Wendell Berry


Wendell Berry – Poet, Author, Farmer, Philosopher

Let’s start this conversation off with one of Wendell Berry’s quotes that has had a profound impact on me and what has become Terroir Seeds:

“We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibilities that have been turned over to governments, corporations, and specialists, and put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and household and neighborhoods.”~ Wendell Berry

I heard or read the old phrase, “If you want to change the world, plant a garden,” when I was much younger. It didn’t make any sense to me at the time, as I strongly disliked being forced to work in our large garden when I had much better things to do with my free time!

I do remember the planting time during spring – readying the rows, digging the small irrigation ditches, making sure that the water would flow all the way to the end of the row. Then the planting of the seeds and transplanting seedlings into their places. We watered our 1/4 acre garden with a gas powered well pump from an old abandoned well that we had cleared up and found water in.

Neither of my parents came from farming or ranching backgrounds. My father wanted to grow our own food because of his concern about the health of grocery store produce in our small town and the proliferation of commercially prepared foods. This was the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most of the knowledge that we used came from our Mother Earth News subscription, along with the advice of a couple of older family friends. Looking back, I see that there was a distinct lack of knowledge and experience even then, but there was a desire to do something different. For all of his faults, my father had it right this time. 

Ours was a typical “spring and summer” garden. We planted as soon as we could in the spring and then watered, weeded and waited until the garden came alive and threw way too much produce at us. Then it was cooking, canning and drying seemingly non-stop until the garden sputtered to a stop, usually after the first couple of hard frosts. After that we cleared the dead plants away and waited until the next spring to try again. I remember the dreaded summer break routine of hoeing and weeding after breakfast until it got hot, then again in the late afternoon into early evening. We were gardening in soil that had been fallow for decades, so the seed bank of weeds was tremendous. We didn’t really understand how to manage soil fertility, so we hoed and pulled weeds constantly. 

After High School I joined the Navy and left the small town behind just as soon as possible. Six years later – after lots of travel, some growing up and the Gulf War, I left the Navy, the big cities and a failed marriage behind and made the conscious choice to move back to a small town. That was when those words about a garden began to make more sense. I began to realize the world-changing part wasn’t the garden or the food that it grew, not even the world that it was supposed to change. Obviously, one small garden can’t change or feed the world by itself.

I learned the magic of what one small garden can do is share.

It can share its food, the knowledge and experience of how that food was grown, why it tastes as wonderful, rich and delicious as it does and the excitement and contentment that only comes from food you’ve grown. The term “local food” metamorphoses into something entirely different, ceasing to be a carelessly used sound-bite and growing into many delicious food bites that nourish us – body and soul. 

That one small garden becomes a few, then several, then many across a town, a city, a county and a nation. That small garden becomes a metaphor, an idea and a movement. That small humble garden becomes a much-needed, deep seated sense of security in a world where very little has the feel of permanence or security today, regardless of social status or financial standing. It gives us grounding and a sense of place, of belonging to and being part of something much bigger, older and better than us.

That small backyard home garden becomes the embodiment of how we as individuals can reclaim our decisions from the proxies of government, corporations and stockholders and make it a personal choice to grow our own food and share it with our family, friends and neighbors, improving everyone’s lives that we share. After all, we are only talking about the third most important ingredient for life, after air and water! Food, as with soil, has been denigrated and degraded into a commodity that is not worth our attention, respect and devotion. We are slowly waking up to this fallacy.

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”~ Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays 

When we garden, we take an active part in the production of our food and quit passively waiting for it to be grown, processed and delivered to us on our whim. As Joel Salatin said in Folks, This Ain’t Normal, “The average person is still under the aberrant delusion that food should be somebody else’s responsibility until I’m ready to eat it.” Even the smallest container garden starts the reconnection process for that person. They learn and observe what it takes to grow even the smallest amount of food, whether it is a single plant of leaf lettuce or a handful of kitchen herbs. Through success and failure, they begin to realize that food doesn’t just pop into existence at the grocery store regardless of seasonality or weather conditions.

The very act of gardening on any scale forces us to pay attention to the world around us, to observe what is happening and learn more about the interconnected nature of all things. We become aware – perhaps for the very first time- of the enormous complexity of our world, and the realization of the folly of simplistic, reductionist, single solution thinking when applied to complex systems, even such a small one as a garden. 

That awakening can be the most beautiful, wondrous experience or one of the most frightful of our lives, depending on how we react and adapt to change. For those who come to see the beauty in growing food, their lives will never be the same. They will acquire a quiet sense of accomplishment, of progress and resiliency that is almost impossible to describe or talk about, but is implicitly understood by another who has made the same journey, whether as a child in a farming or ranching family or one who has made the conscience decision to take the road less traveled.

Our tech driven, always on, instant gratification society is shown to be artificial when we learn that we absolutely cannot plant carrot seeds the day before we want to serve carrot salad to our dinner guests. Everything takes its own time and there are things in life that absolutely cannot be rushed, “right sized”, or optimized to serve our timeline and agenda. As advanced a society as we are today, with as much progress as we’ve made, we are still human beings in a world that is larger than us, that doesn’t march to our drumbeat.

When we begin to garden, we begin to heal our part of the world starting with our own space and lives. As we gain knowledge, experience and success we can start to apply those lessons learned in the garden to other areas of our lives and offer our hard-won experiences to others so that they can hopefully learn from our mistakes. We come to re-connect with the idea that we belong in the world and to the world; we are not separate from and should not be disconnected from it. The idea that human kind shouldn’t be in the wilderness or nature is fully revealed as folly as we learn that not only are we part of the world, we are inseparable from it, no matter how hard some of us try. Rachel Carson said it so well, “Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

To look at it from a different angle, I leave you with this thought that brings us full circle to the beginning of our conversation:

“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again. ~Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

 

 

 

 

quick snow peas with lemon herb dressing


Sugar, Snap or Snow Peas

There is nothing quite as graceful as trellised pea plants in full swing. And nothing quite as tasty as a crunchy sugar snap pea eaten straight off the vine. And nothing that so captures the essence of spring as peas–all kinds of peas.

Peas love cool, wet weather, and so are often only in season for a few weeks, when you will find local farmers bringing in the irresistible sugar snap pea, the Chinese or snow pea, and the good old fashioned shell (or English) peas.

Snow Peas – Healthy and Cosmopolitan

Snow peas are long, thin, early flat pea pods, with teensy proto-peas inside. But you’re not after the peas in this case; it’s the tender pod itself you’ll love. Traditionally found in Chinese and other Asian cuisines, they now appear in all sorts of dishes from salads to pastas to stir-fries.

Some say the name snow pea comes from the slight whitish tint reflected from the pods in bright sunlight. Others say it’s because they are a cool weather crop–best in the early spring or late fall, when they just might be covered with light frost or even snow. But no matter the name, or where it comes from, snow peas are sweet and crisp and delicious– and an excellent source of fiber, iron, potassium, and vitamins A and C. Snow peas are also among the most venerable of vegetables, with evidence of their cultivation going back more than 12,000 years along the Thai-Burma border.

Sweet Sugar Snap Back Story

Way on the other end of the pea timeline, one of the newest pea cultivars is the sugar snap pea. Calvin Lamborn of Twin Falls, Idaho began crossing snow peas with shell peas in the 1960s. He was going after a pea that would have the edible, non-fibrous pod of the snow pea, plus the full-size interior peas of English peas. His hybrid was finally perfected in 1979, and has become a favorite of gardeners and market farmers ever since.

Both the pod and the peas are plump, succulent, and sweetly irresistible. The French call them mange-tout, which tells you what to do, “eat the whole thing,” preferably on the way home from market for maximum nutrition and enjoyment. As with all legumes, peas host beneficial bacteria in their root nodules, which make nitrogen in the air available as a fertilizer in the soil for themselves and whatever crop is planted there next. They are one of the true heroes of our fields and tables–so enjoy!

Here’s what could come out of your garden for this recipe –  Peas and Parsley!

Quick Snow Peas with Lemon Herb Butter from Farm Fresh Now!

Snow Peas with Lemon Herb Butter
Fresh peas cook really fast, so keep an eye on them, and take them off the heat as soon as they turn bright green, while they are still crunchy and succulent.
Servings: 4
Author: Farm Fresh Now
Ingredients
  • 2 tablespoons butter at room temperature
  • 1 teaspoon finely grated fresh lemon zest
  • 2 teaspoons finely chopped herbs of your choice suggest half and half finely chopped tarragon and flat-leaf parsley
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1 pound snow peas trimmed
Instructions
  1. Stir together butter, zest, herbs, salt, and pepper.
  2. Cook peas in boiling salted water until crisp-tender, about 1 minute.
  3. Drain well.
  4. Transfer hot peas to a bowl, then add lemon herb butter and toss to coat.
Recipe Notes

Snow Peas and Sugar Snap Peas can be used interchangeably in just about any recipe.
Sugar Snaps are also great raw as part of a vegetable tray or a box lunch.
Serves four as a side dish.

The Land Connection Foundation
The best way to enjoy healthy, seasonal produce is to buy it from your local community farmer.
To locate the farmers’ market or CSA nearest you, visit Local Harvest.
Farm Fresh Now! is a project of The Land Connection, an educational nonprofit that preserves
farmland, trains new farmers, and connects people with great locally-grown foods. This series is
made possible with generous support from the Illinois Department of Agriculture.

 

 

 

Baked Yogurt Tart


 Sometimes the simplest things are the most elegant and satisfying. This almost-custard yogurt tart is one example. Strained yogurt, a little sugar, vanilla and some eggs are all there is to it, but the resulting marriage of the rich egg and yogurt flavors along with the sweetness of the sugar, all tied up in the aroma and taste of  high quality vanilla is captivating.

Everyone expresses their approval with lots of “mmmm” sounds, not wanting to waste time or attention in talking. That’s when you know you’ve got something special!

Fresh eggs from your backyard chickens, ducks or geese will really make this memorable!

Baked Yogurt Tart
Prep Time
15 mins
Cook Time
20 mins
Total Time
45 mins
 
This incredibly simple but superbly delicious vanilla-spiked tart is very close to a custard, but made with strained yogurt. Originally made with "labneh" - which is a thick strained yogurt, we substituted a plain Greek strained yogurt. We dressed it up with fresh organic whipped cream and some fresh strawberries. It is lightly sweet, creamy and very satisfying! We used one goose egg in place of the 3 eggs, making it a bit richer. Another alternative is duck eggs, which also have a larger yolk than chicken eggs.
Servings: 6
Ingredients
FOR THE CRUST
  • 1 cup flour
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1/4 tsp. kosher salt
  • 8 tbsp. unsalted butter melted
  • 3/4 tsp. vanilla extract
FOR THE FILLING
  • 1 lb. labneh
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1 tsp. vanilla extract
  • 1/8 tsp. salt
  • 3 eggs
Instructions
Make the crust
  1. Heat oven to 350°.
  2. Whisk flour, sugar, and salt in a bowl. Stir in butter and vanilla until dough forms; press into bottom and up sides of a 9" Springform pan.
  3. Using a fork, prick dough all over.
  4. Line dough with parchment paper and fill with pie weights or dried beans; bake until pale golden, 13–15 minutes.
  5. Remove paper and weights and bake until golden brown, 8–10 minutes more; let cool.
Make the filling
  1. Lower oven to 300°.
  2. Whisk labneh, sugar, vanilla, salt, and eggs in a bowl until smooth; pour filling into crust.
  3. Bake until just set in the center, about 20 minutes.
  4. Let cool before serving.
Recipe Notes

Make sure to use the highest quality vanilla extract, as it really will make this dessert! We have used and have fallen in love with Nielsen-Massey pure vanilla bean paste from King Arthur Flour. It is absolutely scrumptious with a great aroma and delicate flavor that is wonderful.
If you are pressed for time, substitute a prepared pie crust. Then the time needed to make this is about 10 minutes of prep and the 20 minutes of baking.

Adapted from Saveur Magazine #163

We made this yogurt tart with a fresh goose egg, as one of those monsters is equal to 3 large chicken eggs. Goose and duck eggs have more yolk than other eggs, so the dish winds up being richer and much more full of flavor. Here’s the comparison on size, as well as the glamor photo of the incredible vanilla paste we love.

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

The goose egg will fill my hand, while I can hold 3 or 4 of the chicken eggs!

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

Since I had the Kamado grill going, I just baked the tart on the grill with a heat diffuser underneath. The tart is almost ready here! It had just finished rising and had about 5 minutes to finish firming up.

 

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

After it sat for about 30 minutes, this is what greeted us:

 

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

And of course, the final glamor shot – ready to wow guests and birthday wife!

 

Smoked Yogurt Marinated Beef Roast

 

This smoked, yogurt marinated beef roast was served for Cindy’s birthday dinner, where I wanted to do something very tasty, a bit unusual and didn’t require hovering over the stove in the kitchen for a long time, as we were busy with catching up in the office after two successive weekends presenting at gardening shows.

We are fortunate to have some locally raised beef that is delicious in its own right, so that made a perfect base on which to build. I was perusing one of the newer issues of Saveur magazine and came across the dessert idea – a baked yogurt tart –  and saw the recipe for grilled yogurt marinated lamb chops. This is our version, slow roasted and smoked over mesquite charcoal in a Kamado, or Japanese ceramic grill. I roasted this at about 300°F for just a bit over 2 hours, as grass-fed beef shouldn’t be cooked as long as conventionally raised beef roast.

The results were fabulous – the beef roast had a rich, smoky beef flavor that is missing in store bought beef, followed by the tangy, complex flavors of the marinade. Prepare this in the morning and roast it in the afternoon, planning about 2 – 3 hours for the roasting, depending on the size of your roast.

This is the perfect centerpiece for an impressive and delicious dinner that won’t take all of your day to prepare!

Scroll down after the recipe for photos showing the process.

Here’s what could come out of your garden for this recipe –  Onion and Cumin, along with garlic you’ve grown!

Smoked Yogurt Marinated Beef Roast
Servings: 4
Ingredients
  • 1 large beef roast about 4 - 6 lbs
  • 1 large red onion finely chopped
  • Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
  • 1 cup plain full-fat yogurt
  • tsp. ground cumin
  • 2 tsp. ground green cardamom
  • 1/2 section star anise
  • 1 tsp. ground caraway seeds
  • 8 cloves garlic mashed into a paste
  • Zest and juice of 1 lemon
Instructions
  1. Grind cumin, green cardamom, caraway, star anise in a mortar and pestle. Add to mixing bowl with yogurt.
  2. Peel and crush garlic into a paste in mortar and pestle.
  3. Stir yogurt, freshly ground spices, garlic paste, zest and lemon juice in a bowl.
  4. Butterfly beef roast in a circular cut about 1 inch thick, lay open and spoon yogurt marinade over, leaving a small amount for the outside.
  5. Roll up and tie with butcher's twine, spoon remainder of marinade on outside.
  6. Cover with foil, marinade for 4 hours in refrigerator.
  7. Heat charcoal or covered gas grill to medium. 300°F is target temperature. Once temperature is stabilized, roast beef for 2 - 2 1/2 hours, turning once each hour.
  8. Roast until desired doneness, then remove and let sit on platter for 5 - 10 minutes. Slice and serve.
Recipe Notes

Grass-fed beef will be tough and chewy if cooked to the usual USDA temperatures most of us are used to. The USDA recommends the beef be cooked to 145 - 170°F, while 120 - 140°F is best for pastured or grass-fed beef. Shannon Hayes at www.grassfedcooking.com has taught me the most about bringing the rich and delicious flavors from these meats!

Adapted from Saveur Magazine #163

We assembled all of the ingredients to start.

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

A close-up view of the spices. I actually didn’t use all of them, but had gathered them when doing the brainstorming and adaptation of the original recipe.

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

I prefer to hand grind my spices when I have the time, the flavor is much better, more defined and richer than with a blender or mechanical spice grinder. The crushing and twisting motion really does make a difference. We also found this applies to the flavors of pesto!

There is green cardamom, star anise, caraway and cumin seeds in there.

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

During the grinding process, the most amazing aromas drift up. Cindy had come in and commented on how wonderful it smelled already, and I was only grinding the spices! I ground the cardamom pods whole to begin with, then pulled the shells out after crushing them a bit to release their flavors.

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

Next up was the garlic. I used the “Peel Garlic in 10 Seconds” trick, this time for the whole head. It still only took me maybe 15 seconds! The reason for grinding it instead of dicing or chopping it is to release the oils and flavors that only crushing or grinding will achieve.

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

After mixing the marinade and butterflying the roast into about an inch thick roll, I applied the marinade and wrapped it back up.

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

After liberally spooning the marinade on the inside and rolling it back up, I tied it with butcher’s twine, spooned the remainder of the marinade on the outside, put it into a bowl and then into the refrigerator for 4 – 5 hours to do it’s magic!

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

That afternoon I fired the Kamado up and once the temperature stabilized, the roast went on. I had spread the coals to the outside and put a small round cast iron griddle underneath to divert the heat to be more indirect. Once the internal temperature was 125°F in the center, it was ready to let rest and then slice.  Beautiful and mouthwateringly aromatic!

It was hard to walk down wind of the smoker without popping the lid every time to check on it!

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.

Once it had rested for 5 – 10 minutes, I sliced it and we dug in. Of the 4 – 6 pound roast, 3 of us ate only about 1/4 of it, so there will be a number of other tasty dishes that result from this one.

A plant growing in the dirt on a sunny day.