Hugh Acheson - The Broad Fork

Copyright 2015 by Fried Pie, LLC
Photographs copyright 2015 by Rinne Allen

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Acheson, Hugh.
Broadfork: recipes for the wide world of vegetables and fruits / Hugh Acheson; photographs by Rinne
Allen.First edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
1. Cooking, AmericanSouthern style. 2. Seasonal cooking. 3. Farm produce. I. Title.
TX715.2.S68A249 2015
641.5975dc23 2014023531

ISBN 978-0-385-34502-6
eBook ISBN 978-0-385-34503-3

Design by Rae Ann Spitzenberger
Cover photographs by Rinne Allen

v3.1

I had some answers deep down in my culinary repertoire, but his forwardness came at me like a cannonball. The odd-looking vegetable had hit the height of its season, it was all over the farmers markets and taking over our CSA boxes, and my fellow community-supporter-of-agriculture resorted to the last possible hope: ask that chef guy who lives down the street. I blurted out, Slaw?

But he wanted more from me. I mulled over this maybe he was looking for something more highbrow. Roasted kohlrabi with lobster, scallion, garlic, fennel, and curry butter? He nodded. A shaved kohlrabi salad with arugula, pecans, lime, paprika, and marjoram? I was rolling now.

Pickles? he asked.

Yes, pickles are great, too. Just make sure the pickling liquid isnt too acidic and shave them thin. Put it on a hot dog. (This is a great culinary response because darn near everything tastes good on a hot dog.) He went on his way, satisfied, surely to pickle up some kohlrabi and to find a lobster. I meandered home, thinking through my endless fascination with the links between food and community.

I am keen on becoming a better member of my food community. So I walk. My walk takes me out my front door, usually accompanied by my daughters, and we meander down the street. We turn left at the house owned by the dear old woman who always says hello, walk down the street with no sidewalk, two blocks to the end, and hobble up the dangerously steep stairs to our friend Alexs house. On the porch are about a hundred boxes of vegetables, arranged for pickup by many of our neighbors. The boxes come from a farm, Woodland Gardens, five miles away, nestled behind the tiny airport in our town, Athens, Georgia. Woodland is an awe-inspiring organic farm that grows a beautiful array of vegetables for many of the high-end joints in the big city to the west, Atlanta. But to me, Woodland is about my friends Celia and John, farmers who work very hard to grow goodness every day. This realizationthat someone took the time and effort to put a seed in the ground, toiled in the fields nurturing a young plant, harvested the offering, washed it tenderly, packed it into a simple box, and brought it to my neighborhoodis a moment everyone in our world needs to have. Its a connecting of the dots after many years of disconnection.

By cooking and enjoying as many vegetables as Celia and John and other farmers nearby grow, Im taking a step in the direction of supporting people I admire, of eating more healthfully, and of eating deliciously. But, as my neighbor made me realize, many people might not know what to do with the bounty of produce as it comes into season. So this book is part of my small-steps plan to becoming a better food citizen.

The recipes here are all about vegetableswhat to do with them, ideas to get you excited to cook and eat them. Its not a manual to a vegetarian lifestyle, but rather a compendium of seasonal recipes to help you bring vegetables to the center of your platefrom quick things you can do right away with what you just picked up to longer, more involved dinners.

I am not perfect. If you come into my kitchen you will find many things that you might not expect: Jif peanut butter, mass-production bread, sliced American cheese, pancake mix, forgotten cheap condiments, juice boxes, and store-bought mayo. My last name is definitely not Kingsolver. I can make an excuse for each one: The peanut butter is for the basic PB&J sandwiches that my kids love. The bread is part of that relationship. The American cheese is an abhorrence when eaten on its own, coaxed with difficulty from its plastic sheathing, but to us it is the only cheese for a true American cheeseburger. The pancake mix is all about the lazy Sunday, a sequence of hours when my family mimics the movements of slothlike creatures (this is often accompanied by Dunkin Donuts). Juice boxes, the bane of landfills, provide a sadly quick and easy resource to make sure my kids dont become dehydrated scurvy sufferers, a worry that sometimes does keep me up at night. Store-bought mayo is the angel and devil on my shoulder: it reminds me of the self-sufficiency I had in sandwich-making as a child, and it pokes me in the eye with the reminder that we are way too busy in our lives to even make homemade mayo, something I am remarkably good at. Again, I am not perfect. But to me, its all about taking small steps.

Mostly I shop at our local farmers market. We eat a lot of vegetables. Were members of a CSA. Being a member of a CSA, or community supported agriculture, is like buying a subscription to vegetables, paying it forward for a bounty to come later from a local and sustainable farm, a farm where you know the names of the people who till and seed and harvest, a place that seeks to ensure that the land is in as good or better shape when they leave it as when they first dug in. Its a support system for those farms you respect and admire, a destination for their hard work and beautiful results. It is a way to eat with the seasons and a gateway to enjoying the bounty of your community.

In the CSA box we pick up on our walk are tender arugula, early lettuces still dewy from a morning picking, crisp tatsoi, baby ginger that Celia is experimenting with, a mix of late-season string beans, bunches of icicle radishes, tiny young mustard greens, perfectly round small turnips, and a lone butternut squash that signals the oncoming cold that our farmers will experience as winter swoops in. In my mind I am going through the dishes I will make. I will roast the turnips, saut the greens, and pickle the stems. I will cook the tatsoi at high heat and finish it with some very finely chopped ginger and toss it with roasted chicken to be served over sushi rice. I will make a salad with finely cut beans to pair with a simple tuna sandwich. I will roast the butternut squash, scoop out the amazingly flavorful flesh, and make tender little gnocchi to serve with crisp sage and brown butter. The radishes will be a snack and the arugula will garnish most meals in some way. Its a good plan.