As humans, our need for food and nourishment is common ground. Religious beliefs, political leanings, age, skin color, nationality, and social status aside, the need for food unites us. We all need to eat, and at the end of the day, we all need to share time with those we care about.
The globalization of our nation's food supply and the move from farms to cities and suburbs have reduced our reliance on local agriculture. At the same time, these changes have reduced our reliance on cooking and, in a strange way, our reliance on one another.
Canned goods, frozen foods, packaged meals, and quick-serve restaurants have changed the landscape of the modern kitchen. With an abundance of ready-to-eat food available at any time and at any price, no one needs to cook anymore. In the car, on the couch, at a gas station, at a ball game, and at the mall, cooked food to fill our hungry bellies is everywhere. Whether it is delivered to our door, handed to us in a bag through a window, or served at a table in a restaurant, food is available without our ever having to cook. That was not the case just a few generations ago.
As a result, home kitchens have changed from sticky, well-used rooms with refrigerators full of leftovers to showplaces with stainless-steel appliances, barely stocked refrigerators, and rarely used ovens. Cooking has become something someone else does for us. We complain of being too tired to cook, too liberated to cook, too busy to cook, too educated to cook, and unable to cook. And guess what? We don't have to cook.
With the lack of cooking comes a loss of cooking skills. Our advanced society has produced a generation of young adults who have never watched anyone cook and don't understand why anyone might need to know how to cook. And frankly, it's starting to show. Despite the abundance of readily available food, we still experience malnourishment, obesity, disordered eating, hunger, and loneliness. Food and drink are abused, leading to chronic illness, social disorders, and environmental concerns. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and alcoholism are the price Kentucky, and most of the nation, pays for this abundance of food and drink.
Still, I suspect that many Kentuckians are like me. They love Kentucky and the unique food traditions it offers. They enjoy the balance of Kentucky's changing seasons. They want to be rooted more in Kentucky traditions and in family and friends, but in our time-starved society, they aren't sure how to go about it. To me, the answer is plain and simple: cook fresh meals at home with real ingredients.
Cooking fresh meals is a conscious decision to nourish ourselves and others with wholesome ingredients, rather than relying on prepared food. When I choose to cook using seasonal ingredients instead of assembling a meal from the contents of boxes and jars, I become acquainted with those ingredients, and cooking becomes a social endeavor, a way for people I care about to gather together and share a freshly prepared meal. Taking time to cook fresh meals at home is an investment in a way of life. When I cook, I give myself permission to slow down and say no to the busyness of the world. Even though the world around me doesn't slow down, I do as I chop, listen to the radio, and cook. As a result, my children slow down too, and as we move through at least a part of the day a bit more slowly, it heightens our awareness of one another and the time we spend together.
This book, then, is about cooking in a Kentucky kitchen, in sync with the seasons and in sync with those we feed. This book is a by-product of what I do almost every day and have done for more than twenty-three years with the help and support of my husband Warren. In our kitchen we cook meals for our children and their friends, our friends, our families, ailing friends, and even strangers in need of food. Sometimes we invite friends over for dinner, but many times we eat alone, just the five of us. Rarely a day goes by that we don't cook something from scratch in our kitchen. This day-in, day-out cooking is not steeped in television fanfare, gourmet recipes, or exotic ingredients. Nor do I want it to be. I plan meals, shop for ingredients, and cook because of my love for the people I cook for, my esteem for the craft of cooking, and my profound regard for Kentucky's traditions, ingredients, seasons, recipes, and people.
Each chapter in the book is based on one calendar month. This contemporary format offers a year-round approach to cooking. Each chapter is stocked with recipes that use cooking methods, traditional Kentucky ingredients, and locally produced foods appropriate to the season. The Kitchen Toolbox, which follows the month-by-month chapters, offers suggestions for stocking a pantry, as well as tips about various cooking methods and ingredients used in the recipes. Throughout the book I mention websites and other sources of information, ingredients, and supplies; these resources are listed in the Publications, Resources, and Festivals section. Different foods are available at different times of the year, and some cooking methods are preferred over others, depending on the temperature outside. To facilitate cooking and eating more in sync with the Kentucky seasons, a chart at the end of the book shows when fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs are in season in Kentucky. Also provided is a section containing menus for entertaining, special occasions, or family suppers using the recipes in the monthly chapters. All this should go a long way toward helping Kentucky cooks feel more at home in their kitchens and realize that they don't need unusual ingredients or equipment to cook fresh food at home.
I believe that any act of cooking done with love and care has the potential to transform the simplest ingredients into a memorable meal. I also believe that a shared meal has the potential to transform those who partake in it, in both tangible and intangible ways. Sharing fresh, home-cooked meals can make Kentucky a healthier, more welcoming, and more hospitable place, if you can imagine such a thing.
Kentucky has a stunning array of seasons—the complete cycle of winter, spring, summer, and fall. As a result, we enjoy a mix of food grown in each season, except for the wintertime. When I started paying more attention to what's seasonally available in Kentucky, I began to fully appreciate the seasons—fall tastes different from summer, which tastes different from spring. I also realized what wintertime meant to our pioneer ancestors. With snow, ice, and freezing temperatures, not much grows outside.
If Kentuckians ate only locally grown food, we wouldn't be enjoying olive oil, sugar, coffee, pineapples, oranges, lemons, bananas, avocados, kiwi fruit, or rice. Yet even the pioneers who lived off the land bought and traded ingredients they were unable to grow or produce themselves. Today, mass production, global transportation, and relentless food marketing has introduced such a variety of ingredients into our kitchens that local and seasonal awareness, much less eating in tune with the seasons, has become almost unheard of, and it's certainly not necessary. It's not uncommon to walk into a supermarket and find fresh berries and melons in January, asparagus in December, and year-old apples in the summertime. Sadly, this produce is not from Kentucky and, more often, not even from the United States. As it stands right now, most Kentuckians can eat any food year-round, making our food supply homogeneous and allowing all of us to eat the same things, no matter where we live or what the season.
In her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Kentucky native Barbara Kingsolver describes a twelve-month journey during which she and her family “documented our year of procuring as much of our food as possible from neighboring farms and our own backyard.” I read this book in the summer of 2007 while lounging by a lake in Michigan and shared Kingsolver's excitement in supplying her own food and her sense of dread at the bareness of the pantry in the wintertime. I enjoyed the book for what it suggests—that we all pay more attention to where our food comes from and make an effort to get our food from where we live. What I struggled with, though, is how to do what Kingsolver did every day when I have a life outside of growing and procuring food, outside of canning and preserving my own food, and outside of raising my own chickens, pigs, and sheep—that is, outside of an agrarian lifestyle. I cook, but by and large, I depend on a supermarket to sell me at least 50 percent of what I cook. What I have settled on is a compromise, a sensible balance between local eating in the strictest sense of the word and full reliance on processed food for my meals. This is a more realistic approach, at least for me. So I not only cook fresh meals but also buy as much locally grown and produced food as I can find, afford, and stomach.
There are several reasons I support eating food grown and produced in Kentucky. First, it is good for Kentucky and good for local businesses. Thriving businesses make our communities vibrant. For this reason alone, it makes sense to buy as many local ingredients and as much fresh produce as possible. Second, food that's grown in Kentucky travels a shorter distance to our plates, and this helps preserve its flavor. I can almost guarantee that fresh produce purchased from a farmer who picked it this morning will taste better than produce that has been sitting in the display case at the supermarket for several days and in a produce warehouse prior to that. When I cook with fresh Kentucky-grown or -produced ingredients, I find they need very little doctoring up. In fact, these fresh ingredients can magically turn one into a better cook. So from a taste perspective, eating locally grown food makes sense. Third, eating locally grown and produced food keeps us in touch with Kentucky's seasons. We participate more fully in our food and our cooking when we realize that strawberries are not a winter fruit and that pumpkin isn't available, fresh from Kentucky, around Derby Day. If we take the time to enjoy the seasons and anticipate the foods they provide, we'll have fewer unrealistic expectations about year-round food availability.
One of the most important reasons to buy locally grown and produced food, however, is relationships—relationships with the people who grow and produce the food, and relationships with the people we cook for. These relationships make us better at communicating and better at negotiating, and when we talk to one another about our food, about our days, and about our lives, our communities grow stronger. Buying local food and cooking fresh ingredients at home allows us to get back in touch with the people we care about the most.
In the end, eating locally means shopping differently for ingredients and cooking fresh meals with those ingredients. To me, local eating is about the benefits to our state's economy, the food's taste, seasonal changes, and our relationships. Local eating is not a virtue to be extolled at all times and at all costs; nor should we look down on others who eat less locally than we do. We're all in this together, and every bit of Kentucky-grown or -produced food we buy or cook is a good thing.
To eat more locally and seasonally, we need to consider not only fresh fruits and vegetables but also meat, dairy products, eggs, and baked goods. Local and seasonal go together. They are like two sides of the same coin. Most often, I prefer local and seasonal over organic when faced with a choice. Although organic practices are common among small farmers and food producers, buying local doesn't mean that the food is organic. The best way to find out about the growing practices of a farmer is to talk that person and develop a relationship with him or her.
Don't expect to make changes overnight. Start slowly, and make decisions based on your food budget and local availability. Enjoy every aspect of eating more locally and seasonally. Enjoy the people, the relationships, the flavor, the quality, and, best of all, your role in supporting local and seasonal food producers. You could even become a local food producer yourself by planting a garden or at least growing some herbs and tomato plants on the patio. Our connection to food grows when we are connected to how food grows.
Listed below are some sources, both online and off, to help you find locally grown and produced food. Be aware that it's up to producers to register their farms or products with the relevant websites, so not all producers will be listed. For that reason, it's important to get to know the food producers and farmers in your area and then help spread the word about their products.
• Visit the Local Harvest website to search for Kentucky farmers’ markets, Kentucky family farms, and other sources of seasonal Kentucky food.
• Find locations of “u-pick” farms at the Pick Your Own website.
• Search the Eat Wild website for sources of Kentucky pasture-raised poultry, beef, buffalo (or bison), pork, and other edibles.
• Visit the Kentucky Proud website to narrow your search by county and product category. And look for the Kentucky Proud sticker or shelf tag—the official trademark of the Kentucky Department of Agriculture designating Kentucky-produced food from blackberry jam to country ham—on products at grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and roadside stands. But note that although a barbecue sauce might be Kentucky Proud, this doesn't necessarily mean that all its ingredients (ketchup, sugar, onions, etc.) were grown or produced in Kentucky; it only guarantees that the sauce was made in Kentucky, underscoring the importance of talking to the producer to find out the food's origins.
• Use the Kentucky Farm Bureau brochure and website. The bureau certifies roadside markets, including greenhouses, Christmas tree farms, vineyards, wineries, and meat and cheese farm markets.
• Shop locally. Markets that support local growers and sell Kentucky products, local baked goods, pasture-raised poultry and beef, Kentucky cheese, and Kentucky Proud products are numerous in our communities. Talk to the owners and “shop with your feet.”
• Search the good old-fashioned Yellow Pages for foods or farms. If you find something local sold at a local market, jot down the contact information and make a few phone calls. Then help spread the word.
• Join a local chapter of Slow Food USA, a group dedicated to the pleasure of food and committed to community and the environment.
• Subscribe to or pick up copies of EdibleLouisville or EdibleOhioValley. These locally produced magazines celebrate the artisans, growers, and producers of our region who bring local food to our plates and our tables.
Just as the garden changes with the seasons, so should produce purchases. Learn when certain vegetables and fruits are in season in Kentucky, and buy them as they become available. Fresh produce cooked and eaten in its peak season tastes superior to food grown in hothouses or other conditions intended to mimic the outdoor season. To help guide your purchases, see the seasonal produce availability chart at the end of the book.
Reevaluate your relationship with produce not grown in Kentucky—avocados, bananas, grapefruit, clementines, oranges, pineapples, kiwi, lemons, limes, mangoes, and cranberries, to name a few. Someone who eats only local food, called a locavore, might eliminate these foods, but that's an individual decision; there is no right or wrong answer. I do encourage buying these products during their natural growing seasons from a state or region as close to Kentucky as possible (for reasons of transportation).
Join a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. CSA involves buying a share in a farm's harvest for a season, and in return, the shareholder is entitled to part of the harvest on a regular basis, typically weekly, picked up at a designated location. This shared harvest philosophy allows subscribers to embark on an adventure of sorts, as the ups and downs of food production are experienced and enjoyed. Some shareholders trade work on the farm (rather than cash) for part of the harvest, and some CSA programs also include eggs, meat, or poultry in addition to produce, depending on the farm. CSA boosts local agriculture and secures an income stream for the farmer running a CSA program. The Kentucky Department of Agriculture maintains a list of CSA participants, and the Local Harvest website can be searched as well.
Preserve produce for use in the winter. An excellent place to learn about canning and other methods of preserving food is the Kentucky Cooperative Extension service; its extension agents offer classes on home food preservation. Freezing is one of the easiest methods of food preservation. The National Center for Home Food Preservation has valuable information about freezing and other methods, as does the Pick Your Own website. Set a goal of preserving a different fruit or vegetable every week. Freeze a batch of green beans, make some Homemade strawberry Freezer Jam (page 150), cook and can some of Margaret's Chili sauce (page 219), or make a batch of Bread and Butter Freezer Pickles (page 218). There is nothing more rewarding than opening a jar of homemade jam in the middle of winter or cooking frozen green beans from the garden for the Christmas buffet.
At the end of summer, fill a “root cellar” with long-storing vegetables and fruits such as apples, potatoes, winter squash, onions, turnips, carrots, and garlic. Some root vegetables can even be stored in a heavily mulched garden. Check with a local county extension office or the National Garden Association for helpful information about root cellars.
Kentucky is the second-largest beef-producing state east of the Mississippi and the eighth largest beef-producing state in the nation. Beef and dairy cattle were brought to Kentucky from Britain, and although our pioneer ancestors might have kept cows for milk, they didn't rely on them for meat, for two reasons. First, many families had only one cow, and they didn't want to slaughter it for beef and lose the dairy products it provided. Second, before the advent of modern refrigeration and freezing methods, one cow was too large for one Kentucky family to eat on its own. Typically, when a cow was slaughtered it was split among several families and then preserved or stored.
Some Kentucky beef is grass fed, also called pastured or pasture-raised beef. These cows are allowed to graze and eat grass, clover, and rye, as opposed to cows raised on feedlots, where they are fed corn and other grains. Grass-fed beef is raised more like nature intended cows to be raised, and the resulting meat is higher in some fatty acids and vitamins and lower in fat than feedlot-raised beef. Grass- or pasture-raised beef is also likely to be produced without antibiotics and growth hormones. Through the Kentucky Proud program, steaks and other cuts of beef from Kentucky cattle are available in retail markets. Remke Markets in Northern Kentucky and Critchfield Market in Lexington both sell Kentucky Proud beef. (Incidentally, the Kentucky Proud label doesn't guarantee the beef is natural, organic, or hormone free.)
If possible, buy a side of beef from a local farmer. Much like buying head-on local shrimp (see page 233), the price of a side of beef refers to the hanging weight price. Double the hanging weight price to arrive at the comparable price per pound. Kentucky beef farmers can often be found at local farmers’ markets, selling their meat among the produce and value-added farmers and food producers. For a bit of fun, visit Kentucky's Fort Harrod Beef Festival held at the Mercer County Fairgrounds.
I like to buy chicken raised without antibiotics or growth hormones and without any saline or flavoring solutions injected into the bird. In Northern Kentucky I buy turkeys from Tewes Poultry Farm or Kremer's Market, and I can buy pasture-raised chickens from a supermarket in my area. For other pasture-raised poultry farms, visit the Eat Wild website.
For more about pork, see page 284.
Local eggs are plentiful. Depending on locale, even some city-dwelling Kentuckians raise their own chickens for eggs, and farmers often sell eggs as a value-added business. My aunt Eileen raised chickens, so throughout my life I've had the good fortune to experience the orange-colored yolks of “country eggs.” Store-bought, factory eggs pale in comparison to the freshness and flavor of farm-fresh eggs. Farmers’ markets often showcase local egg vendors; also, you can visit the Eat Wild website.
Kentucky is fortunate to have both small and large dairies. Louis Trauth Dairy, Southern belle Dairy, Dean Milk, and Flav-O-Rich are larger dairies, and Rebekka Grace is a smaller cooperative dairy. Although buying Trauth milk supports the economy in Northern Kentucky, these milks are often pooled and sold into a co-op that obtains milk from both inside and outside Kentucky.
Graeter's ice cream is hard to beat. It's made in Cincinnati by a small, French-pot process, and with additional locations in Northern Kentucky, Louisville, and Lexington, Graeter's is a local tradition. Other small-batch producers of gelato and ice cream are springing up across Kentucky as well. Support them and spread the word.
A Central Kentucky treasure is Weisenberger Mill, which produces flour, grains, cornmeal, and grits. Many markets and stores sell Weisenberger products, and they can also be ordered from its website. For bread, shop at local bakeries, but be sure to ask if they make the bread dough themselves. Some bakeries ship in frozen dough from a faraway food plant and then bake it on-site.
Visit one of the wineries or vineyards popping up all over Kentucky and participate in a wine tasting. Some grape varieties are perfectly suited to the Kentucky climate. The Kentucky Vineyard Society's website offers a search option for vineyards or wineries in specific areas.
Certified organic food may be free of man-made pesticides and chemicals, but it can still mean big business, as evidenced by the organic cheese puffs made by a large food producer and sold at supermarkets. Being certified organic does not ensure that any food is local or from a small, quaint, family-owned farm, nor does “certified organic” imply nutritious.
Everything from apples to fruit-ring cereal is available in organic form, making it easy to misconstrue organic food as healthy food. In reality, this is not the case. A lot of organic foods on the market are highly processed and tightly packaged and have traveled a long way to reach the dinner plate. In addition, eating all organic food can be expensive, and it does not promote Kentucky farmers or Kentucky food producers or take advantage of the seasons of the Kentucky garden and orchard.
That being said, I may buy organic produce from the supermarket if something locally grown or in season isn't available. The main reason is to reduce my exposure to pesticides and to support more eco-friendly agricultural practices. But sometimes organically raised produce isn't available, or the cost is prohibitive. That's why I prefer to feed my family with food grown and produced in Kentucky, as much as possible. I've found that the growing practices of many local farmers are often close to organically certifiable practices, but either the farmers are unable or unwilling to pay for the U.S. Department of Agriculture organic designation or they haven't passed the time frame for eliminating synthetic fertilizers from their fields.
The Environmental Working Group's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides ranks forty-seven commercially raised fruits and vegetables according to the amount of pesticide residue after rinsing or peeling. The following twelve conventionally raised supermarket fruits and vegetables—dubbed the “Organic Dirty Dozen”—are the most contaminated with pesticides: peaches, strawberries, apples, blueberries, nectarines, sweet bell peppers, spinach, cherries, kale, collard greens, potatoes, and grapes. When I buy any of these fruits and vegetables from a supermarket, I buy organic if it is available.
The following fruits and vegetables—dubbed the “Clean Fifteen”—had the least pesticide residue: onions, avocados, eggplant, sweet corn, pineapples, mangoes, sweet peas, asparagus, kiwi fruit, cabbage, cantaloupes, watermelons, grapefruit, sweet potatoes, and honeydew melons. For these vegetables, buying organic is not as important if the concern is strictly pesticide residue.
Not all the ingredients in this book are fresh in the strictest sense of the word. I use canned ingredients, frozen fruits and vegetables, and even soda pop in a few savory and sweet dishes. If a fresh, local version of an ingredient isn't available, consider substituting a frozen or canned counterpart. The goal is fresh, home-cooked food, but not always as a result of using only fresh ingredients.
Every time I prepare a new recipe, I have to make my own judgments. That's the nature of cooking. The more experienced one gets at cooking, the easier these judgments become. Although I have written, tested, and tweaked the recipes in this book, your results will depend on how hot your oven heats, how full you fill your skillet, and a multitude of other factors. For this reason, I give clues about doneness in most recipes. I may recommend baking a cake for 35 minutes, but if the cake looks and smells like it's fully baked at 30 minutes, check it using the applicable test for doneness and proceed accordingly.
Providing recipes in a book like this one is loaded with apprehension on my part because I want everyone to be a successful cook. I want this to be a book that is read, used, and enjoyed. I suggest reading a recipe in its entirety before embarking on the cooking process. Chop and measure ingredients first so everything is ready before the cooking begins. Taste the food as the recipe proceeds. Most recipes recommend a specific quantity of salt and pepper, but in the end, food should be salted and spiced to suit one's own taste and personal preference, which may not match mine.
To me, one difference between an average cook and a good cook is the latter's attention to the details of selecting ingredients and seasoning food. That said, fresh herbs, fresh citrus juice, fresh garlic, freshly ground spices, and the judicious use of salt all go a long way in making a good cook. With any ingredient, I recommend buying the highest quality one can afford. Fresh ingredients that are grown, transported, and stored with care need little embellishment to produce delicious results.
To ensure success with the recipes in this book, I offer the following suggestions:
Buttermilk: I use a fair amount of buttermilk in my cooking. Unless otherwise noted, I use low-fat (cultured) buttermilk. If buttermilk is not available, use buttermilk powder or homemade buttermilk. To make homemade buttermilk, see page 50.
Capers: The small, unopened buds of a caper bush, capers vary from the size of a small green pea to that of a large olive. They are sold in supermarkets near the pickles, olives, or chutneys. For the recipes in this book, I use the smallest size of caper, also known as nonpareil. Packed in brine, they add a sharp, salty flavor to salads, pasta dishes, and sauces.
Flour: Unless otherwise specified, I use unbleached all-purpose flour. To measure the flour, stir it in the bag or container, spoon the flour into a dry measuring cup, and level off the flour with the straight edge of a knife. Whole wheat flour is specified in some recipes, and 100 percent whole wheat flour is readily available in supermarkets. A newer blend called white whole wheat flour contains all the whole-grain goodness but lacks the heaviness often found in baked goods made with traditional whole wheat flour.
Garlic: Fresh, peeled cloves of garlic impart a wonderful flavor to food, but some recipes call for high-quality garlic powder. One-eighth teaspoon garlic powder equals the power of about one small clove of garlic. Pressing garlic is a fast way to use fresh garlic and is interchangeable with mincing (minced garlic is used frequently in the recipes).
Herbs: From late March through November, when fresh herbs are in season, I use fresh as much as possible. During the wintertime (December through late March), I use high-quality dried herbs, in one-third less the quantity of fresh, in soups, stews, and chilis and on roasted meats and vegetables. I crush the dry herbs between the palms of my hands as I add them to the food to help release their essential aromas and oils. If I haven't dried my own herbs, I buy them from Penzey's or at the supermarket in small quantities that I can use in about six months. Large bottles of dried herbs aren't always the best deal because the essential oils dissipate over time.
Lemon juice: There's no doubt that fresh lemon juice and fresh lemon zest are my choices for all recipes. I store a few lemons in the refrigerator so I have them on hand. They are one simple ingredient with unlimited potential to brighten up a pot of soup, a pie filling, or homemade vinaigrette.
Milk: I use skim milk in recipes, unless otherwise noted.
Olive oil: I buy a good-quality extra-virgin olive oil. General cooking is not the place for expensive or boutique olive oils. Save those for fresh salads or bread dipping.
Pasta: I use a variety of dry pasta shapes in both traditional and whole-grain styles. Of course, whole-grain pasta offers more of a nutritional punch, but any pasta will work, including those based on grains other than wheat.
Pepper: Freshly ground black pepper is my first choice for all recipes. Season to taste, as everyone has a different tolerance for black pepper.
Salt: When testing these recipes, I used iodized table salt (the iodine provides an important nutrient) or fine-grained sea salt. Kosher salt, with its larger crystal size, is a better choice in some recipes.
Tomato paste: Despite their small size, cans of prepared tomato paste always seem to be too big. When a recipe calls for a tablespoon of tomato paste, one is faced with the challenge of how to store what's left over. One solution is to portion the tomato paste by tablespoon onto a baking sheet and freeze it; the frozen lumps can be stored in a zip-top bag. Or you can buy a squeezable tube of tomato paste and keep it in the refrigerator, ready to dispense a small portion at a time.