It’s been a big couple of weeks in our household. As many of you know, I spent all of last week in a stuffy hotel conference room glued to my computer, pulling off my employer’s first ever virtual conference. A year of planning went into it, many tears were shed, and many uphill battles fought. It was a huge success, due in no small part to my wonderful little team.
This victory reminded me of the countless hours I spent doing theatre tech in high school — believe it or not, I was so involved as a high school senior that I briefly considered applying to a theatre production design program for college (lol). What I liked about sinking every waking hour after school into theatre tech was that final moment holding my breath behind the light board, waiting for the curtain to come up on the thing I helped build. Waiting to see what would happen. Schoolwork, exams, whatever — they couldn’t make me feel that way.
In the same way now, I don’t consider my job or “career path” (such as it is) terribly integral to my sense of self worth, in contrast to how passionate I feel about, say, socialist organizing, or writing this newsletter. The job is just how I pay my bills. However, I’ve felt very much in the wilderness about that contradiction between my “passions” and my job this year, especially as the boundaries of my home and work and political and personal lives have blurred so much. I’m at a crossroads as far as what I should do next. It was good to experience that rare rush of professional accomplishment last week, and I guess I’ll see where that feeling takes me.
In an interesting dovetail, Johnathan also reached the summit of a long professional slog this week. On Wednesday he made book as a UPS driver, which is Teamster speak for qualifying for a permanent driver position (the bosses sign your little training book, and you’re in). I am immensely proud of him. Because making book comes with the full suite of top-notch union benefits and protections, it is not an easy process — some days I think he would have preferred actual hoops of fire to what he had to jump through to make it in. (Delivering a single package clear across town after his route on Christmas Eve, for example.)
One part of this probation process is writing a letter to UPS saying why he’d like to become a driver. Johnathan joked that he’d write about how he likes having a job in Richard Scarry’s Busytown — it gratifies him to be part of the infrastructure of the city. It’s a job that will let him sleep at night, let’s say, and I’m especially glad he has a union so his labor is adequately compensated and protected. It’s a good feeling, having some control over our future like that.
This all has given me cause to meditate on, well….work, which led me to revisit Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Doby late Chicagoan and oral historian Studs Terkel. He starts off with a barn-burning opener: “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature about violence--to the spirit as well as the body.” Working can seem quaint in 2021; Terkel interviews UAW auto plant welders, cabbies, telephone operators. Dead and dying jobs that made for an honest living. But there are indications of the future, too: the plants closing, the union bureaucrats, the consultant and coordinator classes, the brokers, and the bosses. The workers soon to experience the horrors of the gig economy and newly inhumane workplaces are backstage, waiting for the curtain to come up.
We experience this same gap here in our home -- from Busytown to busywork. I feel a deep kinship to Terkel’s interviewee Sharon Atkins, the receptionist who says “I always dream I’m alone and things are quiet. I call it the land of no-phone, where there isn’t any machine telling me where I have to be every minute...You know you’re not doing anything, not doing a hell of a lot for anyone. Your job doesn’t mean anything. Because you’re just a little machine.” Even the salts of the earth Terkel interviews yearn for “daily meaning as well as daily bread,” as he puts it. What should we all do with our alienation? How do we fight for bread and roses, too?
This struggle will last our lifetimes, and has a long lineage of workers asking these same questions. There are signs of hope, and movements building. For now, with no easy solution on the horizon: we are cooking, and writing, and thinking, and talking with our friends and comrades. And always working. From the crossroads, r
For someone who loves cooking and eating vegetables, there's no substitute for the height of Midwestern summer. Nothing compares to Illinois sweet summer corn, or the garden cucumbers and tomatoes whose vines and skins smell like all the sunlight they've absorbed.
While we're still a few months away from being handed brown paper bags full of peppers from friends and relatives, the first spring produce is finally arriving in Chicago. This means a mad scramble for ramps, the leafy wild onions that gave our city its name. Ramp ravioli, pickled ramps; even ramp pizzas are not out of the question on local restaurant menus in April. Along with fiddleheads and morel mushrooms, ramps are one of the fleeting first signs of spring in these parts, and it's not unusual for people to head out to forest preserves or suburban marshes to search for them. Ramp season feels like a little treat for making it through another Chicago winter, and a holdover until the summer produce is finally on our tables.
If you're not up for a trek to the woods to search the mud for wild onions, or if nobody will share their top secret foraging spot with you, many grocery stores and farmers markets will have ramps for the next few weeks. I was able to get some at Local Foods near Goose Island.
I’ve been in the mood to make a savory galette for a while, and ramp season felt like the perfect excuse. I’ve added plenty of earthy mushrooms to the mix to make this a more substantial dinner and dollops of creamy ricotta for contrast. With a crunchy salad of frisee, spring favas, radishes, and sardines, this easily fed three hungry people.
While I won’t blame you if you decide to use premade pie crust, I really recommend trying this recipe from Stella Parks. It requires no special tools, no frozen butter, no vodka, no liquid nitrogen, no granite slab, just your bare hands and ingredients that everyone already has. While she specifies low-gluten all purpose flour, I used King Arthur, which despite having more gluten than most AP flours, worked great. You can either make the recipe as written and use only half of it for the galette, or do as I did and just divide all the amounts in half. One revision I would make, however, is that you will have a hell of an easier time rolling the dough out into a circle if it starts out round, rather than as a square as shown in the recipe, so after doing the folding, shape the dough into something like a hockey puck before rolling it. Watch Evan Funke roll out a sheet of pasta for an idea of the technique.
Unless you live next door to an Italian deli, you’re probably better off just making your own ricotta. I always find that I need a little more vinegar than this recipe calls for, but making it couldn’t be easier, and it really is delicious. No need to mess around with cheesecloth; a metal strainer works fine, especially for a recipe like this, where we want to lose as much whey as possible to keep our crust crispy.
When selecting your mushrooms, you’ll want to get some that are meaty and low in moisture. Button mushrooms will leak water all over the inside of the galette no matter how much you sauté them first. I used a mix of shiitake and oyster mushrooms, which are pretty easy to find and inexpensive. One easy way to add complexity to a dish like this without making things too complicated is to chop the mushrooms two different ways and add them in stages, giving you more textures and varied levels of caramelization.
RAMP, MUSHROOM, AND RICOTTA GALETTE
serves 2 generously, up to 4 with a salad
10 ounce ball of pie crust
8 ounces of shiitake mushrooms
8 ounces of oyster mushrooms
8 ounces of ramps
1 cup of ricotta
q.b. extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
1 egg
A few chives, or other herbs for garnish
Preheat your oven to 400°F. On a well-floured work surface, carefully roll out your crust into a large circle. You’ll be shooting for something like fifteen or sixteen inches across. If at any point the dough sticks to the table or your rolling pin, don’t hesitate to dust everything with more flour. Don’t stress too much about this being perfect; it is a rustic, freeform pie, after all. When the dough is big enough, line a baking sheet (such as a pizza pan) with parchment, and carefully place the dough on it. Trim off any overhang if necessary, and chill the rolled-out crust in the refrigerator, uncovered, while you make the filling.
If necessary, wash the ramps thoroughly under cold running water. Separate the bulbs from the leaves and remove the root ends from the bulbs as you would with green onions or leeks. Thinly slice the bulbs and set aside. Slice the ramp leaves into ribbons and set aside.
Remove any bits of dirt from the mushroom stems, and thinly slice both sets of mushrooms. Mix them together in a bowl, and put about half of the mixture back on your cutting board. Thoroughly chop these mushrooms into a small dice, and keep them separate from the bigger slices.
Coat the bottom of a pan with olive oil and place over high heat. When hot, add the bigger pieces of mushrooms along with a big pinch of salt and some pepper. Sauté them until golden all over and the sound of their sizzling becomes faint (remember, sizzling is the sound of the mushrooms’ water hitting the oil, and we’re trying to force water out of these to keep our pastry dry). Once this is achieved, add the smaller bits of mushrooms, along with the sliced ramp bulbs. Cook until the ramps smell very fragrant. Feel free to add a little more oil to the pan here if it feels necessary. Taste again for seasoning, and when you’re ready, turn off the flame and add the reserved ramp leaves, stirring until they wilt into the mixture.
To assemble the galette:
Remove your crust from the fridge, and apply the ramp and mushroom mixture to the middle of the pastry. Use the back of a spoon to smooth it out into a circle, leaving a couple of inches of bare crust. Dollop spoonfuls of ricotta on top of the mixture.
Now it’s time to fold up the edges of the galette. You can stay true to the rustic intent of the dish and simply tuck the edges over the filling. If it’s good enough for Julia Child, it’s good enough for you. If you want to go for a little more flair, which I did, you can make a series of slits into the crust from the edges until just up to the filling, and then fold them up one at a time to get a shingled effect. Was it worth it? Who can say?
Whichever you decide to do, beat an egg in a small bowl and brush the exposed crust with it. Sprinkle the edges with some coarse salt, and place in the oven until golden brown and delicious, around 45 minutes. After removing from the oven, sprinkle it with some chives or other finely chopped herbs, and allow the galette to cool for a few minutes before serving. Enjoy with a salad, a glass of wine, and wait until tomorrow to clean up all the flour.