Abra Berens trained at the world-renowned Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork, Ireland, before embarking on a career as a chef in her native Michigan. But her biggest culinary revelation came accidentally, at the end of her first — and last — year as a farmer, a few weeks before heading to Chicago for a job that paid the bills.
Dead broke, she tested her creativity by limiting her meals to the last of the farm’s produce — kale and carrots – with pantry staples and eggs from the henhouse.
“Each night was something new from the same primary ingredients,” she writes. “Shredded carrot and kale slaw with scrambled eggs. Poached egg with carrot latkes and kale salad. Spicy roasted carrots with sauteed kale and hollandaise.”
That exercise in frugality has shaped her approach to cooking ever since. Freshness and flexibility rule.
Herein lies the premise of "Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables," a collection of more than 100 health-giving, farm-inspired recipes — each with multiple variations — plus a plethora of tips, techniques, and clever insights for whipping up produce-focused, flavor-packed meals on the fly.
Organized around 29 different types of vegetables from Michigan fields (and mostly grown here in Georgia as well), the recipes are minimalist, with spare instructions and, at times, vague measurements where there’s no need to dirty up a measuring tool. It pays to study beforehand the hefty pantry section and glossary of cooking terms and basic techniques, where you’ll learn the meaning of “a glug” and “to blister.”
I tried — and loved — her “Cream-less” Corn with Sautéed Greens and Seared Salmon, a fast meal-in-one centered around sautéed corn kernels spiked with thyme, then blended with a little butter and quickly-made corn stock. The delightfully unexpected combination of textures, flavors and colors is genius, and reinforces one quote from Berens that concisely sums up her philosophy: “There’s always another way to eat a carrot.”
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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