by Julia Baynor, Meals Manager
Ah, the seasons.
Even in our pandemic year, summer at The Nashville Food Project still managed to show how we receive so much abundance, with piles and piles of vegetables coming through our doors.
Through donations and sourcing from local farms, we were up to our ears in tomatoes, cucumbers and summer squash. The Tennessee summers are long, and bountiful produce filled our walk-ins until what seemed like October. We look forward to that time again.
Then summer slipped away and a beautiful fall descended upon us until the constant flux of donations started to dwindle. I found myself calling over to our headquarters kitchen from my office a few blocks away at St. Luke’s Community House, looking to source extra produce for our meals. “We’ve got nothing,” became the common refrain. Winter had started to set in.
Fresh produce is one of the things I love most about my job at TNFP. I will never stop marveling at the natural rainbow housed in our bins: the crimson tipped lettuces, the blushing pinks of crunchy radishes, and the deep, dark violet of beets fill me with inspiration. Turning beautiful produce into delicious meals and sending them out to nourish our community is what I live for, but in the winter, things get a little harder. Produce becomes more scarce, and the items we do get aren’t always the easiest to work with. Butternut squash have tough skins and seeds that must be scraped out. Winter turnips come in with gnarled skin and stringy roots that must be peeled away. Working with winter produce can be arduous and slow, much like working through winter itself.
Around the same time the winter season descended upon us, I started contemplating winter myself. In the book “Wintering,” author Katherine May explores the many characteristics of physical winter but also recognizes the difficulties we as humans experience in our personal winters as well. As I read May’s perspectives about the cyclical nature of our lives and of the seasons, I found myself reflecting on the changes the previous year had wrought at The Nashville Food Project.
The meals team has been harboring a winter of its own. In addition to the psychic hardships and exhaustion of working on the front lines of a pandemic, many meals team members suffered the loss of loved ones over the course of the past year. This winter penetrated the fabric of our team as well as we saw several treasured veterans move on to other endeavors. As last days came and went, so did uncomfortable feelings about what to do next as a team. In a lot of ways it has felt like starting over, building our program from the ground up.
There were days that felt scary and discouraging. A meals team without several foundational members felt like staring into the darkness of winter. I kept going back to lines in “Wintering” which assured me, eventually, things would look up.
“Over and again, we find that winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit. Yet we still refuse them. The work of the cold season is to learn to welcome them.”
I realized I had been looking at winter with the wrong perspective. With May’s musings on my mind, I felt my resistance to winter begin to thaw. We hired new team members who came with fresh energies like spring, and I began to feel hope again. With new people come new perspectives, and I look forward to the growth of our program that will come with their ideas.
I also began to welcome that hardy winter produce into the kitchen with less trepidation by focusing on the potential these scrappy vegetables held to become something delicious. This winter, we received upwards of 600 pounds of butternut squash from a local independent farmer, hundreds of pounds of root vegetables from Bells Bend farm, and, after a little winter storm made their delivery routes impossible, Imperfect Foods filled every shelf of our walk-in with boxes brimming with so-called “ugly” produce. In the darkness and cold of winter we were still able to make trays of colorful root vegetables, slowly roasted in our ovens until the peppery bite faded into sweetness. We made silky, garlicky turnip purees, creamy butternut squash pasta sauces, and peeled away the rough exteriors of “ugly” carrots to use in mirepoix for comforting winter soups. Winter vegetables are the perfect example of taking what is seemingly “nothing” and turning it into so much goodness.
On their way to becoming garlic-mashed turnips to serve alongside Meyer lemon-rosemary chicken.
Winter presents a set of circumstances none of us can control. But it also gives an opportunity to embrace the action of letting go. Winter holds space for all of us to deal with the hard truths of the year that has just passed. And through the sharp lens of winter’s harsh reality, it gives us something else too: the prospect of new beginnings, and with it, the arrival of spring.
As I sit outside with the sun on my face for the first time in what feels like months, I can feel it approaching.
“Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.” -Katherine May
Radish Tart in an Almond Flour Crust
Adapted from Martha Stewart and Dishing up the Dirt.
Yields 1 x 9 inch tart
Almond Flour Crust
2 cups almond flour
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp dried parsley
1/2 tsp salt
pinch of ground black pepper
1/3 cup olive oil
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp water
Tart Filling
4 oz goat cheese, room temperature
8 oz cream cheese, room temperature
1 egg
1 tsp fresh thyme leaves
8 oz radishes (watermelon radishes are beautiful!), scrubbed, trimmed and thinly sliced.
2 tsp extra-virgin olive oil
Instructions:
1. Place a rack or sheet pan large enough to hold your tart pan in the center of the oven. Preheat the oven to 400F. Grease a 9 inch tart pan with oil. In a large bowl, whisk together the almond flour, garlic, parley, salt and pepper. Stir in the oil and water and mix until well combined. Press the dough into your greased tart pan, making sure the dough goes at least 1 1/4 inches up the sides. Bake until the crust is lightly golden and firm to the touch, about 18 minutes. Let the crust cool to room temp and reduce heat to 375F.
2. In a large bowl or the bowl of a food processor, whisk or blend together the goat cheese, cream cheese, thyme and egg.
3. Using a a spatula, spread the filling evenly over the crust.
4. Toss the thinly sliced radishes with salt, pepper and olive oil until evenly coated, then layer them over the filling. Sprinkle with flaky sea salt and bake in the oven until the radishes begin to shrivel and the filling is bubbling around the edges, 35-40 minutes. If you notice the crust getting too brown, cover the edges with tin foil.
5. Let the tart cool for about 15 minutes before slicing and serving. Top with more fresh thyme, or even some balsamic glaze! Enjoy!