If you recall, last week’s challenge meal involved sunchokes as well.  As many of you are undoubtedly aware, eating locally means that when things are in season, you wind up consuming a fair few of them because the harvest dictates what’s for dinner.

It seems that our farm planted enough sunchokes to have them for at least two consecutive weeks, because they were out for the weekly pick-up again.  We actually managed to score a double batch this week by trading in our allotment of dried peppers (of which we already have an entire string) for a basket of sunchokes from someone who apparently felt creatively challenged by the tubers.

After much agonizing over recipe options, I settled on a lighter, herbier version of a traditional au gratin dish for these sunchokes.  I’m not a huge fan of creamy sauces, see, and I get pretty turned off by dishes like scalloped potatoes or fettuccini Alfredo.  To complicate things, I wanted a simpler dish than a multi-ingredient soup.  Basically, I wanted something to let the character of the sunchokes shine instead of drowning it in pools of heavy cream or pureeing it into a liquid.  Me and sunchokes, we’re still getting acquainted.  I may very well make them into a soup if we get them again, but I want to have a better sense of what they are and how they work first, dig?

Care to meet some of the cast of characters?  Sliced sunchokes, red potatoes from the farmer’s market, and a magic herby yogurty sauce, pictured below.  Not pictured: Spinach.  Pecorino Romano.  Fresh yogurt herb sauce for garnish.

This was very much a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants sort of recipe, so forgive the lack of specifics in the following post.  To be honest, I’ve come to realize that very few of my Dark Days recipes make it to publication with any significant specificity.  When that dawned on me this weekend, I was initially horrified.

“Oh, my!” I lamented. “Whatever was I thinking?  However will anyone manage to make this again?”

Then I realized: I don’t want you to make this.

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I haven’t forgotten your questions, I promise.  Things have just been busy ’round here, what with testicles getting snipped and tossed and all.  (Hippo’s doing fine, by the way.  And his eye got fixed as well!  He’s a new pup.  One who walks a little gingerly at the moment.)

But enough about testicles.  Let’s talk about lunch!

Okay, so I maybe need to work on my transitions.  I’ll get on that.

Jessica wrote to ask:

What recommendations do you have for those who work in an office and would like to bring healthful lunches that won’t take 90 years to make in the morning? My one catch is that I live in the frozen tundra of the north, and I want something warm in the winter.

Ah, the frozen tundra.  I remember the tundra.  Fondly.  But distantly.  I have to say, I greatly prefer the frozen tundra at a distance.  The non-frozen months in the north are lovely.  It’s just the frozen ones that lose their appeal for me.

So.  Lunch that won’t take forever to make in the morning.  Let’s get to it!

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As I’ve pointed out before, processed and prepackaged foods usually have something in them you’d prefer not to be eating.  In the case of many non-dairy “milks” such as soy, rice, or almond milk, that’s the seaweed-derived thickener carrageenen.  Carrageenen is interesting enough to me that I’ll devote an entire post to it in the near future so you can revel in all the gory details, but for the moment I’ll just say that I have not been favorably impressed with the results of the research on carrageenen.  Because our household attempts to keep dairy consumption as a pretty small part of our diet, that meant that I took some time last weekend to whip up some homemade almond milk.  It’s surprisingly simple, and it does have some side benefits beyond carrageenan avoidance, as you’ll see at the end of the post.

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Laura over at Urban Hennery decided to make this week a theme week in the ongoing Dark Days of Winter local eating challenge.  Specifically, she told us all to seek out some type of local produce we had either never cooked or never eaten before, figure out what we were going to do with it, cook it up all proper-like, and devour.

I was a little nervous about the challenge.  See, as members of a CSA, farmers’ market fiends, and foragers, the Unicyclist and I have eaten dandelion greens, rapini, turnips and turnip greens, squashes of all shapes and sizes, purple spinach, purple potatoes, golden beets, watermelon radishes, cactus fruit, cactus pads, mesquite pods, daikon, burdock, zucchini flowers, pansies, purple beans, teparies, tat soi, I’itois onions, bok choy, kohlrabi, and a whooooole lot more.  Frankly, although there are probably edible things growing in the Phoenix area that we haven’t yet eaten, finding them might prove to be quite a task.

Fortunately, the fates smiled on us in our CSA share this week, and we got a tiny basket of sunchokes from the farm. While I’ve eaten sunchokes before, the Unicyclist hasn’t.  Best of all, neither of us had cooked them before. Serendipitous much?  I apparently have some good karma stockpiled somewhere.  I just hope I don’t use it all up on produce.

Anywho, I’m sure at least some of you are wondering what the heck a sunchoke is.

Those are sunchokes.

For starters, they’re dirty.

And knobbly.

And just plain weird-looking.

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I don’t really have a good reason for calling these New Moon cookies, except that I personally think they are out of this world.  Oh, and they’re round.  Like the moon.  And they’re brimming with quinoa, which is also orbish.  So, they’re round at several levels.  And tasty.  And that’s what matters.

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And now, for the results of the random drawing (the Unicyclist is home, so I’m rooking him into it)….drumroll, please!

Brumbrumbrumbrumbrummmmmmm…..

Join me in congratulating, MANGOCHILD!!  Huzzah!  Her ode to her favorite fruit is printed here.

Mangoes

Mango. A smile. A laugh as the juice trickles down my chin.
Mangos, yellow, red, and the deepest orange. Sunsets and sunrises at any time of the day.
Squishing the soft skin between my hands as the pulp mashes within, only to squirt out the top into my mouth and onto my friend’s face.
Sustaining me, soothing me, a joy throughout the years.
Scraping the pit with my teeth, drawing out each sweet bit of fruit until the fibers stick between my teeth. Scraping the skin with my teeth and laughing at the teeth marks left behind.
Joy in kachumber, in sweet mango sauce, in mango lassi and mango salads.
Nothing short of simple happiness.

W00t!  Your copy of Sundays at Moosewood will be on its way shortly!

Well, it’s true—looking at the poll results, everyone’s poem was someone’s favorite, and all of them sure were enjoyable to read!  However, it is time to look at the results of the voting, and the voting is in.  Without further ado, the first place winner is….

…”Dont Kick da Beet!”  Congrats to DJ Kimmus and beetNick!  You are the new proud owners of Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites!

And, in second place, proud winner of  The Cookshelf Vegetarian, we have Jessica’s beautiful “Open Letter to a Carrot.”

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I spent some time poking around after the post yesterday, and I found a few interesting things.  One is this interactive map from The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), where you can click on individual countries and see what’s currently being reported.  IFPRI also has a 40-page report on the 2008 food crisis situation, which I haven’t had time to read yet.  If you’re interested, check it out at the link.

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Hippo is begging you to remember to vote. So far, it looks like everyone has a favorite!  The race is tight, and I’ve had many comments here and in my e-mail inbox about how much all the entries were enjoyed.  Thanks again to everyone who participated.  Tune in here tomorrow to find out the winners of the cookbooks, as well as to check out a new recipe for vegan, gluten-free, flourless, and absolutely delicious cookies!

That’s not a typo.  According to the United Nations (as reported in this article in The Independent), one billion is the number of people expected to be without sufficient food and nutrition this year.

That’s despite two consecutive years of record-breaking harvests.

Obviously, it’s not about the amount of food; there’s plenty to feed the world over.  It’s about access.  Currently, with food prices climbing alongside poverty rates, more and more people are finding themselves without the monetary resources to adequately feed themselves and their families.

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