Changes at Watts Grocery

Watts Grocery, the Broad Street haven for Durham foodies, has a few changes coming up. First there are the usual seasonal menu changes which include:

• Braised lamb shanks with Sea Island pea ragout
• Southern Fish and Chips (at lunch only) with catfish fingers and house cut fries
• Caramel Cake with cranberry compote
• Oyster, Shrimp, and Andouille Jambalaya with short grain rice
• Warm apples with Mas de Lavail ice cream and crisp walnut cookies
• Roast poulet rouge de Piedmont with Lee Brothers' pimento cheese potato gratin and pecan pan sauce

Mmmmm, pimento cheese anything sounds good to me, so I'm looking forward to the gratin. I wonder if it's offered as a side, though, since I doubt I'll order the chicken. And I love the Southern Fish and Chips idea -- hope there's the requisite Southern fried seafood condiments of cocktail sauce and tartar sauce too.

One other big change for WG is the axing of the late-night hours. I asked chef/owner Amy Tornquist about this by e-mail and she replied that it wasn't working as well as they would have hoped and that "it always seemed a little bit of a painful shift for the front of the house" because of the small WG staff. Amy's willing to reconsider in the future but only if there's a way to do it without taxing everyone. It'll surely be a loss for Durham's late-night offerings but will still remain a superb option for lunch, dinner and Sunday brunch.

Amy was also kind enough to share the full new menus (which haven't been posted on the WG site as of yet) so here they are: Lunch/Dinner and Brunch/Dessert. Enjoy!

(photo via http://blog.indienc.com/2009/03/watts-grocery-durham/)

The truth about blackberries in Durham

There was a great post on the Duke Park neighborhood e-mail list this week about the joys of picking blackberries in Durham. I enjoyed picking them when I was little but haven't thought much about it lately -- but now I'm inspired by Tom Whiteside! Read below for more. (And the photo above of a Durham blackberry patch was snagged from the Durham blog Shift of Tow posted last year on July 4.)

Dear Neighbors -
The fruit, not the gizmo. We are in the middle of blackberry season, and as usual my fingers are purple and my arms are covered with tiny scratches. My freezer is filling up. I am very happy. This wonderful fruit is everywhere, we have an inner city abundance of a culinary treat and it is a blessing. I've got a day off work, what the heck, I am going to spread the word about blackberries. In case you're interested, I offer Blackberry 101.

The stalks and brambles grow wild all over the place, you can find them along railroad tracks, behind buildings, alongside parking lots, in various places along the American Tobacco Trail, on the roadcut hillsides above 15-501 bypass in the vicinity of the intersection with the Durham Freeway, all along the Durham Freeway, on the hill across from Sam's, etc etc etc. I get a few, wild, in my backyard hedge. Look around carefully and you will find plentitude. They are easiest to spot in spring when the white blossoms on bending stalks stand out at a distance. This is, by definition, a common weed. These days I don't go more than a mile or two from my house for blackberries. Working at a leisurely pace I can pick a gallon in about an hour and a half. If I wanted to do this every day it would be easy. There are plenty of berries, plenty, plenty, plenty.

The fruit turns from green to red to black. Right now you will find all three colors on the same stalk. You can pick berries for several weeks, going back to the same place every few days to get what has ripened up. (They are not bananas, they will not ripen off the plant.) The berry is ripe when it is completely black. A ripe berry will come off with a gentle tug; if you have to pull it excessively hard to detach then it is not ripe As you pick you will find that some black ones still have one or more bright red little globule things, that's fine, it's ripe enough. But if you see a lot of red mixed in with black on the same berry, leave it for tomorrow. Ideally the ripe one is solid shiny black, and it comes off readily in your hand. If you find one that's more of a dull black, a bit past ripe and mushy, go ahead and taste it - sometimes these are already fermented on the bush, it's like a very fresh shot of blackberry vodka. (more on that later)

The bad stuff - blackberry thorns are wicked. As a wild plant that likes to grow back into space that's been cut, the blackberry often shares habitat with poison ivy. (For example, there's plenty of blackberry between the Wachovia and the old Kmart, and there is some absolutely spectacular poison ivy, too, with purple rusty stuff growing atop the leaves. I'm not picking there anymore.) More often than not it's decent territory for snakes, too. So generally I wear long pants and work boots and a heavy long sleeved shirt. Most days it's not much fun at 3:00 in the afternoon; early morning is best to stay out of heat and sun. I usually go before breakfast, this morning was absolutely perfect weather. I take plastic containers with lids, because it sure is a drag to spill a quart of berries. Just in case you don't like snakes or poison ivy, you can still pick blackberries - they are not always in the middle of brambles. Some of my favorite places are quite easily accessible and safe even in shorts and sandals, and no I'm not going to tell you where those are.

If you see a few ripe berries but not many, stay right there and look carefully. Look underneath. The ripe fruit gets heavy and pulls the stalk down, and you will often find the best stuff down in among other weeds. Sometimes the blackberry bush can climb up into small trees, so you can even find them overhead. But always look way down low, underneath everything else. It IS a jungle out there, so stay in one place and look low. Sometimes you find fruit on big established brambles, and sometimes you find perfectly nice fruit on rather lonely solitary stalks. At the end of the season you are picking the last black ones and there are no more red ones coming along. Even then, you might still find more berries nearby, on different plants in deeper shade.

People have said to me, "Oh I wouldn't want to take the food away from the birds." If you get into the bushes you probably will meet some birds and they might fuss at you, but that's probably because you are near their nest. If they are fussing badly you are probably too near, so try to back out carefully. Otherwise, you're not going to hurt them by taking "their" food. Once you see how many berries there are, and how many are inaccessible to you because you don't have wings, you won't worry about the birds.

So what to do with all this fruit? Wash it, drain it, eat it. Fresh with cereal, fresh with vanilla ice cream. Cobblers and pies are the best. The black turns to a beautiful deep purple when cooked, it's just an outrageously gorgeous color. Some people don't like the seeds, no problem, it's easy to take them out - make syrup or jelly. I like syrup, and it's easy - add 1/2 cup sugar to a half gallon of berries, a tiny bit of water, cook it down slowly and strain the seeds out. Refrigerated it lasts for weeks, it can be frozen. More or less sugar to taste. Cook it longer if you want it thicker, great on pancakes. Don't cook it so long and you've got an easy liquid form for making beverages. The taste is unique but is like pomegranate or black currants - that tasty dark fruit bitter flavor. For a soft drink I add syrup to regular ginger ale. For an adult beverage, add a splash of blackberry syrup to Blenheims ginger ale (hot hot or regular hot) and vanilla vodka. Careful, this is way easy to drink - very refreshing and it goes down like Kool Aid (and I mean that in a good way). If you freeze blackberries in a single layer on baking sheets they will stay like individual frozen berries when you bag them; if you put a few cups of fresh berries into a plastic bag and freeze them like that you will have one big clump of frozen berries, fine for wintertime cobbler or pies. BTW, we have a couple of Blenheim's bootleggers in the neighborhood, they make the run to South Carolina every once in a while and personally I am in good supply, but if anyone knows of a local retailer please let me know.

You can buy blackberries at the Farmer's Market and they look pretty good, all nice and big and shiny. The wild berries you forage for free might be smaller most of the time, but if you look around you can find plenty of impressive berries wild, too. Even the smallest berries cook down fine to syrup, I usually have two containers, one for juicy (to eat fresh or cobbler) and the other for not-so-juicy (for syrup).

So forage well. Here's a toast to the common-as-weeds blackberry, abundant as far as you might wander. It is a tough, scrappy and delicious part of our world. I nominate blackberry as the Official Duke Park Neighborhood Wild Fruit.

- Tom

Oh, Indy

I picked up the latest Independent Weekly at the library this afternoon and was appalled by the cover. No, silly, you know I'm a fan of local food, but cripes, who thought of this headline?

EAT WHERE YOU'RE AT

I know people bitch all the time about grammar these days but would it hurt a newspaper to use grammar correctly on the cover? Okay, you're saying, it's just an alternative paper. True, but given that the Herald-Sun is now trumpeting how great they are only because the N&O staff is dropping like flies alternative papers may be all we're left with one day. (No offense intended to the delightful M. Chen at the H-S.)

On the other hand, I shouldn't complain too much. The article is about cool places to eat in the periphery of the Triangle and well worth a read.

And while I was there searching for an image of the actual cover (which I clearly failed to locate) I read this amazing story of a guy who wrote to Joe Biden in '72 after his wife and children were killed and Biden's response. You may have seen Biden's reference to this in the debate with She Who Must Not Be Named but this made it even more real for me. Very touching.

P.S. Feel free to find all the grammatical mistakes above, but remember, I don't get paid to write or edit! (Clearly.)

Cobbler!

Enough of these bad food posts -- here's a good one! The fam and I went to out first Wednesday afternoon outing to the Durham Farmer's Market and got a bunch of stuff, including some delish Sungold cherry tomatoes from Ben at Fickle Creek Farm and some purple peppers from a farmer whose name I forgot.

BUT -- and the key for posting, I got two pints of large juicy blackberries from Lyons Farms. Above and below are my blackberry cobbler photos. Don't you wish you had some right now?

About that.

So, you know the whole tomato-salmonella thing? You know, the one where more than 800 people have been reported to have been infected with the same strain (and countless others just at home with "the stomach flu")? Well, the delightful CDC held a press conference last Friday to announce the following finding: tomatoes may or may not be responsible.

Come again?

From the Washington Post:

"We continue to see a strong association with tomatoes, but we are keeping an open mind about other ingredients," said Patricia Griffin, a top epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"We have to re-examine the whole thing," David Acheson, a top food safety official with the Food and Drug Administration said. "We are concerned there is something out there still exposing people to this salmonella saintpaul strain." ... "Nothing that Dr. Griffin said indicates that we should be taking a serious look at anything else, but rightly that question is being asked," he said. "We need to be looking at all possibilities."

So it's definitely the tomatoes, except maybe something else is out there, but nothing indicates that there is, but we still should be looking for something else.

Want to know one of the big problems? Tomatoes from all over Florida and Mexico get shipped to Florida, dumped all together, and then "repacked to meet the customer specifications" -- so they have no idea where tainted tomatoes (if indeed there are any!) came from, and it's all our fault anyways since we consumers are asking for it.

At least we have FDA inspectors out there making sure this doesn't happen, right? Er, not really. The Dallas Morning News tells us that just a trickle of imports from Mexico are being examined by inspectors. "We have this huge growth in imports, this huge growth in trade; at the same time we have severely cut back on our regulatory agencies and their ability to do their job, especially the food portion of the Food and Drug Administration," said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives for Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports magazine.

What's a poor boy to do? Head to the Durham Farmers Market (or other similar market). Or sign up for a local CSA. Or grow your own. Or a combo of all three.

Food For Thought

In April I co-taught a short course (called Mini-Term) at NCSSM with another teacher and 20 students. In addition to reading Michael Pollan, discussing organic certification, Slow Food and watching some interesting films (including King Corn), we visited several "local food" sites. All of the people that we asked to visit agreed and all were incredibly gracious and informative. Here's where we went:

Elysian Fields Farm, Cedar Grove

SEEDS Garden, Durham

Goat Lady Dairy, Climax

Fickle Creek Farm, Efland

Watts Grocery

Durham Farmers Market

See more photos here (from Facebook):
Album #1
Album #2

EDITED: most of the photography above and in the albums was done by recent NCSSM graduate Ha Thien Nguyen!