Bitters for Breakfast

Endive is good late crop, not only for farmers, but also for kitchens. Getting ready for the first frost in the fall is always a rush. All those peppers and tomatoes still on the vine! All that heavy squash to lug into the barn! Any crop you can leave in the field and not even think about is like gold in the bank. Endive is cold hardy, and even if the outside leaves get discolored from freezing or desiccated from wind, inside there is still a beautiful beating heart waiting to be uncovered.

I was in Maine all summer, wrestling an old house back from oblivion. We weren’t planning to stay into the cold months. I flew back to Colorado in September. I really needed to bring the round-bottomed wife to see the place again, because she’d only just visited, briefly and many years ago. The idea of moving here to Maine had to be evaluated as a current reality thing, not a theoretical, what-if thing. I figured she’d stay a week or two, get grossed out by the state of things, and then either cancel the whole project or at least go home to our comfy setup in Colorado.

We drove our little shitbox car out together in late September, planning to leave it in Maine for the winter, as a get-about whenever I flew here to work on the property – assuming I’d come out when each of the major jobs was underway and a contractor needed access to the property. By mid-October, we had made progress on the house and Mary decided to stay with me up until the cold weather dateline of November 1.

We managed to get into town for the last farmer’s market in Sanford. This is a small, food-only market but with many excellent farms and provisioners. Being the last market, shoppers had pretty much bought everything in sight before we got there, but a little operation out of Rochester NH called Nerdy Turnip Farm still had a pile of purple greens hiding in a bushel basket. I decided against mansplaining to the farm hand how to sell endive. I set two of the tiny heads down on the counter to check out. She asked for $2 each, so I grabbed a third.

The thing about endive: shoppers who don’t know what it is probably won’t purchase endive because they don’t know how to cook it. People who do know what it is, and how to cook it, will pay almost any price for a good head. The rare person who is interested but unsure needs to be told how fabulous it is, given quick instruction on how to prepare it, and offered a first-timer discount. Varieties range from whitish green to red to deep purple. It may be call radicchio, when round like a cabbage, or chicory, in spear-shaped heads, or escarole or frisee when frilly and green. In Denver, we sold large red heads for $12 and regularly sold out. I loved the rare occasions when we had some left, because I took those home and stashed them in my own fridge.

Here it is Christmas eve. Mary and I overstayed our dateline after she figured out how to get the old furnace fired up. True, we ran out of fuel oil once, because I wasn’t paying attention. But we are still here, discovering more and more about the old farmstead and working on the house.

It’s hard to get to town and we try to keep the fridge stocked. We drove all the way out to Waterboro to score clean beef from a small producer there. This morning I was hunting around in the fridge for breakfast items, and found an old paper bag in the crisper bin with that last head of red endive in it! A little worse for wear, but I didn’t even have to peel off the outer leaves. The tiny head was a beautiful still-beating heart after 2+ months in the fridge. That’s what I mean about endive being good for kitchens.

To prepare, I fried up a couple strips of bacon. I washed the endive and cut in half lengthwise, then quartered just the fleshy stem, and popped the two halves into the pan just as the bacon was finishing. When I flipped them a few minutes later, I put on some eggs to fry, wondering why I hadn’t bought the whole bushel basket of endive when I had the chance.

Eating bitters is important when your diet is high in proteins and fats. You can get your bitters in many forms: tinctures, herbs and spices, or in substantial foods, like greens. Bitters tell your gall bladder to step it up, helping your gut process fats and proteins. You don’t need much. A large sprig of fresh parsley, a small head of endive, or a helping of mustard greens are examples of plated bitters.

Bitters for breakfast makes the bacon and eggs feel like a light and healthy meal, to me. Pulling down old oak lath from a ceiling in an unheated room? No problem at all with a belly full of bacon, eggs, and bitters.