Mara Jernigan

Every morning our okra plants show off their pretty yellow flowers

I love a good Sunday lunch. It actually gives me as much pleasure to prepare a long leisurely lunch for guests as it does to eat one myself, in fact maybe more.  Here in Belize at Belcampo, we serve a family style lunch on Sundays that includes two meat dishes made from our own pasture raised animals, two vegetables, two salads, and of course rice and beans. We serve it all at one time in wooden bowls with our own hot sauce. Although I am still intimately involved in the farm, garden and the menu development my talented Belizean cooks do all of the cooking.  I realize I miss cooking and teaching and so I have made myself a promise to try to get into the kitchen at least once a week, cook something and try to write about it.

Don't let your okra get this big! Pick them pinky finger size

It’s the dry season here and while the most decadent fruits; mangoes, avocados, velvet apple, star apple, passion fruit are not quite in season we still have plenty of vegetables and herbs in our year round irrigated garden. It has been fun cooking with garden fresh okra. Although I have had very slimy okra ours really is not slimy at all. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that they are harvested fresh each day. We batter it in cornmeal and fry it as an appetizer served with homemade chipotle sauce, serve it with other garden vegetables and put it in Garifuna Fish Tea, a delicious soup.  I even have a cook who, unbelievably,  makes great nutmeg spiced shakes with it blended with milk or yogurt and ice. While I like okra no bigger than my index finger, our walk in has been overflowing lately with daily okra harvests. So today for lunch I combined them with garlic, onions, cumin, beet greens and black beans. Then I topped it all off with cilantro, lime and queso fresco. So we are now out of okra, until tomorrow! Here’s the recipe:

Cumin and Garlic Sautéed Okra, Beet Greens and Black Beans with Queso Fresco

30 minutes

3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

3/4 of a cup of diced onion

1 jalapeno, finely chopped (if desired)

2 Tbsp. olive oil or coconut oil

1 pinch of toasted ground cumin seed

2 cups okra, cut in 1/2 inch pieces

2 cups of beet greens, washed and coarsely chopped

1 cup of cooked black beans

1/2 a lime juiced and 1/2 in wedges

1/2 a cup of fresh cheese, queso fresco or fresh goat cheese

1/2 a cup of chopped cilantro

salt and pepper

• In a large frying pan, sauté the onions, garlic, cumin and jalapeno in the oil with a pinch of salt
• After the onions are soft, add the okra, saute further until soft, adding a little water if they threaten to brown
• Add the damp beet greens and toss with the okra
• Add another pinch of salt and cover with a lid for a few minutes
• When the greens have wilted, add the cooked, drained black beans
• Add the lime juice, toss, taste and adjust seasoning (salt, pepper, acidity)
• Add 3/4 of the cilantro, toss and remove from heat
• Serve in a platter or bowl with the remaining chopped cilantro and queso fresco on top and additional lime wedges

Tags: From the Garden, Recipes by Mara
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My favorite rhubarb dessert

Rhubarb Coconut Cake

When I see a cake recipe that calls for buttermilk I know it will be moist and have a slightly tangy, rich taste. This easy recipe from my late mother Sheila combines spring rhubarb with a coconut topping for a most unusual but delicious match. Bake one for your mom this Sunday!

Serve with crème frâiche or ice cream and a glass of Italian Muscato or a BC Dessert Wine.

Ingredients:
Topping:
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup shredded, sweetened coconut
1 teaspoon cinnamon
_________________________________
Cake:
2 cups chopped rhubarb
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup butter
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk
Source: Mara’s mother Sheila
Method:
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a springform or 9″ square cake pan.

Mix the topping ingredients by hand in a small bowl until chunky
but well incorporated. Set aside.

Wash and chop the rhubarb into 1/2-inch pieces and sprinkle with
2 tablespoons of the white sugar to macerate.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour and baking soda, set
aside.

In the bowl of a standing mixer, combine the remaining sugar and
butter and beat with the paddle attachment on medium high speed
for 3 to 5 minutes.

Add the egg and buttermilk and mix on slow speed, scraping down
the sides of the bowl.

Add the dry ingredients and mix on slow speed just until
incorporated.

Add the rhubarb along with any juices and mix in with a rubber
spatula. Pour into the prepared pan and sprinkle the topping over of
the batter.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center
comes out clean.

Tags: From the Garden, Recipes by Mara
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Curing our 2009 garlic crop

This summer, we had the biggest and best harvest of garlic I have ever had in over 10 years of growing garlic! After planting 2 boxes of seed garlic purchased for $200. , we now have around a thousand heads of beautiful, organic garlic. Like most chefs, I consider garlic a kitchen staple. But I hate to have to buy it. Nowadays, most restaurants use big plastic jars of pre-peeled, sulfited garlic, or worse yet, pureed garlic.  Like so many tasks in the restaurant industry, it is not worth the labour to pay someone to peel garlic. Even most of the garlic in the grocery store is imported from as far away as China and it is often chemically treated so that it will not sprout. So I try to grow enough garlic to last the whole year. Garlic is a wonderful crop to grow. Planted as the last task of the season, in mid October and mulched with straw to supress weeds, it lays dormant under a blanket of earth and snow until the soil warms up in spring. It will poke through the straw around March. In June it will sprout serpentine scapes,which should be cut off and then sauteed or pickled like beans. We cut back on watering by the beginning of July and let the garlic harden off, and from then on I check the size of the garlic by pulling out a plump head every couple of days. When the tops dry out and turn yellow and cloves have formed a skin the garlic is ready to harvest. This year the garlic harvest and subsequent cleaning, trimming and bundling took place over the course of one hot week in July and involved the help of WOOFERS (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), staff and even some of our guests! Our wonderful, creative gardener Valdilia figured out a way to weave them into decorative bunches. After about a month in a shady, drafty spot, we now have them dried and put away, enough for the whole year!

With so much beautiful garlic, I was inspired to make a  silky-smooth roasted garlic veloute. We served it to our guests several times this summer, with a zuchinni blossom stuffed with goat’s cheese and lemon thyme, a single, seared, Qualicum Bay scallop, some chopped arugula or a fresh salsa verde.

Tags: From the Garden, Recipes by Mara
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Last year, our Provincial government introduced a new carbon tax. Whether a carbon tax is an effective way to curb climate change is a discussion I will leave to the likes of climate change expert and my favorite critical thinker, British author George Monbiot www.monbiot.com . Instead, I want to focus on what I did with my $100. carbon tax credit cheque. Every man, woman and child in British Columbia was issued this cheque last summer with the encouragement to spend it on something with a positive environmental impact. No doubt a political jesture to quiet some of the negative press the tax had been receiving. Working at home and cooking from a garden takes a good chunk off of my bad carbon score for flying, but when my personal wine budget is tight I often turn to imports. So this was where I decided to try to make a difference. Here at Fairburn Farm we have about a dozen old fruit trees. They are very tall, crooked and well beyound pruning. Every year we loose at least one or two due to storms and the juvenille water buffalo that like to rub up against them. Yet they still produce enough fruit for 3 families, the sheep and chickens grazing in the orchard and the occassional bear or racoon that comes through in the fall. I never manage to pick as many as I would like and several varieties are not good keepers. So one warm day this fall my friend Valdilia and I headed out to the Orchard with a ladder and some plastic tubs. After about an hour of harvesting, we had around 200 pounds of heritage apples, including Gravensteins, Alexanders, Jonathans and Northern Spys, 2 kinds of pears and quince. We loaded them up in the car and drove them 5 minutes away to “Duncan McBarleys”, a local You-Brew facility. They washed and crushed the fruit and made a dry, hard cider according to my specifications, for a cost of $200. for 50 litres, including the cost of the bottles. A month later I showed up to bottle the cider, an easy task that took about an hour.The results were great! A dry, crisp cider which has developed more integrated fruit flavour in the last two months has been my local apperitiv through the winter months and has also been a great braising liquid for lamb, roast pork and sablefish. It’s just too bad it won’t last until summer!

Tags: Farm Life, From the Garden by Mara
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I love the story of the farm mouse and the city mouse. Anyone who lives on a farm knows the feeling of guilty neglect when you miss harvesting something at it’s prime, or suffer a setback because you have been off having fun or had your mind on other things. The flip side of that is the smug satisfaction you get when the cold weather comes and you know you have all kinds of treasures squirreled away, jars of preserves, a freezer full of meat and fruit, enough home grown garlic to last the year. This fall was particularily mild, and when I returned in mid November from my annual trip to Italy my garden was still green and lush. I am proud to say I have not yet bought any produce other than onions and celery this winter. All that changed this week with the onslaught of a foot of snow and temperatures cold enough to turn the cellulose structure of even my hardiest kale to mush. But three days beforehand, after listening to the weather forecast I headed out to the garden and filled two buspans with beautiful winter greens, escarole, radicchio, mustard greens and arugula. I picked the last tops of sprouting broccoli, harvested fresh chives and parsley and filled the produce drawers of my refrigerator with  green and purple cabbages.

Let it snow.

Tags: From the Garden by Mara
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