Category: Gardening

June 12, 2013

Et Tu, Crouton?

The Kid loves Caesar salads. He’s keen on salad in general, especially with lots of vinaigrette—heavy on the homemade vinegar, especially blackcurrant—and is an exemplary eater of vegetables in general, especially for an eight-year-old. But he will murder a bowl of romaine and croutons with the eggy, cheesy dressing. Of course most restaurant versions flat out suck, what with the inferior ingredients and all, so I planted extra romaine this spring in order to ensure a steady supply. Leading actor thus covered, the other components were easily secured: homemade apple/sumac vinegar, a duck egg from a nearby farm, the heel of a homemade sourdough boule, pecorino from Dancing Ewe Farm, good oil, and anchovies.

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May 9, 2013

A Zoo In My Lovage

By the end of the last post, I had figured out that one of the prominent flavor notes in lovage is quite similar to fenugreek. If you cut some, or, better, tear it, your hands will become insistently perfumed with the persistent aroma of the plant. When people dismiss it with variations of the “it’s like celery” line, that’s a cop-out on par with the “tastes like chicken” descriptor so loosely applied to things as different as mushrooms and alligator. Lovage doesn’t taste like celery, though it approximates it visually, up to a point. It’s much closer to fenugreek, with a whiff of caraway and a citrusy tang.

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April 30, 2013

It Takes A Pillage

This is a shot of my little ramp patch. (Likers of the blog on Facebook already knew that; just saying). I planted these about four years ago, near the stream, under some trees. They have taken hold quite well, and are beginning to spread. It’s hard to resist pulling them up, but I do, so they will continue to multiply. What I do instead is to cut one leaf off, leaving the rest. Thus do…

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April 26, 2013

IT’S ALIVE

There are plenty of arguments in favor of gardening, and they’re all important. Exercise, connecting with nature, saving money, controlling your food supply, eating food at the pinnacle of freshness, learning to ferment to handle the surplus, and so on. It’s not like I need to make the argument. But for me there is one overarching reason that trumps all the others combined: inspiration.

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April 24, 2013

Green Onions

I’m still not done with charred scallions; a fat and unruly bunch still remains from my spring cleaning of the garden prior to the new load of compost being spread around for this year’s planting. I’m going to plant twice as many this fall, and leave them unprotected and neglected all winter just so I can have even more next spring to char and chew and enjoy while I mutter insults about all the wimpy vegetables that can’t endure the intemperate hardships of our climate and still make for such sweet eating come the thaw.

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April 11, 2013

Know’st Thou Fluellen?

I’ve written before about leeks in vinaigrette being one of my all-time favorite appetizers. Leeks have a particularly savory completeness to their flavor, an almost meaty umami element that’s extremely compelling and addictive. They take well to all forms of cooking, and their silky texture when perfectly done—slick layers sliding apart under the fork—is hard to beat for sensual pleasure in the vegetable kingdom.

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March 1, 2013

Bust A Capsicum

Espelette peppers, named for the town in Basque France that made them famous, are a unique food. Dried and ground, they have a particular aromatic quality: earthy and yet bright at the same time, with a fairly gentle but insistent heat that represents (in general, based on my own anecdotal experience) the upper limit of most French palates’ tolerance for spiciness. The great hams of Bayonne are cured with copious pepper, and it gives them a gorgeous flavor and tint. It’s not really a cooking spice, but rather a finishing one, especially given how much money a small jar commands. A pinch sprinkled on top of fish, chicken, or potatoes (or a hundred other things) adds an irresistible trebly zing and a not insignificant coloristic bump.

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January 1, 2013

Seminal Effort

For January’s Chronogram, I visited the Hudson Valley Seed Library to talk about their rapid growth and plans for the coming year. If you live in the area, they offer a full range of seeds that are bred and selected to perform well in this climate. Even if you don’t, theirs is an important story if you prefer to have your food dollars support local small businesses rather than huge multinational corporations.

October 16, 2012

Cut And Dried

One of the things the garden forcefully teaches is the vivd difference in flavor between things we grow ourselves and even those things we pay the full yuppie markup for at the local health/organic emporium. For years I bought the herbes de Provence blend at the local Health Mart™ and used it, often liberally, in many dishes. The blend of thyme, rosemary, oregano (and/or marjoram) and lavender (and sometimes fennel, and more) is pretty much Mediterranean in a jar when it comes to giving your meats and sauces that certain fragrant, resinous quality that’s instantly recognizable. Add a few fat pinches to a pan of tomato purée, and it’s pizza sauce. Like that.

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September 24, 2012

Seeing Red

This time every year I order lots of Blue Beech tomatoes for making purée and sauce to get us through until the beginning of the next tomato season. Blue Beech are a variety of paste tomato that can be cooked with skins and seeds and still remain wonderfully sweet, so processing them is dead easy: I trim the stem end, halve them , and throw them in the pot to cook down and disintegrate. Then I stick-blend the whole thing and run it in batches through the food mill to catch the skin fragments and seeds. It saves a lot of time, especially when dealing with a hundred pounds of them at a time as I did recently.

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