Skagit Barbecue: Part Deux
by Ben Goe
I grill at least once or twice a week this time of year. Fewer dishes to wash, more time spent outside, and so much Maillard reaction! That’s a ten-cent word for caramelization, if you didn’t know. Last year I wrote an article for the Enquirer about barbecue basics, and I thought that this summer I’d follow up with some more advanced techniques. Let’s get grilling! Papaya makes an incredible meat tenderizer. Remove the seeds and skin from papaya and blend to liquify. You can add salt and pepper, soy sauce, hot sauce, or anything else you might like in a marinade, or you can leave it plain and rinse it off before cooking. Use a tough cut of meat, one that you might normally cook very slowly. Brisket, eye of round, or short ribs are all good choices. Leave the meat in the marinade for 6 hours, then rinse and dry. You can now season and cook it as though it weren’t a tough cut. Cook on a hot grill to your preferred doneness and char level, and your tough cut will transform into a forktender masterpiece. Great for beef, but I don’t recommend using this technique for poultry or pork, as the papaya enzymes will break them down too much and too quickly.
Local Summer Produce JULY
Benton, Chelan, & Rainier cherries, assorted apricots, yellow peaches, white peaches, nectarines, donut peaches from Brownfield Orchards
Strawberries
from Silva Family Farm
AUGUST
Peaches, Gala, Gingergold, & Zestar apples, Bartlett & Star Crimson pears from Brownfield Orchards
Blueberries
Next up: there’s a foolproof formula for grilling salmon fillets that I follow. Put the salmon skin-side down on a piece of foil, and top with a fat, something acidic, a spice or herb (or two or three), a sweet ingredient, and a salty ingredient. A combination I often use is salt, pepper, thin slices of butter, thin slices of whole lemon, onions or garlic, tarragon, brown sugar, and capers. Try sesame oil, soy sauce, other fruits, ginger, hoisin sauce…get creative! I’ve used blueberries on salmon to excellent effect. Close the foil when you have your perfect combo and put it skin-side down on a very hot grill. The fish will cook in 14-18 minutes. A real winner: grilled chicken can be a gourmet affair! Make a marinade with plenty of fat, acid, and flavor. I love to use a recipe I adapted from the nowclosed Mediterranean Kitchen restaurant near Seattle Center. Their recipe used wings, but I don’t follow the recipe to the letter, and I’m a thigh guy anyway. The Med Kitchen recipe calls for quite a lot of lemon juice, a gratuitous amount of pureed garlic, olive oil, salt, and curry powder. Marinate the chicken, overnight if possible. Turn your oven to 350 degrees and transfer the chicken to a casserole dish. Cover with marinade. Bake for 20 or 30 minutes, until the chicken is nearly or just cooked through. Blend up some more garlic with a little lemon juice, salt, and a glug of vegetable oil to baste the chicken with. Drain the liquid from the partly cooked chicken. Grill at medium-high heat, turning and basting often, until crisped. You can use this method with any sort of marinade. If you try the Med Kitchen style, pair it with tzatziki, pita, saffron rice, hummus, and a Greek salad for a memorable meal. Go meatless: try a grilled salad! Grilled Caesar is a delicious and impressive-looking dish, and fairly easy to make. Slice romaine hearts in half vertically and dress lightly with oil and lemon juice. Cut some crusty bread into fairly thin slices, then crush a couple cloves of garlic into some olive oil and brush it onto both sides of the bread slices. Grill the lettuce briefly on the hottest part of the grill- you mostly want to give it some char marks. On the cooler side, grill the bread until toasty. Serve half of a romaine heart drizzled with Caesar salad dressing and a couple of toasts on the side. You can apply this technique to various chicories or maybe iceberg lettuce, but you won’t want to subject more delicate greens to this sort of treatment. You could also serve it with grilled lemon slices. No reason to stick with Caesar, either! Try other dressings, grilled vegetables, and grilled fruits in salads. Stick with hardwood charcoal, disdain the lighter fluid, and enjoy a lovely and delicious Skagit summer.
The Return of Connection When I was hired at the Co-op in March of 2020, I was excited to help with the planning and logistics of Co-op events. But about 3 days later, the world shut down and my task of scheduling events quickly shifted to cancelling all of them. It started with events scheduled in March, and then April. Before we knew it, our workshop space was filled with piles of backstocked toilet paper and a conference table adorned with a mosaic of colorful fabric face masks. Fast forward: It’s April 2022 and with nervous butterflies and a dash of giddiness, I packed up my car with fresh fruit and drove over to the YMCA for Healthy Kids Day. We were finally diving into our first outreach event in over two years. Not only had I never had the opportunity to represent the Co-op in person, I hadn’t had the chance to connect with our Skagit Valley community. Seeing tiny hands reach for a giant fair-trade banana was a delight! Hearing folks speak such positive things about our Co-op filled me with pride. And getting the opportunity to be the person who represents a place so many adore was a treat. While the social engagement inevitably led to a long nap, I walked away from that event with more appreciation for something so simple, but that I missed so deeply: community. In early May, a few of us from marketing and produce had the opportunity to visit Ralph’s Greenhouse, Living Rain Farm, and Hedlin Family Farms. Aside from being a fun field trip filled with petting baby goats and eating fresh spinach straight from the field, I felt immense gratitude to be bouncing around in a retired school bus filled with seven of my co-workers. Hearing our produce team chat with farmers about crop rotation and soil quality and all the ways to enjoy leek scapes brought me back to why I love the Co-op: community. In late May, Co-op employees gathered to celebrate our achievements and hard work at Christianson’s Nursery Vinery Building for our first staff party since I started. Over pizza and tacos, we shared stories we’d gathered throughout the many seasons of change we’d experienced since 2020. We brought family members and friends into the Co-op fold through a game of cornhole. And many of us simply reflected, thinking
from Bow Hill Blueberries
SEPTEMBER
Honeycrisp, Fuji & Cosmic Crisp apples from Brownfield Orchards
Table grapes
from Sauk Farm
Heirloom melons, Japanese & Italian eggplant from Edible Acres
Blueberries
from Silva Family Farm
IN SEASON ALL SUMMER Herbs, lettuce, corn, cabbage, kale, tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, zucchini, radicchio, broccoli, edible flowers, & so much more
from our local farms including: Moondance Farm, Boldly Grown Farm, Waxwing Farm, Well Fed Farm, Skagit Flats, Ralph’s Greenhouse, Highwater Farm, Blue Heron Farm, Napping Lion Farm, The Crow’s Farm, and Hedlin Family Farm
by Leigha Staffenhagen
about how nice it was to be able to connect with one another outside of the world of stocking shelves, serving hot food, and bagging groceries. If you’ve ever worked at the Co-op, you know just how memorable these parties are. There’s something special about seeing your coworkers in person, outside of the context of our big brick Co-op building, dancing, laughing, and frolicking through the grass with big grins on their faces. And after working at the Co-op for two years, a number of us finally got to experience what we’d been missing throughout the course of the pandemic: community. By now, you’ve surely sensed a trend in this article: throughout the tumultuous course of the last two years, I’ve deeply missed feeling a sense of community. Don’t get me wrong, we all worked with what we had to keep our Co-op community connected. We hosted Community Conversations on Zoom. We engaged with our members and community through social media, email, and the Natural Enquirer. We hosted staff lunches and ice cream parties. And above all, we did our best to smile with our eyes while the rest of our face was covered with a mask. Community is a simple word, but it has a cornucopia of meanings, especially when you haven’t had an in-person connection in what feels like a lifetime. Community is a farmer sharing a story about his rhubarb crop that he’s been dutifully caring for since 2005. It’s the joy of handing a Washington-grown Fuji apple to a future Co-op member. It’s chatting with your coworkers about life in the Valley over a slice of pizza in a retired barn. Community is whatever YOU make it. So, as we move into the summer I hope you get the chance to feel that return of connection. Plan a picnic in the park. Meet up with friends for a lunch of Co-op sandwiches and ice cream. Attend that concert that’s been rescheduled three times. Enjoy a weekend unplugged reconnecting with family members you haven’t seen in a couple of years. Or, take a trip to the beach with that one special someone. No matter how big or small your community is, having the opportunity to connect with one another again is something I don’t think any of us will ever take for granted again.
Skagit YMCA’s Healthy Kids Day. Photo by Ting-Li Wang.
The Co-op’s Marketing and Produce teams on a local farm tour.
Co-op Staff Party at Christianson’s Vinery skagit valley food co-op
• the natural enquirer • july–september 2022 9
