The only way that my business model (or domestic model, depending on how you look at it) will work is if I am cooking for myself at the same time that I am cooking for my customers. I’m developing, promoting, and selling a way of eating that is based on good quality food, simply prepared, and ecologically and socially as blameless as I can get it. The food should be pleasant to work with as well as to eat.

One trouble with this is that ecologically and socially blameless food is a lot more expensive than GMO crops grown on industrial farms with lots of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and criminally exploited immigrant farm workers. I have to put my homegrown, organic, handpicked, cooked-to-order food out there on the market next to this other stuff, and it looks like a high-end product, not something a schoolteacher or working parents could eat every day.

So I have to figure out how to work with this situation. Nothing wrong with having well-off clients, but I’d like a broad range of customers. The way I’ve decided to do that is to keep the Peasant Fare mostly vegetarian and based on grains and beans. It would make the food cheaper and my life easier to exclude cooked greens, because they are a lot of work, but I just can’t do that. I’m almost religious about Greens and Beans as core components of a healthy diet. I think that no matter what your diet is like, it would be improved by the addition of greens and beans. I’ll explain why in a later post.

This is a variation on a recipe by the great Mary Estella, as baked by the delightful Morgan Massey, who was introduced to me by the talented Nancy Maurelli, three women whose cooking I admire very much.

Mary, Morgan, and Nancy called these “Raspberry-Almond Tortes,” and they are a variation on thumbprint cookies: each one has a small pool of caramelized fruit jam on top.

I have been growing both sesame and sunflower seeds this summer, so I wanted to try to convert this recipe from almonds (which for me, at best, come from California and are implicated in the industrial bee-pollination business that is so problematic at present) to something that I could at least theoretically produce completely from home. Most of the ingredients are easy to find in organic versions. I think you could grow everything except the maple syrup in Virginia, though I can’t be sure yet whether the sesame is really practical.

Recipe: I process one cup of rolled oats into a coarse flour in the food processor. I put that in a bowl with a cup of whole wheat pastry flour and a smidgen of salt, and add a half-cup of chopped sunflower seeds. Then I blend together a half-cup of tahini and a half-cup of maple syrup (grade B amber is fine) and add that to the dry ingredients, working it with a fork until it has the consistency of a fairly stiff dough. Depending on how thick the tahini is, you will probably want to add a couple tablespoons of oil (I use sesame oil, not toasted) and another tablespoon of maple syrup to help the cookies hold together.

Transfer rounded spoonfuls of the dough to an oiled cookie sheet and make a little indentation on top of each one with your quarter-teaspoon measure. Fill it with raspberry jam or some other all-fruit preserves with strong flavor. (I recently tried a very sweet, subtle, pear-blueberry jelly and it was wrong for this. You want something robust.)

Bake at 375 for about 20 minutes, or until the jam is bubbly and the cookies are starting to brown.

Welcome to the Peasant Fare blog. This is where Martha reports on her project of developing a local, seasonal cuisine that is good to eat, good for you, and ecologically sound. It should also be affordable, though that term needs to be unpacked and examined.

The idea that economizing on food is always good has been part of my thinking for a long time. But now I know that many food workers are treated cruelly and opportunistically by government and employers and that many cost-saving measures are destructive and produce unwholesome food.

So along with “affordable” we need “sustainable,” meaning, in this case, that all the consequences of producing and eating the food are considered, not just price.