Today’s guest post is by Ellie Markovitch, a multimedia storyteller and lecturer at the University of Maine Department of Communication and Journalism. She uses food as a starting point for conversations and community building. You can find her at storycooking.com, and she has two accounts on IG: @elliemarkovitch and @fermentation_friday, where she likes to use the hashtag #storycooking.
Here’s Ellie:
This time of the year you can find me distilling my garden. Every morning and evening before and after work, I give myself a little preservation job. In Maine, where I live, temperatures are dropping and the forecast reminds me that 32˚F could be just around the corner. The Farmer’s almanac says September 30 is the average date for the first fall frost—so the race is on! But we don’t need the calendar, we feel fall in the air, the foggy mornings, colorful sunsets due the sun's lower angle, leaves turning red and the plants slowing down their growth.
I spent the summer overseas with my family. We rested most of our garden, planting only a few cabbage seedlings, and buckwheat as a cover crop. When we came home I was delighted to see a few volunteers thriving. A turnip plant growing in the compost bin was a sweet welcome home gift. The majestic purple cabbages hang on despite the drought, and even without a garden I am finding food to preserve.
Dmitri and I planted our first garden when we lived in Troy, New York. When my mother visited, called us “sem terra,” a Portuguese phrase that literally means "without land" or "landless." I was born and raised in Brazil and this term is often used as the proper name for members of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST), a large social movement that advocates for agrarian reform and the redistribution of land to rural workers.
She was not making fun of the MST or comparing me to them, just noting that I would try to grow food in such a small plot. Maybe she was surprised to see us garden after the many years we were mobile, living where we studied and found work. Maybe my mother didn’t have words to name what she saw, my history starting to surface. My grandmother, her mother, was a sharecropper and once my parents had me and my brother, that was how food made its way to our tables. Our family also went to my paternal grandparents farm on weekends where we often gleaned the fields and came home to process food.
As a beginning gardener, I didn’t know what I was doing and planted the carrots very close. I picked the tiny carrots and my mother picked on me, saying that I was not cleaning them well. I ate them with much enthusiasm, and declared, “We eat the whole carrot. the root, the stem, the greens, and even the dirt.”
I was so grateful and proud for growing things. The privilege of having a garden is profound. During the years I lived in cities, the closest I could get to a relationship with the land was volunteering in our CSA or meeting microbes that caught a ride from fields to my plate.
In 2018 we started our garden in Maine. The growing season is short but a lifetime of scouting for fresh food makes me appreciate every second of the process. Finding ways to preserve food allows me to participate in the life cycle of plants.
Food doesn’t stop maturing once it’s picked. The decay part of the cycle begins, to bring what is grown back to the earth. Preservation interrupts that decay, and gives me a place to insert myself into the cycle.
Eating from my garden, and this year, from friends’ raised beds who dropped off produce fills me with thanksgiving. I want to eat every fruit, seed and leaf. And no, it is not possible. But I do my best to preserve what I can. Thanks to the bounty of my generous neighbors, I am deep in my fall rituals.
Every year, I use many methods, water bath and pressure canning, freezing and dehydrating, and fermentation. This is how I can keep up the conversation with the world I can’t see. The slow process of fermentation helps me be attentive to how produce continues to transform once it stops growing in or above the ground, or on a tree. I am a big fan of growing food and a big fan of microbes. Combining the two activities brings me joy. The joy is deepened by the fact that it is practical! I use less freezer and fridge space too.
The big blousy outer leaves of cabbage are one food that excites my imagination. My husband harvested a head of purple cabbage and I can’t get over the glory of the lush outer leaves. He processed them this week by stacking them, rolling them out like a cigar and feeding them through the food processor tube. They come out chiffonaded. We can do this by hand, but the outer leaves are tough and a robot makes it easier on stiff hands. We froze some and I am fermenting the rest.
The food processor is such a useful tool on my food journeys. In it, large leaves can be chopped fine along with other roots like carrots and kohlrabi and some aromatics and packed with 10% salt to be used as bouillon or soup base.
Those giant cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and winter squash leaves all have a place in my kitchen. I use them to make beautiful, edible non-stick layers for cooking fish, or to line a Dutch oven to bake bread. I also like to ferment the whole leaves of cabbage to make cabbage rolls. The fermentation softens them and makes them easy to use, while adding delicious flavor.
To lacto-ferment, I want to create an environment without oxygen which allows beneficial lactic acid bacteria to flourish while suppressing bacteria that could spoil food. We can dry salt, where the salt extracts the water from the vegetable, or make a brine when vegetables do not produce a lot of liquid.
With the outer leaves, I find it best to submerge them under a prepared brine solution of at least 2% salt. I vary from 3.5 - 5% depending on how long I want my ferment to go, how warm it is in my kitchen, and the kind of produce I am fermenting.
I typically make a brine with 2 1/4 teaspoons of sea salt per 1 cup of non-chlorinated water. While this may seem like a high salt ratio to some, it's a straightforward formula I use for fermenting salsas and large vegetable chunks like when making a fermented giardiniera. The higher salt content slows down fermentation, which allows me to ferment at room temperature for longer. Once the ferment is to my liking, I either use it right away or transfer it to a cooler spot or the fridge. The extra salt is handy because I just use less salt when I add the fermented veggies to a dish.
Watching the arrival of fall and cold days is like experiencing a slow goodbye. I place myself at the end of summer, watching a loved one from a small window of an airplane taking off. I want to savor each moment and trust that I can keep a little bit of it alive with us during the winter months.
Our quotidian ways to use the chiffonaded fermented leaves:
I use them to make cabbage rolls – golabki.
They go into borscht soup. The fermented leaves help build a layer of flavor often achieved by using beet kvass.
Fermented leaves can be chopped and go into an egg/tuna salad as a “pickle” addition.
We can mix the chopped leaves with onions, carrots, oregano and jalapeno for a curtido.
Fermented winter squash gives out grape leaves vibes and here is stuffed with rice and meat and the leaves bring in the “zing.” I didn’t add lemon juice in the recipe.
Other ways to use large garden leaves: as a non-stick for baking bread or to decorate a loaf.
Last but not least, brussel sprouts greens from last year’s garden that went to the freezer but cooked beautifully in stir fries and soups.
Frozen whole outer green leaves being cut as needed for soup.
Thanks, Ellie!
How are you all preparing for winter?
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