegetarian cassoulet, featuring the local and organic fall harvest from Elmwood and Three Springs.

And speaking of local lamb - later this week I’ll “dish” about a source close to central Kentucky.

It’s milk all over the place, for some reason, not spilled, but compelling a new consideration. My sharp-eyed librarian friend pointed me toward Milk, a new book of history and recipes by Anne Mendelson, and Milk in the Land, a documentary film that “examines the relationship between the popular drink and culture, revealing how milk became America’s staple beverage as well as a powerful symbol of American patriotism and progress.” (It’s wonderful to have librarian friends.)

Did you know that two million Canadians each year take advantage of a free milk calendar produced by Canadian dairy farmers? This is an udderly Canadian thing to do - Canadians being so full of good sense and commitment to living well. The home economist who develops the recipes that boost the calendar’s popularity “has a rule that unless an ingredient is available in her local grocery store in the small town of Buckhorn, Ont., she doesn’t use it in the calendar. Green curry paste came to Buckhorn this year, so a recipe for Thai Pork Stir-Fry is featured in October 2009.” Read the rest of this entry »

Dana Reed, orchardist and co-owner of Reed Valley Orchard, gave me an impromptu lesson in flavor-building recently. I asked, “Why does every piece of fruit I eat from Reed Valley Orchard have so much flavor? How do you do it?”

Dana credits God’s goodness, and then names some factors and practices that humans can bring to raising flavorful fruit. Here’s what I understood from Dana’s list.

> Clay builds flavor. The soil at Reed Valley Orchard, at the margins of Bourbon and Harrison Counties is clay-ey, not like the rich dark loam in the heart of the Bluegrass. Whether it’s nutrients in the clay, or ways the clay makes the apple tree take in and process nutrients — clay contributes to apple flavor. “Richer soils will build more tree,” Dana says, “but clay seems to give the fruit more flavor.”

> Sunlight builds flavor. The Reeds prune their trees skillfully, so sunlight reaches more fruit directly. Dana says some researchers have figured out an ideal leaf-to-fruit ratio for best fruit flavor: 40 leaves per individual fruit. Dana doesn’t have to count leaves one by one. With his years of study and work, he knows what that 40-to-1 ratio looks like, and how to use pruning and thinning to get to it.

> Thinning the fruit builds flavor. Dana says, “Each tree has a certain amount of sugar. The tree divides that sugar among all the fruit on the tree. If there are fewer apples, each gets more sugar.”

> Picking fruit when it is ripe captures flavor. Dana says there are a lot of ways to test for ripeness, and ripeness matters. While it is easy to tell when to begin picking some apple varieties he has grown for years, Dana uses science to decide when some of his apples are ripe. When needed, the Reeds use a refractometer, seed color (brown is good), an iodine/starch test that measures how much starch has been converted to sugar, and more. “Some people in the Bluegrass start picking too early,” Dana says. They need to take some Flavor Lessons from Dana.

We were talking about apples, but I award five mental flavor stars to fruits from Reed’s all through the growing season: blueberries, plums, blackberries, black raspberries (my favorite), tart Montmorency cherries, and the glorious parade of late summer pears and apples.

The more I learn about the work, thought, patience, dedication, and love that go into the wonderful central Kentucky foods I so enjoy, the luckier I feel. I hope our local food economy keeps ripening, maturing to the benefit of growers and eaters both.

It was chilly Saturday (November 8, 2008), and the numbers of both farmers and customers at the Lexington Farmers Market had dropped in just seven days. This was Reed Valley Orchard’s last Saturday at the 2008 Market, though their excellent store at the Orchard (see map) will be open through November.

Usually the customer line at the Reed stand is long and patient, but not as patient as the kind people behind the bushels and pecks, who offer sample slices of any apple that interests any customer. Saturday the conditions were good for enjoying a tasty conversation with Dana Reed, the superb orchardist whose skills burst through in each bite of a Reed Valley fruit. I will do a separate post about the ways Dana and his work crew cultivate intensely flavorful fruit.

Here, though, my purpose is to share what I have learned about storing and keeping fresh apples for the next few months — and enjoying them. Read the rest of this entry »

I took the picture at left of Curtis Congleton last year. I visited Congleton Farm outside Versailles, Kentucky (that’s ver-SALES) to watch Curtis and his sorghum partner, Randal Rock, make sweet Country Rock Sorghum from sorghum cane grown on the farm.

I enjoyed learning about the ways Curtis and Marti Congleton are diversifying their farming post-tobacco so they can continue living on their beautiful Woodford County land with their children. The scale and openness at Congleton Farm give real meaning to the their statement on the Kentucky Department of Agriculture website, “Know where your beef comes from.” Read the rest of this entry »

I take inventory most meals: What is “ours?” What came from the garden outside our back door or from one of the wonderful farms near us, or at least from Kentucky? Eating homegrown or local foods is not my religion - but it is a habit I am forming.

Today’s lunch:

> Brown beans (these weren’t Kentuckians, sadly), cooked in chicken stock from an Elmwood Stock Farm hen, flavored with an Elmwood onion and two slices of Stone Cross Farm smoked bacon, topped with a little sauerkraut I made using cabbages from a Lexington Farmers Market farmer I didn’t know, and some jalapeño jelly from Three Toads Farm. (I was in an experimental mood, thinking about “Brown Beans Three Ways” as a local alternative to Gold Star Chili. This crispy corn bread - tangy kraut - sweet/spicy jelly combo works.)

> Corn muffins made from Weisenberger Mill’s fantastic unbolted white corn meal, Elmwood eggs, Brook-Lin Jersey buttermilk, olive oil from thousands of miles away, salt from France, leavening from unknown sources

> Apple cider from Reed Valley Orchard mixed with sparkling water from way too far away

I have a mental wish list of foods and drinks I wish Kentuckians would produce. Nut oils, for example. Could black walnuts and hickory nuts produce edible oils to add to the animal-based fats we can produce here? Even sparkling water - how about a local seltzer company, as some cities have? At least the processing could provide some local jobs, and the food miles would evaporate.

Interesting related events today: My excellent source in Chicago (tall, smart, beautiful, kind) sent a link to Jill Santopietro’s New York Times story, “When Chocolate is a Way of Life.” Santopietro tells the unlikely tale of the Quichua people in Amazonian Ecuador learning to ferment and process cacao instead of selling the raw product at bargain basement prices to intermediaries. Yes, they did, and so can we. (Look at this amazing unripe cacao pod. Who figured out a way to eat this stuff??)

We Kentuckians can learn to add value to many more of the great foods that grow here. Locally pickled veggies, for example. Locally canned tomato juice. Local hard cider. More local dairy products: butter, creme fraiche, cheese curds, hard and soft cheeses, buttermilk, cream, yogurt.

Another interesting event happened today: a conversation with a successful small-scale dairy farmer who wants to grow more products for Kentuckians. He says a lot of young farmers near him want to know what all of us eaters want to buy. We need a way to hook up demand and supply. Something for some enterprising, tech-savvy Kentuckians to invent. Yes we can. (Or at least YOU can!)