Jackie Appleseed | The Enigmatic Grapefruit | Recipe: Pasta e Fagioli
Issue No. 58
In this week’s issue, how do you like them apples? 🍎🍏 If someone shared this newsletter with you, subscribe here:
In Virginia, I recently had my first apple picking experience, and boy did it live up to the hype (see evidence below). Once I returned home, I became a regular Jackie Appleseed, gifting apples to friends, making pie for family, and preserving chutney and vinegar for myself. But the main event of this whole apple fantasia was making cyser (a cross between hard apple cider and mead) with my friend Jennifer, a mead witch and beekeeper. She supplied the honey, gear, and knowledge, and I donated the apples.
Even though I’m a ferment head, I’ve always been a little afraid of brewing alcohol. One time I fermented some pineapple soda that turned out to be exceptionally alcoholic. Whoops! But the cyser is my first real go at home brewing.
Jenn and I decided my nonfunctional fireplace would be the best place for the first step of the fermentation. We popped an airlock on the top of the carboy and tucked it into the fireplace. I just needed to monitor and make a few adjustments depending on how the microbes were behaving. Jenn had mentioned that there might be no activity at first, or it might become super-active super-fast.
There still were no signs of life in the brew the next morning, so I pulled the carboy out of the fireplace and topped it up with a bit more apple juice. Then I went for a bike ride. When I got home a couple hours later, my living room was head to toe covered in apple mash. The sugar in my morning addition of apple juice had turbocharged the ferment. The pressure in the carboy built up and the airlock exploded off the top, with apple mash and juice geysering all over every surface of my living room. Apple mash clouds on the ceiling and apple mash dripping down the walls. Apple mash on the couch and the rug and under the pillows and in between the blinds and on the fan blades and the house plants. No one would describe me as a neat person, but never in my life have I been faced with a mess of such epic proportions.
I stared in shock at the auburn hellscape that was my living room. I called Jenn. She was flabbergasted. In decades of brewing, she had never had a carboy explode like this. Chock it up to the power and mystery of microbes! I got off the phone, put on my big girl pants, and went to work. The clean up was extra tough because my beautiful old house has intricate beadboard walls and ceilings, which meant having to painstakingly scrub the mess out of every little crevice. But eventually, I did it. And I only broke down crying once!
But talk about character building! I will absolutely never forget my first home brew. And after the explosion, things calmed down substantially in the carboy, which is now happily and steadily bubbling away, almost ready for bottling. I am so looking forward to that first sip of cyser.
shake it Jenn!
love,
Jackie
You’ll be the 🍎 of our 👁️ if you share this issue!
Save the Date!
Now is the perfect time to participate in activities with 👉 your local Slow Food chapter .
I’m on the board of my local Slow Food chapter, and we’ve got a bunch of great projects and activities on tap. Check out your local chapter and help build food sovereignty for all! Here’s an exciting event our chapter is organizing this weekend!
Slow Food Treasure Coast potluck and plant exchange
When: Saturday, October 17 from 3 - 6 p.m.
Where: Kai Kai Farm in Indiantown
What: Share seeds or any garden bounty. Or pick up something special to take back home. Perhaps a jackfruit seedling, a cutting of chaya, or some heirloom veggie seeds? Everything is free, in the spirit of the gift economy!
But wait there’s more: Head over to Shadowood Farm in Palm City on Sunday from 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. for their fall plant sale. They’ll be donating a portion of sales to the Slow Food chapter.
-jackie
Fresh Links
*🥐It’s a Hellscape Out There. Try a Galette | NY Times
As we enter our sixth or seventh month of pandemic baking, with no end in sight, try a galette. Writer Tamar Adler writes that you can get fancier, but “they’re just dough and fillings.” Just a freeform, flat pastry to bake for yourself, without needing to worry about how beautiful it’ll look on Instagram.
Galette-making doesn’t require the tedious high-wire moments needed for baking a pie, such as crimping. There’s little to be proved with a galette, but that’s why they’re the right recipe to attempt in these chaotic times. And fortunately, Jackie shared an excellent galette recipe just last week (although she calls it a crostata. Potato potahto).
*Yea it’s a croissant. The world needs a galette/crostata emoji.
*🍊Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet | Atlas Obscura
The grapefruit is an oddball. Nobody knows how it made its way to Barbados, where they were first discovered in the mid-1600s, even though all citrus fruits started in Asia. Nobody knows why in English it’s called the, um, grapefruit. (Some unsubstantiated theories: Because it grows in bunches or it tastes like unripe grapes). And then there’s all the potential serious interactions grapefruit can have with a wide variety of medications.
Writer Dan Nosowitz delves into the strangest of citrus, which first arrived in the U.S. in Pinellas County, Florida in the early 1800s. The state even built railroads to transport grapefruit and other citrus to the rest of the country. As the grapefruit’s popularity swelled, it inspired fads like the Grapefruit Diet. But today the grapefruit has a much different association with health: Don’t eat it or drink it with your medicine. The article explains why and the science is super informative. Like many fascinating scientific discoveries, its effect was discovered by accident — by the Canadian government in 1989. The short version goes like this…
Grapefruit has a compound called furanocourmarins that protect the fruit from fungal infections and ruin an important enzyme in the body called cytochrome P450. The enzyme breaks down substances into inactive forms. When the grapefruit compound wipes out the enzyme, a key defense mechanism goes away and the body can easily overdose on drugs in the bloodstream. Take that medication warning seriously because “it does not take an excessive amount of grapefruit juice to have this effect: Less than a single cup can be enough.”
*Yea it’s a tangerine. The world needs a grapefruit emoji.
🧂The Redemption of the Spice Blend | Eater
Everything had to be “from scratch” when the home-cooking renaissance kicked off at the start of the aughts. No more canned veggies or buying broth in a can. And no more seasonings like Mrs. Dash. Too often home-cooking was an identity and premixed spices could be derided as lazy or a form of cheating. Now home chefs are wondering why we ever felt that way. In the middle of a pandemic, spice companies are selling more mixes than ever.
Spice blends shouldn’t be seen as a shortcut but as a gateway to other flavors, says chef Meherwan Irani, who founded Spicewalla in 2018. For example, mixes in Spicewalla’s “Taco Collection” highlight the regional herbs and chiles used in the rubs and seasonings. Some blends use ingredients that would be damn near impossible to find in the U.S., like the Sichuan-inspired mala spice mix, sold by Fly By Jing. Founder Jing Gao said she’d carry home suitcases full of chili peppers from China when she started. Eric Rivera, a chef in Seattle, hopes blends will expand the repertoire of U.S. home cooks by introducing them to integral tastes from other cultures like those of his family’s Puerto Rico.
Rivera understands the ease that blends can provide. Especially for budget-tight chefs who may be doing more home cooking than ever, blends impart flavor without the cost of buying all the ingredients individually. “I’ve engineered it to be an easy button for people because I want them to put that shit on everything,” he says.
Quick Pasta e Fagioli
My first memory of pasta e fagioli (pasta and beans in Italian) is from Flavors of Italy, a run of the mill Italian-American restaurant my family frequented during my early childhood in Coral Springs, Fla. If memory serves, there was a waterfall in the restaurant, which is very exciting. The pasta e fagioli less so. The basic soup of pasta, cannellini beans, and veggies came automatically before any entree, like miso soup does at many Japanese restaurants. I filed it away as something boring and not worth ordering.
My next memory of pasta and beans came during our first season at Ground Floor Farm, when Farmer Mike would cook staff lunches of pasta with tomato sauce, throwing in a can of Costco black beans to satiate the famished farm crew. I started out skeptical, but was soon convinced of the merits of putting beans in pasta. Now I do it all the time, particularly when I need something quick but hearty. Here’s an easily adaptable pasta e fagioli you can have on the table in 15 or 20 minutes.
Serves 1 hungry person
Ingredients
1 cup uncooked pasta
1 cup cooked white beans of choice (canned or cooked from dry)
a few cloves garlic, chopped
1 bunch greens of choice (sorrel, arugula, or callaloo are nice), chopped
a sprig or two of rosemary
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1 tablespoon butter
olive oil
crushed red pepper
fennel seed
vinegar or choice
parmesan
step-by-step
Cook pasta in salted boiling water until al dente.
While pasta is cooking, add a glug or two of olive oil to a pan along with garlic. Cook for a few minutes over medium heat, until garlic is fragrant. Add rosemary, a four-fingered pinch of red pepper, and another pinch of fennel seed, and let sizzle for 30 seconds. Add beans and breadcrumbs. Stir.
Before draining the pasta, add about 1/3 cup of pasta water to beans and turn heat to high. Add drained pasta, butter, and a splash of vinegar to pan. Stir constantly until the contents have absorbed all of the water.
Stir in greens and grated parmesan. Enjoy!
They forgot my bleeping onion rings. Again.
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is a cook and kitchen educator based in Stuart, Fla. She is co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a communications specialist at the ACLU of Texas. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.