A night out with 5 virgins  -by GKC

EPV's olive oil tasting was a big success!  Last Monday, at 6:30 PM sharp, 45 people crammed into Circa's petite dining room to savor hors d'oeuvres (prepared by Circa chef and owner, Jeremy Whitcomb), sip wine, and sample some very fine oils from France, Italy and Greece.  Bob and Mary Lou Heiss, owners of Cooks Shop Here, a favorite local source for culinary treats from around the world, brought the oil and ran the tasting.  Berkshire Mountain Bakery provided some of their fantastic ciabatta bread for dipping.

The Pumpkin "Pie" and the Inscrutable Nut -by GKC

This post was supposed to be about pumpkins.  Specifically, it was supposed to be about what I did with a cup and a half of leftover roast pumpkin.  I'll give you the back-story.  A few weeks ago, Melissa asked me to write a recipe for pie made with fresh pumpkin--not canned orange gloop--to go in our November newsletter.  So I set about procuring a pumpkin (as luck would have it, there was a sugar pumpkin in our share that week) and writing a trial recipe.  I made the pie for Christophe's birthday and it was deemed newsletter-worthy.  But then I started thinking, if pumpkin can go in a sweet pie, why not in a savory pie?  Or, better yet, on a pizza pie?  I'll admit that this wasn't a completely original thought (then again, when it comes to cooking, so few are).  Two years ago, I had pumpkin pizza at a restaurant in New York.  But that pumpkin was a topping, and I was envisioning pumpkin as sauce--think orange pie, as opposed to red or white.  To achieve this, I would puree the leftover pumpkin (I had already passed it through a food mill but I wanted it even smoother), then mix it with a little crème fraîche and a grating of nutmeg; some salt and pepper and I'd have a pizza sauce.  Fundamentals in hand, it was time for the fun part: deciding what to put on top.

Unusual Valley Edibles -by GKC

Fall caught me by surprise this year. Maybe it was the fact that summer didn't quite happen here in the Northeast. The sun made an appearance for a few weeks in August, but it declined to stick around long enough to ripen my peppers or coax blooms from my eggplants. I only picked two patty pan squash, the cucumbers gave up before they really got going, and the tomatoes... Last year, my mom, my brother's girlfriend and I canned almost fifty quarts of whole tomatoes--with a little help from our menfolk. We froze dozens of baggies of tomato concassé (peeled, seeded and chopped tomato flesh), labeled with enticing names like "Black from Tula" and "Indian Moon." We made oven-drieds andd salsas, we even tried a nineteenth century recipe for tomato preserves.

This summer, needless to say, was a different story. I managed to freeze a few pints of puree and I made one batch of my favorite oven-dried Juliets (small, red, plum-shaped tomatoes)--but that's it. After surveying the damage to our own plants, and to the heirloom field at the Hampshire College farm (our summer CSA and the source of past tomato bounty), we hung up our tongs and put away our mason jars. While I thought briefly about buying and canning some other farm's seconds, it seemed like an affront to the memory of last year's crop.

Cooking with a Master Chef, or The (Gaby) Julie & Julia Project -by GKC

I feel I should start this post by admitting that until three summers ago there was a major gap in my cookbook collection: I didn't own a single book by Julia Child. There are two reasons for this omission. First, I cook way more Italian food than I do French, making Marcella (more on her later) my Julia. Second, while I own a sizable collection of cookbooks, I hardly ever cook from them. I tend to use cookbooks for inspiration, not direction. I like to flip through them, see what the author has done with a dish, and then change it to suit my needs or my whims. A gorgeous color photo with an enticing caption will catch my eye, and I'm off and cooking--not bothering to read about mincing this or measuring that. (It's ironic then, that when I write a recipe, I tend to be very precise.) More often than not, I eschew cookbooks altogether; what's ripening in the garden, or languishing in the refrigerator, is my guide as I set about planning the week's meals.

Marcella Hazan, grand dame of Italian cookery and author of the incomparable Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, is the exception that proves the rule. I trust her implicitly, reference her often, and follow her recipes to the T. I also have a great fondness for the Joy of Cooking. I know it represents an era in American cooking that many people would like to forget; but I love "Joy"--as my mom calls it--both for the impossibly dated recipes ("Chipped Beef Cornucopias" and "Bird of Paradise Salad") and for the ones I actually use ("Skillet Corn Bread" and "Pie Dough Cockaigne"). But back to Ms. Child. Three summers ago I got married, and some foodie friends, aghast at the notion of a couple embarking on married life so ill-prepared, gave Christophe and me a copy of The Way to Cook. I have not cracked it until now. But Thursday is our anniversary, and the movie Julie & Julia comes out the next day, so it seems like a good moment to try a little Gaby & Julia experiment. (I should note that the cookbook in the blog/book/movie is Mastering the Art of French Cooking not The Way to Cook; but then, I'm not blogger extraordinaire Julie Powell).

If You Can't Weed it, Eat It: Foraging in the vegetable garden -by GKC

Last spring my husband, Christophe, and I decided to expand our vegetable garden. Or to be more accurate, last winter I sat down in front of the Seed Savers website and ordered so many seeds that we were obliged to expand our vegetable garden. It's still pretty small by most standards; the principal bed is 8' x 24' and the secondary bed (which we added after I went to Annie's and bought shallots and seed potatoes) is a 2' x 30' strip that runs along the fence at the bottom of our yard. In the interest of saving money, Christophe opted to do the necessary turf-turning by hand, rather than rent a roto-tiller. This may have been a mistake. He got blisters from the pickaxe and we both spent hours squatting on the ground, shaking out clumps of sod and detangling entrenched earthworms. Actually, those worms are one reason why it's bad to make a habit of roto-tilling; a single pass to break up new sod is OK, but if you do it too often, you risk compacting the soil, killing beneficials—like worms—and destroying the network of mycorrhizal fungi that provide nutrients to your plants' roots. (If you're not sure what that means, check out this article.)