Subject to ReVision

2011-11-05T20:14:00.002-04:00

The last sweet and hot remnants of summer

Lettuce soup

2011-07-04T18:48:00.000-04:00

It's the Fourth of July and we still have so much lettuce left in the garden, despite eating it every day and giving away bunches and bunches. Can't freeze lettuce but I can make a delicious lettuce soup. Also use some of the lovely peas from the garden.

First sauteed up some onion and garlic scapes in olive oil.

Added chopped lettuce and some spinach and mixed for a few minutes, and then added chicken broth and cooked gently for 15 minutes. Cooled slightly and pureed in a blender. Added some hot pepper vinegar. Sprinkled with dill and garlic chives. Voila!

Salad Days

2011-06-05T21:04:00.000-04:00

Early June. Summer came early this year, but it's always a big rush after the last frost-free date to get the major part of the garden planted. Here in Ithaca, New York, Memorial Day weekend is a safe bet. But already we can enjoy the fruits of early spring planting. We're even still enjoying overwintered greens. This was a particularly good year for over-wintering greens, between the relatively mild temperatures and the decent snow cover. We had also covered the little spinaches, radicchio, and lettuces with leaves in the late fall. The radicchio did spectacularly well, as did a few lettuces:

In early April, the new salad crops were sown, and now they are thick. It didn't hurt that April and May were the rainiest in history. We hoe up raised beds with paths between, and sow the lettuce thickly. Shades out a lot of the weeds! Here we have (from the top) Red Deer Tongue, Tropicana (or was it Barbados?), and Nancy lettuce.

In the mornings, I thin the beds, while at the same time picking for the table. The key is to feel around the base of the plants, and pick out whole plants, rather than just leaves. Even on a busy day, the plants can be thrown in bowl of water, roots first, and sit around as a lettuce bouquet all day, before being washed and packaged up in the evening (except for what's eaten that day of course.)

The best chocolate chip cookies / kitchen sink cookies

2011-03-28T20:14:00.000-04:00

Rachel’s coming home for a few days, so it inspired me to dig out the best cookie recipe - we made them together many times since she was little. It's a low-fat version of the Toll House chocolate cookies my mom used to make – and we loved them, though they were saggy and greasy. These ones have half the fat (one stick of margarine instead of two) and are just as tasty.

I modified the Sensibly Delicious Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe slightly; used whole eggs instead of egg whites and water. I can't see throwing away good yolks. And I substitute my own technique on mixing.

The chocolate chips can be substituted in part or all by fudge pieces that went wrong; raisins, etc. I like to mix it up and make them true kitchen-sink cookies! This time I'm adding part peanut-butter fudge that was a bit too crumbly; along with some raisins; and pecans.

Ingredients

3 cups flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 1/4 cups packed dark brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup margarine, softened

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 large eggs

1 ½ to 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

1/3 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350°.

Cream brown sugar, granulated sugar, margarine and vanilla in large mixer bowl.

Beat in eggs.

Mix flour, baking soda and salt in medium bowl.

Dump the dry ingredients into the wet.

Stir in morsels and nuts.

Use hands to mix thorougly, and shape balls to place onto lightly greased baking sheets. Squish each one down a bit with a fork.

Bake for 10-12 minutes or until centers are set.

Cool for 2 minutes.

Remove to wire racks to cool completely

Hawk!

2010-03-22T21:24:00.001-04:00

Sunday afternoon the chickens were out on rec around 5 pm. Steve was in the kitchen making coffee and I was in the potting shed starting seeds. From the back window I saw the chickens scrounging around the asparagus patch along the fence. I turned my head back to the seeds. Suddenly there was a commotion - loud squawking. I turned my head to see the chickens turn suddenly like Catholic schoolchildren when the morning bell rings in the schoolyard - they just went single file and disappeared into the forsythia bush. Something was up.
Steve wasn't hearing this, so I walked back there and the one hen was squawking like crazy right next to the forsythia, and the other girls were nestled tightly together in the bush. I counted only five. One chicken was missing. I looked around for feathers.. Finally Steve came out and we both saw in the other corner of the yard that a large black bird had cornered our chicken. Steve poked the hawk with a pole and the bird flew into the neighbor's tree, keeping an eye. Bells jingled, and I thought I saw the bells around the bird's feet. The chicken rushed backed into the pen, which was right there.
A man appeared in the other yard. He had been chasing his bird all the way down here. Meanwhile Steve was in the back checking out the other chickens. I went back there - he said we got to get the chickens back in the pen. I took one in my arms and walked down the yard. Suddenly there was the hawk again flying right at me from a few yards away, wings spread. I ducked curling into my chicken. It felt like I went into a heavy wind. I got to the cage and opened the door and threw in the chicken. Steve was saying, "Annie go back into the potting shed!" I'm thinking what is this macho thing. I'm not going to hide in the shed. I haven't done any harm.
When I walked back over to the driveway, the man was there and he had caught his hawk in some kind of device around his finger. He was apologetic but we were thrilled to see the hawk. He said it was a Harris hawk and he had been up at the municipal golf course at the bottom of the lake, when the hawk took off - it must have seen the chickens. Now Steve suggested I get the camera. I got some pictures, but they're not developed yet. I still don't have a digital camera or a camera on my cellphone.
When I walked back to the potting shed, I noticed my hand was all bloody. I guess the chicken dug in when the hawk tried to convince me to drop her.

Eggs for sale

2010-03-15T20:16:00.001-04:00

We started with chickens last year, and it's been a success - perhaps too much of a success. We have more eggs than we know what to do with. We've given a lot away, but it would be nice to sell at least some of them to cover some of the feed costs.

The chickens are beautiful Golden Comets - fairly quiet; good for our mixed-use semi-wild West End neighborhood. They're a little scrawny for meat, but they sure lay a lot of eggs, even all winter long. Here's a picture of them in the garden last summer. Now we let them range all over the yard a few times a day. (More pictures to come.)

I used to just eat one egg sandwich a week, but I've been working on increasing my egg consumption, and it's been very good! Now the burritos often include some scrambled eggs. I tucked some hard-boiled egg into the pita with felafel and tabouli today. For last Sunday brunch, tried Scandinavian-style and had sardines and hard-boiled egg on sour corn rye toast; couldn't help adding some of that Capricho with black pepper goat cheese that they sell at the GreenStar. I would love to barter with the cheesemakers for some eggs!

Meanwhile I'll barter with anyone through the genius of Ithaca Hours. We just need a few regular customers. Bonuses from the garden available during the harvest season! You can contact me at gardensfirst at gmail.com if you're interested in some eggs.

Cabbage two ways

2010-02-24T20:54:00.003-05:00

Inspiration for cooking wanes in the bleak days of February when very little of last summer's bounty is still left in the larders, and the days of fresh still seem far off. I was moved to buy an organic cabbage and first used more than half of it to make kimchee – the simple version according to Tassajara Cooking. It's a two-day process rather than the longer traditional fermenting.

Kimchee

Day 1
Cut cabbage into bite-size chunks and put into non-reactive glass or ceramic bowl.

Mix with ~1 ½ T salt.

Mix. Press down with a plate on top and a weight.

Store overnight in the refrigerator.
Day 2
Pour off accumulated water. The salty water can be saved for soup.

Add garlic, ginger, toasted sesame seeds, and red papper to taste.

Store in glass or other non-reactive containers in refrigerator.

Kimchee is a delicious additive to add kinds of things – salads, pita sandwiches, soups…

OK still another half a cabbage left. There are some carrots in the hydrator too. Ah, masala! Masala is a mixture of vegetables, with Indian spices. My introduction to the basic recipe for masala came from another of my early favorite cookbooks from the seventies, The Golden Temple Vegetarian Cookbook. (These are the cookbooks I actually learned to cook from back in the seventies when I was in my twenties. I learned to make bread from the detailed directions in The Tassajara Bread Book.) As with many of the recipes in the Tassajara, this one can be adapted to use many different kinds of vegetables according to what it is available and what turns the cook on.

Vegetable masala – Basic masala for curry

Cut several cups of vegetables in advance. This time I'm using just cabbage and carrots, but any combination you think is compatible works..

Heat 1/3 cup oil – sesame is best

Fry up 2 or 3 onions; add 2 T minced ginger and a few cloves minced garlic

After the holy trinity (i.e. onions, garlic, and ginger!) is soft and fragrant, add 1 tsp jeera (either cumin seed or caraway seed), 1 tsp turmeric, a tsp of garam masala*, ¼ tsp or more cayenne pepper and salt to taste.

Stir for a couple more minutes and then add a couple tomatoes (fresh or canned). The tomatoes are optional.

After that is cooked down, add the several cups of vegetables. When it comes back to heat, add some water, and lower heat and cover til cooked, stirring occasionally.
* garam masala is a mixture of spices, so if you don't have that, you can just put in a little of various spices according to taste including cumin, coriander, cardamom, pepper, cloves, cinammon.

mixed harvest

2009-10-18T11:45:00.004-04:00

Late blight (potato blight) hit the tomatoes bad this year, as it did all around the region, thanks to our local big box stores which buy tomato plants from the south, and the people who bought their plants from them, and then the virus spread through the air. My tomatoes were started from seed, and only caught the virus late in the season, unlike some friends out in Trumansburg and Lodi who lost pretty much everything. I was able to salvage parts of a lot of the bigger tomatoes. The damaged parts had to be cut out, and the rest could be used. The smallest cherry tomatoes did the best – Ildis and Jelly Beans. Also the Principe Borghese showed very little damage and had a good crop. Usually I use them mostly for the tomato preserves and dried tomatoes, but this year they pinched-hit for all fresh uses along with the little cherries. One Rutgers plant survived surprisingly well – at least it was Rutgers according to my records, but the fruits were on the small side, a little bigger and rounder than the Principe. I should save some seeds from that plant! We've still been covering it up at night along with a few other things since frost has threatened at night. So still been eating some tomatoes about every day; just have a lot fewer jars on the shelves. Tomatillos did not seem affected so do have a lot of salsa verde. More to make tonight.

Have a great crop of kale and collards this year, thanks to early planting for a change. So I've had it all summer, but now I really am appreciating them, as there's little else. The dinosaur or Tuscan kale is most susceptible to the cold, so I'm cooking, eating, and freezing a lot of that now before frost gets really hard. It's always surprising to pick a few lower leaves from each plant, and then strip the skinny leaves from the stem and slice them and there is actually a big pot of greens. These don't cook down to a tiny volume like spinach, but hold their texture, and consequently put up with more cooking.

The serviceberry tree is entering is entering its glory time.

Labor Day feast

2009-09-07T22:00:00.005-04:00

UntitleInspired by having company, we did a barbecue for Sunday of Labor Day weekend. The meat was simple; the vegetables were almost all from the garden. Western-style pork ribs marinated in Stubbs' barbecue sauce. A couple chuck-eye steaks. The queen of the barbecue: sweet corn. We don't have the room to grow it, so we've gotten a few bushels over the past few weeks which we barbecue and freeze. First the ears are soaked in a bucket for an hour or more, then barbecued in the husks. They don't need much cooking but even if they get singed, that only accentuates the flavor in the kernels nearby. Cut off the kernels and freeze in bags. Cole slaw – thinly sliced cabbage, sweet onions, and grated carrots lightly dressed with olive oil and cider vinegar, and sprinkled with a few chunks of apple, raisins, and roasted sunflower seeds. Potato salad with hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, and basil. Broccoli-tomato salad: Sauteed the broccoli lightly with garlic. Added tamari and balsamic vinegar, and then chunks of tomatoes. Added sliced olives and goat cheese. We grew the tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes, broccoli, onions, garlic and basil. I gave up growing carrots. I can't grow everything well.

rhubarb pie

2009-07-04T10:16:00.006-04:00

It's Fourth of July so will do something traditional - rhubarb pie! This time I'll put in some serviceberries since they were abundant this year and last. Although I was eating them fresh last week, we still had some in the freezer from last year when Steve put a tarp down and shook the tree. I've been laboriously separating stems from berries, so just a few will go in. They do make it extra special - a few red gems thrown in!

The serviceberry, by the way, is a wonderful landscape tree. Native to eastern North America, it's covered with delicate white blossoms late April or early May. The berries are delicious and very popular with the birds and squirrels. In the fall it's astounding as the leaves turn from red and purple to burnt orange.

Whatever fruit is available for a pie, I fall back on the same basic recipe. The pie crust recipe comes from Craig Claiborne's The New York Times Cookbook and the filling part is based on the fruit pie recipe in Let's Cook it Right by Adelle Davis.

Pie crust:
Stir together: 2 cups flour and 1 tsp salt
Add: 2/3 cup shortening
Mix until lumps are no bigger than little peas.
Sprinkle in ice water (about 1/3 cup but it depends) and mix until it stays together. I start mixing with forks and end up with my hands making balls.
Form two balls - one bigger than the other, and cover and put them in the refrigerator for an hour or more. It makes it easier to roll out.

This next step is probably not necessary but it prevents a soggy crust.
Preheat oven to 425°. Roll out the bigger ball for the bottom crust and put it in a 9" pie pan. Flute the edges. Pierce with a fork intermittently over the surface for air to escape. Place a smaller pan like a cakepan on top to keep the crust from rising. Cover with foil and put in the oven for 8 minutes. Remove cakepan and foil and bake for another two minutes. Take it out of the oven.

Fruit pie:
Preheat oven to 375°
4 cups fruit - cut up
1/2 to 1 cup sugar depending on sweetness of fruit
3 to 4 Tbsp whole wheat pastry flour depending on wetness of fruit
dash of salt
Mix together and add to pie crust. Roll out top crust and cut into long strips and lay them criss-cross on top.
Bake for about 40 minutes til it looks done.

For the rhubarb I used the full cup of sugar. Sometimes I make pies with fruit I had previously canned, like peaches and plums, and they already had sugar so then I just 1/4 cup sugar to the pie.

early summer eats

2009-06-29T20:02:00.008-04:00

As usual, the night's menu revolves around what is fresh in the garden. Lately there's a lot of peas: sweet peas and snap peas. The snap peas are tempting for a crunch right off the vine, but cooking them every so slightly really brings out the sweetness. I generally put just a little oil on the fry pan and get it good and hot; sauté the snap peas briefly, sometimes with minced garlic, and then toss on soy sauce. They're good in a salad, and of course in a stir-fry with other things over rice.

I remember clearly the first time I tasted fresh sweet peas out of the pod. I was in junior high and ironically my classmate from Manhattan shared some on our end-of-the-year school outing taking the boat around the island. I was skeptical at first as the cooked peas my mother served were only surpassed in vileness by the cooked spinach. But these were a totally different thing, and the beginning of an awakening to fresh vegetables.

The sweet peas go well into a spring tabouli. I don't even cook the little ones but mix them into the still-warm bulghur. The basic recipe I borrow from The New Moosewood Cookbook, but then I vary the vegetables.

1 cup bulghur
1 ½ cups boiling water
1 tsp salt
black pepper, to taste
¼ cup lemon juice
¼ cup olive oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed

Add the boiling water to the bulghur and cover and let sit 30 minutes or more. Mix in the other ingredients above. Then the recipe says to refrigerate before adding the vegetables, but that might be a more essential step when tomatoes and cucumbers are to be added. This time of year, I don't necessarily refrigerate at this stage, but toss in the peas, and some parsley and maybe mint. Dill, why not? Whatever I got that seems suitable. A few chickpeas are nice. Green onions, yes!!

Tonight are a lot of collard greens. Torn from the stems and cut into ribbons; add them to the garlic sauté, and then liquid – this time broth from the hambone that had been secreted in the freezer for months. Some are added to tonight's black bean soup; and the rest saved for another day in the freezer.

2009-06-20T19:18:00.005-04:00

White clover is blooming in the lawn and even my mother noticed how beautiful it was on this rainy day, which otherwise she considered a miserable day since it rained all day. She remembered how she picked the clover for her mother when she was a little girl. I told her I love the rain. I got out a lot of the dusty house plants; the philodendron and ivy, spider plant, begonia and peace lilies; and spread them out on the patio in the light rain. Walked around the garden, knowing I didn't have to do any planting or even bother weeding today. Wait til the rain stops. Time to admire how lush the plants look in the rain. Picked the swelling peas and a bulb of fresh garlic.

veggie burgers

2009-05-30T10:43:00.006-04:00

More than ever I'm working on using things up and cooking more efficiently – minimal waste of food and ultimately effort. My mom's penchant for having the refrigerator fairly empty so that she can see everything, is finally rubbing off on me. It's a challenge to please my mother, my daughter, Steve, and myself. Rachel is a vegetarian. Mom and Steve and convicted carnivores. I'm somewhere between, preferring meat as a condiment rather than a main course.

I've pretty much mastered burritos. Now I'm working on veggie burgers. Steve and my mom prefer the real thing. I like the real thing only if it's barbecued. I've tried a few veggie burger recipes – like the lentil walnut burger from The Moosewood Cookbook. When they came out with The New Moosewood Cookbook, I noticed that the lentil burger recipe had changed! I liked the original but the new one is good too. Recently I wanted to incorporate tofu in a veggie burger so searched online for such a recipe and the mushroom tofu veggie burger from the Harvard School of Public Health recipe looked pretty good, so I used it with modifications. The nuts should be finely ground so that they hold together better.

Now that I have an idea now of the various possible ingredients, I figure I can improvise and throw various things together in a rough balance of ideas of taste and the right consistency (and what is on hand!). In my first attempt I started with some tofu, which I had previously shredded and marinated and sauteed. Added cooked lentils and bulghur, finely chopped walnuts, and a couple eggs. Threw in a little hot sacue and of course salt and pepper. At the end added a bit of cornmeal as it seemed a bit wet.

Forgot the mushrooms! Rachel just put them on top. Buen idee!

A few nights a week there's more greens to cook up, since the salads can't keep up with the quantity. Last night cooked up lambsquarters, swiss chard, and spinach: LSS. I try to label the greens accordingly when I put little containers in the freezer, so that I can remember whether they were DGM (dandelion garlic mustard) or BGM (bacon garlic mustard), for instance.

compost

2009-05-23T10:22:00.004-04:00

A beginning gardener is an impatient one. A mature gardener is a composter. The rich soil in the beds, built up over the years from compost, can be seen now where the dill is volunteering heavily. In the beds it grows dark green and tall, but between the beds where the soil is shallower and scraped away, the dill is lighter in color and shorter. It's harder to pull out of the ground in the paths too since it is so packed, not lofty as in the beds.

salad days

2009-05-22T20:26:00.002-04:00

I must hard-boil some more eggs tonight for Steve's salads. This has been a great year for salads already. Spinach, swiss chard, and radicchio overwintered under the leaves. As the last summer's spinach is practically gone, now the spinach seeded in March is coming on strong with big fat dark geen leaves. One of the best spinach crops I've ever had.

Lately been eating a lot of violet leaves (I forgot to pick the flowers when they were good); there's some young lettuce thinnings to add to the mix. The lambsquarters are just starting to be big enough to bother picking and adding to the salads.

When I see garlic mustard in the yard, that goes into the mix too. I try to pull it out every year, but there's always some that still pops up here and there. I'm surprised not to have heard from Betsy Darlington this year about garlic mustard pulls in the woods.

garden activity

2008-11-22T11:18:00.000-05:00

Facing reality, I brought the large brighly flowering geraniums, as well as the noble evergreen rosemary plant into the potting shed and cut them all back. The geraniums are simple and clear to cut. Look at the branches and save the bright green new stems; go for the darkened old brown stems and cut them down to the base, in the process mercilessly cutting off flowers right and left. The plant looks rather small, but green and healthy at the end; by spring it will be rebounding strong and beautiful. I'm never quite sure where to cut the rosemary - I've heard to cut them back by one-third, so I kind of trim it all around after taking out a a few particularly straggly branches from the base. Also brought in a Penny Lane viola that bloomed sweetly in the speckled shade off the patio all spring and summer and again has a couple of sprightly blossoms.

Working on the garden clean-up gradually. Early in the month was another great sunny day for it, so it was a wonderful excuse to linger. Took down another trellis-netting. This one had been for the tomatillos. The vines shrivelled to dry brown leaves and slippery rotten stems here and there, but there were still some solid tomatillos to harvest. Despite the light frosts we had they're still good for salsa verde. The trellis-netting is always a bit of a pain to reuse, but I try. There was also twine to untie as Steve had tied up some of the abundant side branches. Sure I could cut the knots with a knife, but then I couldn't save the short pieces, and besides, I can get totally mesmerized untying a knot. I’ve been drawn to that activity since a child, untangling my aunt Sis’ rosary beads during church. At that time, it distracted me from the boredom of church. Untangling the trellis netting gave me a chance to be still and look up once in a while and see the bees visiting the four-petaled yellow wild arugula flowers which are the only bright color around, and time slows down. And then a little pale yellow butterfly drifted by and I followed its meandering path with my eyes until it landed in the grass. I walked over to see where it alighted and found a dandelion flower tight in the low grass, previously inconspicuous. Later when working in the potting shed, I saw four dead ones of this same kind of butterfly on the windowsill. On one side the wing is more white with a yellow border and two black smudgy spots. Maybe it's a sulphur butterfly - I'm not sure.

Towards the middle of the month, it turned much colder and has stayed that way. But even though the winter has come early, with an early snow coating the ground at Six Mile Creek, still getting some fresh greens every morning that I’m willing to venture out. The snow has still been covering the east bed where there’s some arugula, lettuce and radicchio, and I figure hopefully that I can let that go as the snow might be insulating it a bit, and I pick the other barer plants on the west side where they get a bit more sun due to the configuration of the trees. Still picking garden cress, lettuce, mustard, swiss chard, spinach, arugula, radicchio, sorrel, and winter cress, as well as sideshoots on the two Dividend broccoli plants which were set out in June. The late-planted broccoli got too late a start and is only just putting out small heads. Eventually I’ll have to face reality and pick the small immature heads before they freeze into mush.

I pick almost every morning now – as much as I can before my fingers freeze. The leaves are small now but still so healthy. All the little bits add up – it’s amazing. If I don’t get them now they might be gone tomorrow or next week. Pretty soon my only fresh greens will be the alfalfa sprouts I sprouted myself or something I buy at the store.

Steve planted the garlic a couple weeks ago and I planted a few shallot bulbs a few days ago. He covered the garlic with leaves, but they're now sprouting through the leaves! I clipped the tops and chopped them into salads etc.

pickles

2008-09-20T11:40:00.000-04:00

Summer is still lingering on despite the evidence of school buses and college tuition bills. There is some hope for the fall garden: sprouts of mustard and arugula are strong - starting to eat thinnings. Radicchio transplants are also putting out some growth but it will be a little while yet before they can shoulder the bulk of a salad. Lettuce and spinach are quite small but coming up so long as I remember to water religiously during the hot dry days we've been having. The cooler nights are forgiving. All the abundant greens of spring are long gone. The masses of dandelions and garlic mustard, which I had packed into little jars and into the freezer back in April have since been found and eaten, as summer greens became sparse.

The best green this year to carry through the summer, when lettuce has already bolted, is Swiss chard. It's pleasant when cooked like any other green, and the young leaves can passably substitute for lettuce, when lettuce is scarce. In past years, I grew the venerable old Fordhook variety. Since I don't grow that much at a time, that seed packet lasted over several years in the refrigerator. When I ran out this year, I decided to try for some visual excitement and obtained Charlotte and Sea Foam chard from Pinetree Seeds. Charlotte is a red-ribbed variety and Sea Foam is a lighter bright almost limey shade of green. Grown together they make a striking contrast. Sowed in April, they are still going strong in September. Sea Foam is crinkly and more delicate so more suited to salad. But either one can be used for either cooking or eating raw.

Canning has been going on steadily since the first batch of pickles in early August. Bread-and-butter pickles, dill pickles, salsa, tomato juice, plums, chutneys. Although my favorite is dill pickles, most of my family favors the sweet bread-and-butter pickles, so I make a lot of them for gift-giving. Ever since I discovered the recipe in Putting Food By, I've never bothered to try a different one for the sweet pickles since everyone loves them. Actually the authors of Putting Food By credit Isabelle Downey's Food Preservation in Alabama for the source of the recipe. My old Bantam paperback edition of Putting Food By has gotten pretty tattered and falling apart over the years, so my daughter recently found a higher quality trade paperback edition of the book from the Stephen Greene Press in a used bookstore. But lo! It doesn't have the best recipe ever for bread-and-butter pickles, so I will reproduce it here before it turns to dust:

Bread-and-Butter Pickles

6 lbs medium cucumber
1 1/2 cups sliced onion
2 large garlic cloves, left whole
1/3 cup salt
2 trays ice cubes or crushed ice
4 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 tsp turmeric
1 1/2 tsp celery seed
2 T mustard seed
3 cups white vinegar

Slice unpeeled washed cucumbers into 1/4" slices . Add to large bowl, along with sliced onions, garlic and salt. Cover with ice; mix well and let sit at least three hours. (When I leave it up to 24 hours, I put in in the refrigerator.)
Drain off the liquid and remove the garlic. Combine sugar, spices and vinegar and heat just to a boil. Add the cucumber and onions; simmer 10 minutes. Pack loosley in clean, hot pint jars, leaving 1/2" of headroom. Adjust lids; process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes. Makes 7 pints.

late May

2008-05-24T20:29:00.001-04:00

One of the delights of early spring is finding unexpected edibles in the garden. Each year, at least if the winter is not too severe (and it has not been so lately), some vegetable plants, normally considered annuals, survive over the winter and put out new growth in spring. It's not predictable, although I often try to over-winter things, like spinach, by covering them with leaves in the fall, I'm not always successful. I've had good luck on occasion with the spinach in the past, but not reliably. Last fall we haphazardly covered a lot of things with the abundance of leaves - including spinach, lettuce, and some kale which was still small in the fall. This spring no spinach survived, but a bunch of radicchio plants surprised me with new growth since uncovered in March. I've been picking leaves regularly in the past weeks. Several little kale plants also survived the winter to grow again, and I will keep an eye on them to see if they get big enough to pick before flowering. They were planted on the late side last year and never got too big. The radicchio and kale had both been started indoors last June and transplanted into the garden in July.

Then there are the re-seeders. I've already mentioned the dill which has been re-appearing for years without benefit of re-seeding (June). Sprouting pockets of feathery growth in numerous spots around the garden, dill consequently ends up cut and scattered over all kinds of dishes. I'm getting in the habit of picking a bunch up by the in the mornings and sticking them in water like a small bouquet to keep fresh for using later in the day. The little plants go into a shot glass and as they get bigger and bigger they move up to a quart jar. There's a ridiculous abundance now, but it's always a challenge to still have enough around by the time the cucumbers are ready for pickling.

Deepening my love affair with arugula, I started some wild arugula (Rucola selvatica) seed a few years ago. A little more bitter than domesticated arugula, it's still a great wake-up call for the taste buds alone or mixed in with other greens. In the last couple of years I haven't needed to seed it again, as it has re-seeded thickly in some spots, and is scattered just about everywhere else in small bunches or single plants. It's slow to grow when first seeded, but after a while it seems almost invasive. Garlic chives is another delicious treat in spring and early summer, which has been spreading a little too promiscuously. This year I'm being more aggressive about picking the garlic chives and wild arugula, so as to make more use of them and make more room for other things! The garlic chives are solidly rooted and so I go around with a hand shovel and pull out bunches of plants to thin them out. Often I bring them into the house and put them in a big bowl with a little water in it to keep them fresh for a day or two while cutting off the tops and using them here and there. Other times I clip the tops off right in the garden after digging out the roots, carrying the compost bucket (to throw the roots) and scissors, along with the harvest basket.

It's amazing how many foods can absorb a quantity of garlic chives, especially stews and soups. Since it's good as an ingredient in pesto, sometimes I make a pesto with it as the major ingredient, and then later in the summer, when basil is available, the pestos can be mixed together.

The wild arugula can be cooked up like dandelions, garlic mustard and other greens, and saved in small containers in the freezer for use throughout the year. From early spring til late fall, it's one kind of leafy greens after the other. They each have their special qualities, but when there is an abundance they often get mixed up together in the pot as cooked greens. Dandelions and wild arugula are on the bitter side so they benefit from more liquid in the cooking. Garlic mustard can be awfully chewy, but if chopped fine or even pureed after cooking, it makes a fine deeply flavored sauce. Radicchio is already wonderful raw - a deep smoky taste, so only makes it into the cooked greens at times of most abundance when we can't use all of it fresh. Mustard greens can vary as for their sharpness of taste. In recent years I've been growing Tendergreen mustard (from Gurney's seeds) which is a milder and prolific form. After sowing seeds in early April, thinnings are ready to eat in a month and by early June plants are starting to send up flowers and it's time to pick them all.

Thanks to Golden Temple Vegetarian Cookbook, here's a lovely recipe for mung bean-mustard greens soup:

Cook 1/2 cup mung beans with a few bunches chopped mustard greens and plenty of water. Puree after it's cooked.

When that's almost done, sautee onion, garlic, and gingeroot. Add a teaspoon or two caraway seeds and curry powder (or garam masala), salt and pepper. Add the pureed beans and greens and heat slowly.

A surprise this spring was shallots. It shouldn't have been a surprise if I had been paying attention. I planted seeds for them last spring and didn't get around to harvesting them until so late that I didn't find them all. If I was thinking I might have done what I did by accident anyway, as people often plant shallots in fall for next year's harvest, just as we do with garlic. So we've been eating some of them as green onions, and now I'm going to let the rest mature into shallot bulbs, and maybe will plant a few in the fall! They are sending up a lot of shoots with seed tops, so I'm picking those for fresh-eating and to divert the energy back into the bulbs.

I had started epazote by seed a few years back and to my delight it re-seeded itself in subsequent years, so that I started to depend on it. It's good to throw in epazote leaves with the black beans. Besides adding authentic flavor, it is purported to neutralize the flatulent effect of eating the beans. Alas it stopped coming back last year, so I had to start seeds again. C'est la vie! But they didn't germinate! Then I discovered they were growing thickly in the pot where I had been growing cilantro, which was now dying off. In fact they're showing up in several potted plants that are using my recycled potting soil. What luck! Now I just have to rememer to use them when cooking black beans. The fragrance clears the head.

fudge

2007-12-03T11:08:00.001-05:00

In the weeks preceding Christmas I get to fudge-making. Over the years, the many failures only drove me more determinedly to conquer the process. Though not the correct consistency, the failures were usually still edible: generally undercooked and eligible for fudge sauce. Occasionally the fudge was over-cooked and came out more like hard candy. Then there were the intermittent successes, when the fudge miraculously congealed into the perfect smooth and almost solid texture that we desire. When it comes out too crumbly, I save the crumbs to put into cookies in place of the chocolate chips.
After repeated attempts, note-taking and re-reading notes, here is what I have learned to be able to more consistently make the fudge come out right.
The recipe is slightly modified from Fannie Farmer for chocolate nut fudge:
Ingredients: 3 squares of chocolate, 2 cups sugar, 2 T corn syrup, 3/4 cup whole milk; 2 T butter, 1 tsp vanilla and 1 cup chopped walnuts.
Melt the 3 squares of chocolate in a 3-quart sauce pan. Add the corn syrup, sugar and milk. Stir til it all dissolves; bring to a medium boil and stop stirring. I've read those directions in the past, but it took me a while to recognize the significance. Bring to a medium boil and stop stirring - really! As a neophyte I had found it hard to resist the impulse to stir. I was afraid it would stick to the bottom. Why, it was getting stuck to the pan all around the upper edges! Well, there's a better way to deal with that than to stir it all back in. Instead keep a little bowl of warm water near the stove, and use a pastry brush dipped in the warm water to brush down the sides periodically. Stirring actually results in the re-formation of sugar crystals, and will not result in the proper fudge texture. Relax and let the swirling of the boiling mix it all up.
Fudge requires attention and obedience to the laws of fudge physics. It is not one of those cooking escapades that one can modulate according to one's desires. Once begun, timing is all, and the fudge tells you when it's time. The boiling phase requires patience and close attention; it needs to boil at a good pace, but not boil over. It generally takes about a half hour of boiling before it reaches that magical "soft-ball stage", but it might only be 15 minutes or closer to an hour. Different atmospheric conditions and humidity have their effects - it's actually best to make fudge on a dry, cool day. I get the impression that the addition of fattier elements such as chocolate or cream decrease the boiling time. I haven't had much luck with a candy thermometer - the one I used was probably off by 10º - so I'd given up on that. But if you have a good one, they say that 234º is the temperature of the soft ball stage.
I go by other signs. When the volume boils down to about one-quarter of the original volume, and drips from a spoon start to fatten, then the time is getting closer but there's no need to panic. You can even slow it down a bit at this point if needed, by turning down the stove a bit. The soft ball stage is defined as "a small amount of syrup dropped into chilled water forms a ball, but is soft enough to flatten when picked up with fingers". As the ideal stage nears, the last drops from the spoon briefly form small balls on the descent. In a blink of an eye, a tail forms and they look like little sperms before hitting the bottom. If you reach in and pick one up off the bottom of the glass, it does not disintegrate in your fingers anymore, but can be formed into a little ball and flattened too.
Now is the time to pounce! Remove from heat and throw in two tablespoons butter, cut into little pieces. It is the role of the butter to help cool down the fudge slowly. Once again, against all intuition, do not stir at this stage! Put the pot of fudge on a rack so it can cool down from all sides, and leave it alone. (Sometimes I hasten the process by immersing the pot in a larger container of cold water, but this can be risky, as the cooling can suddenly become rapid particularly on the edges.) If you haven't already done so, now is the last chance to butter up the 8-inch square pan, and chop the nuts. Keep an eye on the fudge, for once again you are waiting for the right moment to pounce again. This cooling stage generally takes about a half hour. We are waiting for it to cool to lukewarm, so that is pretty easy to spot. Once the sides of the pan are no longer hot, you can test it by poking a finger in the middle of the fudge. If it's still hot, then it needs to cool longer. Once it's just barely warm, approaching body temperature, then it's time to really whip into action!
Now all that pent-up urge to stir can fully express itself. Add the teaspoon of vanilla and mix it in gently, and then start to really get into it. Oh what activity for 10-15 minutes – muscles and breath! Do this on a solid counter at a good height to maintain good posture. Have a sturdy wooden spoon, as the fudge is now thickening rapidly as you stir, and you want to get the heavy spots on the bottom of the pan to mix in. Beat, beat, breathe, beat! Continue to beat til it just starts to lose its gloss. The gloss doesn't have to disappear entirely, but it must start to diminish. Add the chopped nuts. Now it is really impossible to mix – oh, hands don't fail me now! – you can drop the wooden spoon and roll up the sleeves. Hands always do the best job when things get really stiff. It's all in one glob now. Press it into the pan - no need to press it to the edges. Let cool on the rack and if you have the patience, watch how the gloss continues to dissipate until it's perfectly fudge. You know what to do now, with the knife.
My other favorite is penuche, which my aunt Sissybell made to perfection when I was a child. Unfortunately I never got her recipe or really watched her do it. But this recipe I found on the internet from the Christopher Kratzer Bed & Breakfast in Clearfield, Pennsylvania. It was passed down from the proprietor's grandmother who had learned it from her days in Atlanta.
Ingredients: 2 cups brown sugar, 1 cup milk or water, 1/4 tsp salt; 2 T butter, 1 tsp vanilla and 1 cup chopped pecans. Follow the same procedure.

pictures of May

2007-05-10T16:10:00.000-04:00

Steve rescued the crabapple from the chain link fence adjoining our backyard. He thought it was a pear tree, but we're almost as happy that it turned out to be a crabapple.

The geraniums and rosemary were overwintered in the basement, but now get to come outside on the patio. Cilantro was started from seed in February.

This is from a few years ago. Only two of these tulips came back this year.

The south-facing patio is a micro hotspot, occasionally allowing sunbathing in the spring.

I planted this crabapple tree (Malus 'Royalty') in 1987. Before that there was one of the old peach trees which had been planted by Caesar Capucci, but it was dying and had to go. Violets growing wild under the tree have been encouraged over the years by pulling out competitors.

Petals fall.

Early peas waiting to climb the trellis. Lettuce grows nearby.

Garlic, in the background, was started in the previous fall.

A redbud tree and lilac bush from two adjoining yards make us appreciate our neighbors in close city lots.

Dandelion harvest

2007-04-30T11:08:00.004-04:00

Earlier in April I searched carefully for a bunch of young dandelions. Last week, as May loomed, they were everywhere and huge - the dagger leaves spraying out from the center of each plant like spokes on a wheel. On Saturday there was more time and I pounced, quickly filling up the wire basket.. It was a cool and misty morning. Today most of those I found have started blossoming, and now everybody notices them. The best quality has passed. Nevertheless I make one more harvest.

It's best to pick them in the morning when they are freshest - isn't that the best time to pick anything? But there is often not time then to clean them all, and certainly I'm not ready to cookup the whole batch. Excess dirt is shaken off each plant before being thrown into the wire basket. Then usually, I throw them all into a bowl or bucket of water. On the misty morning the air and bit of soil which still stuck to the roots were still damp, so I just left the basket sit on the back stoop. A light rain arrived mid-morning, providing a first rinsing. So they stayed fresh all day until I got time to deal with them.

When it comes time to chop off the roots, I throw the leaves into clean water for a second rinsing, and the bowl of muddy water gets thrown directly outside under the crabapple tree so as not to clog the drain. A third rinsing in clear water removes the last of the dirt and the transformation from the ragged-looking plant begins. As the long jagged green leaves separate in the cleaing, milky white stems are revealed with a shimmering purple center line. The bigger plants are tougher than the young ones we ate a couple weeks ago, and there is less succulent white stem, so they require a little more moisture and more time in cooking. And don't expect to eat a big bowl of dandelion greens. They're more of a spring tonic. Earthy dense flavored, a little goes a long way: they complement well other foods such as the pot roast made last night with barbecue sauce and then sweet potatoes. I package the extra abundance into glass jars or recycled plastic containers of a cup or less in size. They crowd easily into the freezer and are a welcome addition to many dishes in future months.

The old wisdom has it that when daffodils bloom that is the time to plant onions, as well as other early plants as potatoes and asparagus. Today I actually did get the sweet onions ito the ground while the daffodils are still blooming. The onions, which I had started in late February, looked puny but healthy. At first I went for those with dry soil to transplant, but found the little soil balls would fall apart, so then I watered lightly all the dry ones and went for the moister ones. That worked well as the soil held together for the transition into the new hole, newly sprinkled with compost. Several seeds had been sown into each unit, so some units had more than one plant. I did not divide them up at this time, figuring I could thin them out for green onions down the road.

Besides garlic mustard and dandelions, right now I'm also able to pick wild arugula and bits of corn salad, which both have returned from previous years. I've still re-sown regular arugula, which has a slightly milder taste than the wild, but I'm addicted to both. No longer need to re-sow the wild: Arugula selvatica, as it has established itself now!

This morning there was a residual chill from the cold night. I had to get outdoors into the sun and warmed up by finding a sunny spot in the garden in need of weeding. On hands and knees, the warmed soil felt good. It hasn't rained for days.

Winter walk to Stewart Park

2007-03-31T11:03:00.003-04:00

As I plod through my fifties, my exercise regime alternates between days of running and days of lower impact: sometimes nothing more than a quick round of push-ups, sit-ups and stretches, but whenever possible: walking, biking, or if I'm really lucky cross-country skiing. Living, as I do, in the west end of Ithaca, and being rather averse to getting into the car prior to using my body, my trips tend to go two different directions depending on time available and chosen method of travel. I can run over to Cass Park and do a three-mile loop on the nice paved trail. When I have time for a long walk, I often head to Stewart Park which is more like a five-mile trip.

These routes just happen to coincide with the Cayuga Waterfront Trail. Phase 1, already completed, is the Cass Park loop. Phase 2, which links the Cass Park loop to the Farmer's Market was originally supposed to be constructed during 2006, according to the official website www.cayugawaterfronttrail.com, although little obvious progress has been made. Agreements with landowners still have to be ironed before construction can proceed. Phase 3 will eventually link the Farmer's Market to Stewart Park and the Tompkins County Visitors Bureau.

Long walks are a favorite part of my exercise regime – it's less strenuous on the body and the mind. There is time for leisurely contemplation and more opportunity to observe surroundings than during the rush of running. There's not always enough hours in the day for a long walk, especially in winter, during the weekdays. Light is limited; and I do have to show up at my job fairly regularly. Most weekends in winter I manage to fit in one walk to Stewart Park. Although not a finished trail as of yet, it still can be walked.

I start on the very west end of West Court Street. The big parking lot there is filled with potholes on the south end; mud and snow to the north where it's less developed. The anchor restaurant is gone from that location: most recently Buffalo Street Barbecue had a rather short stint, preceded by a longer successful run by Bistro Q. The owners of Bistro Q also managed Just a Taste restaurant in downtown Ithaca; plus they had a catering business and just couldn't handle all that success. Prior to that, Old Port Harbor restaurant was there forever (at least as long ago as I can recall). In the milder times of year, the MV Manhattan still docks there to collect passengers for their dinner boat cruises as well as other cruises, and they apparently use the building to prepare the food.

Although the parking lot is rarely full this time of year, there are cars back there from various businesses in the neighborhood, such as Enterprise auto rental which is on the corner of Buffalo and Fulton. Heading north with the ruts from vehicles in mud and snow, there is what appears to be a lot of nascent activity – much equipment and trucks, but I'm never there in the weekdays to see much work going on. The Spirit of Ithaca is docked there on the shore – another old cruise boat that had been previously docked over by Kelly's restaurant and has not been lake-worthy for many years. One day I was surprised to hear music coming from this old vessel – a jam session seemed in progress. The walking can be difficult along here some times of the year, as the access narrows to a rocky, potentially muddy path along the railroad tracks. The most difficult was following the Valentine's Day snowstorm when the snow was almost two feet deep. A thicket which runs along the shoreline is often busy with birds and rabbits skittering about finding shelter and food.

Next up are the Ithaca College and Cornell boathouses. It's easier walking now to veer away from the railroad tracks into their parking lots, and here the view of the inlet opens up. The Boatyard Grill is just across the inlet on the tip of Inlet Island and Cass Park is beyond. North of the boathouses is a shallow bay where in summers past we have pulled the paddles in on our canoe to float around lazily in the sun and observe a great blue heron still and waiting. Currently we have to continue down the road past Andree's Petroleum towards the Wastewater Treatment Plant, and turn left into the Farmer's Market. But presumably when Phase 2 is complete, the path will turn to the west along the north side of the bay around the DOT property and arrive at Farmer's Market along the shore. They'll have to do some major filling in to accomplish that, as a wide water-filled ditch, with a dense stand of reeds, currently separates the walker from going that route.

Once we do get to the Farmer's Market, we can see where the trail will arrive. An attractive trailhead has already been constructed at the Market. They had a ribbon-cutting for the trailhead in December 2006, but for now it's a trailhead to nowhere.

I continue north along the shoreline around the Farmer's Market building to where Cascadilla Creek runs into the Inlet. The path hugs the shore between the creek and a fence surrounding the wastewater plant. It's wild again along the margin there with the overhanging trees and wildlife. Docked boats can be seen at the marina across the creek and then there's the Haunt. I used to go there when I was young and they had great music down on Green Street. I hear they still have great music and a lot of events and even food. Sometimes I see and smell the smoke coming from their barbecue as I go by.

A footbridge over the Creek brings us very close to the railroad tracks again and then we're on Willow Avenue. There's the building where my daughter used to go to Montessori pre-school. Occasionally I brought her on this very trail, but more often we travelled the paved city streets back then so that I could roll her in the stroller. Turn left and head north on Willow Avenue past various businesses and the Tompkins County Transportation Center where the buses all go at the end of the day, towards the golf course and Cayuga Lake. The Newman Municipal Golf Course has been a popular spot since 1935. I don't totally appreciate golf, as those manicured lawns require an awful lot of inputs of chemicals, so was glad to hear that the city has recently applied for a grant to develop more ecological ways of maintaining the course, such as using effluent from the wastewater plant for the irrigation system. The mature trees are glorious. From the magnificent Scotch Pine and Colorado spruces when you first approach Pier Road to the ancient sycamores and maples scattered throughout, they take my breath away on a sunny day in winter outlined against the sky – the bright white bark of the sycamores festooned with hanging balls. Heading east around the perimeter of the course, glimpses can be seen of the lake to the north.

The path will follow the existing road around the east side of the golf course. Further down the road is a gathering spot for shopping carts which have been found all over the city. A huge mound of wood chips that have been left over from various clean-up operations sends up a damp woodsy odor.. Anyone can back in there with their vehicle and haul out as much wood chips as they can get.

You can also sometimes detect a slight burning odor as you approach the Fire Department's Training Center. Once or twice I've watched the firefighters dealing with a training in full gear, hoisting ladders, ramming into locked doors, voices yelling, and smoke pouring into the sky out of the wrecked cement block structure. Knowing that there was no real danger, I could enjoy the thrilling spectacle of their skill and serious intention.

The trees open up to the east and Fall Creek comes into view. In the milder weather there are often plenty of people spending the afternoon calmly fishing, sometimes equipped with lawn chairs and coolers and children running about. Over the pedestrian bridge we reach the heavily wooded Fuertes Bird Sanctuary. In the wintry time of year, I'm careful to hold onto the railing on the slope entering and leaving the bridge as it can be quite slippery on the wooden surface – I have fallen on my bottom there before!

There's a main path that circles all through the wood. I can walk it in about 15 minutes. You feel like you're in a remote refuge in this old growth woods except for the incessant sound of cars on nearby Route 13. It can be quite muddy during the wet parts of the year. Someone had pitched a tent last year well off the trail where it could barely be seen when vegetation is thick.

Over another footbridge and we're in Stewart Park – depending on the weather, full of picnickers, young people gathering around their cars with stereos blasting, old people feeding the ducks, geese, and gulls, children chasing them and playing in the playground. On the coldest days, maybe just a few birders and people who don't get out of their cars but just come for the view. I head for the Cascadilla Boathouse, and walk between it and the shore and get on the path that goes around the swan pond. Alas there are swans there no more, although there used to be in years past. Then walking along the shore, there is most always a breeze, and an ever-changing panorama of sky and moody watercolors pulsing on the surface of deep waters. In the wintertime, the shallow water freezes for quite a ways, and braver folk than I venture out on the frozen surface to get a closer look at the birds. Once I saw in the distance near Lake Shore Road a large kite trying to catch the wind, and eventually it did reach up to the sky, and the person attached at the other end appeared to be affixed to a skate board. He slid over the ice drawn by the wind from the sail - a winter windsurfer!

At the other side of the park, over the railroad tracks, there is the Ithaca Youth Bureau and the Tompkins County Visitors' Bureau. A small intimate garden behind the Youth Bureau invites quiet contemplation protected by tall cedars and a tiny footbridge bridge over a streamlet.

You could then head out of the park and get on Lake Street and get to visit the roaring waters of Ithaca Falls on the way back into town, or circle back into the Fuertes Woods and back where you came. The possibilities for walking around Ithaca are endless.

2007-02-25T15:36:00.001-05:00

The nose is running; the snow is falling. A little snow shovelling at a time keeps the lungs exercised and the limbs moving. Lots of stretches all day long keep the lower back from failing.

Plants. Seeds ordered last month have arrived, and it's not too late to order more. Time to start cilantro for the first crop of the season. In the past I've used one rectangular peat pot, which was then transplanted into a deeper pot after a month or so. This year I'm trying several small peat pots, and I will place several in one big pot next month. Fill the peat pots with dirt and scatter the seeds. They can be sown fairly thickly. Cover with soil. In a month or two, when the roots start appearing on the bottom of the peat pots, I'll put them all into a deep pot so the roots can keep growing downward. They make nice long roots. This will provide the earliest snippets of cilantro to sprinkle on dishes with mexican or thai flavors. The cilantro roots should not be neglected, as they have yet another dimension of flavor, and can be minced finely to make a wonderful marinade. Grind black peppercorns with garlic and chopped cilantro roots. Mix with fish sauce to a paste. Those plants that are not used when young will produce fine white flowers and set seed for next time.

Indoor plants have been stalwart through the winter, but they need attention. A couple look terrible, and I just can't take it anymore, and add them to the compost. Other big-leaved varieties, like philodendron, and begonias, really benefit from a dusting on a bright day. Those sunny days hovering around thirty are a treat after the harshness of the teens and zero fahrenheit. Bathing in the light from the window, I take a soft cloth and carefully wipe each leaf, and that gives me a chance to see the ones that are so damaged that they are better removed. Soon the plants can breath better again, and I am renewed.

Cooking. One thing good about winter is that there's a natural freezer outdoors on the porch, so it's easy to make big amounts of things, like soups and stews, in stages, and then eventually have a number of containers of various things in the real freezer for future meals over the next weeks or months. The flavor gets a chance to deepen over the slow cooking. There's no pressure, no rush – a little at a time. Those big cast-iron dutch ovens keep the food protected out there in the cold and snow.

One staple in my kitchen is black beans from which I make refried beans, chile, and sometimes black bean soup! Sure I could open a can or two and make a small quantity, but it's more fun to start from scratch, and it's cheaper. An awful lot of food can be made from a one-pound bag of dry beans. The beans need slow and long cooking so they can gradually absorb water and not shrivel. So first they are soaked overnight in a big pot filled with water. That soaking water is dumped out the next day, usually for the crabapple tree just outside the back door. Fresh water is then added to cover at least a few inches above the beans – heat to a boil at first, and then lower to a simmer. In The Good Food Book, Jane Brody recommends repeated cycles of boiling with fresh water and dumping out the water, so as to get rid of the flatulent-causing polysaccharides. I can't quite bring myself to dump out so much of that flavorful water and soluble vitamins and minerals beyond that first soaking. Instead I try to have a supply of epazote handy. This Mexican herb is reputed to reduce the flatulent effect of the beans and it enhances them with a unique flavor as well. Cook for several hours at a low simmer until the beans are soft.

The beans can be left outside well-covered for another night, or more cooking can proceed.

Refried beans are of primary importance in my household as we are regular burrito eaters. Sautee onions, garlic, peppers, salt and pepper; add chili powder, cumin, and coriander. Stir til fragrant, then add the beans with some liquid, so it can continue to cook down and let the flavors meld. Mash and stir; mash and cook some more, gently at a very low heat of course. The potato masher works great on the beans. Cover or not cover depending on how much liquid there is to cook off, and how well the beans are cooked. Stir often so they don't stick. Heavy cookware like cast iron really helps here. Often these go out overnight and come back in for more cooking the next day, as it takes a long time to cook down to the right consistency. They're not called RE-fried beans for nothing. If some black bean soup is desired, can have another pot going with a similar complement of vegetables and spices (an addition of celery would be nice if available), and obviously a much higher ratio of liquid to beans. The onions and peppers are in bigger chunks for the chile or the soup than for the refried beans.

If making a chile with meat, the ground meat should be browned in a separate pan, then drained of grease. It works great to spread it on a brown paper bag to de-grease. (Later the bag is torn up and thrown into the compost. When covered with other food wastes, woodash, leaves and whatnot, meat products are not likely to attract pests.) In the dutch oven, sautee onions, peppers, garlic, and maybe carrots. Add chile powder, along with extra cumin and coriander, salt and pepper til the fragrances arise. Throw in canned tomatoes, and then the beans with a good amount cooking liquid – could also add extra stock if available -- and cook on low for a long time, letting the smells sneak around the house.

I made another catfish stew (in time for Mardi Gras!). Sauteed onions, carrots, celery, garlic, and peppers. Braised big chunks of catfish separately on a hot cast iron skillet peppered with paprika, before adding them to the vegetables. It was time to add herbs or spices. I'm learning that I need to tone down the spices so as to give some of it to my mother. We can add the hot sauces to our portions later. I was thinking cumin would be real nice touch in the stew, but then remembered that probably my mother would prefer oregano/basil Italian version of the catfish stew. Hmm, I took another sniff of the stew. The current vegetable and fish aromas mingled with those that had permeated the castiron of the dutch oven. I threw in a little cumin and then some oregano! Why not? Cooked them a bit, and then the canned tomatoes, and the last bit of a bottle of red wine.

catfish stew

2006-10-16T11:24:00.001-04:00

I'd been waiting all summer for those eggplants to grow. We gave them the utmost attention this year, starting them by seed in early March, and keeping them under fabric cover when transplanted outside so that they were not riddled with flea beetle bites and ultimately destroyed as in previous years. Steve built a wooden frame so the plants could grow big and still be covered up, but not be weighed down by the fabric. Once a week or so I would lift up the side and pull out the weeds and admire the large green leaves with the deep purple hue and eventually they were loaded with little lavender flowers with yellow centers. I wasn't looking at them regularly enough though. After a while it struck me that I hadn't seen any fruits forming from those flowers, just more and more flowers all over the now massive plants. In a moment when talking with Margaret and she mentioned something about pollination. Ah-ha! Probably the bees need to get into pollinate those flowers! My knowledge of botany is kind of vague. Off came the fabric. The plants were big and strong now to withstand insect predation, and soon little black orbs tinged purple to white at the base formed dripping down from the flowers.

That was in mid-September about a month ago. Once the eggplants started forming, I removed many of the flowers and some of the smaller eggplants, so as to give the few a chance to get larger. Each week as frost became a more and more serious threat, I'd pull off all the flowers whenever I'd notice them and also some more of the wee eggplants. Now the little eggplants were big enough to save. A bunch of them could contribute to a meal! In recent days, Steve started to cover up the eggplants, peppers and tomatoes with mattress covers and sheets at night when frost threatened. I'd picked most all the tomatoes and peppers but it would be nice to get some bigger eggplants. Especially since this was a bumper year for zucchinis and I wanted so much to make ratatatouille!.

Had picked enormous numbers of zucchinis until the killing frost a couple days ago. We had not bothered to cover the massive zucchini plants. Now that the giant leaves have turned black and flattened to the ground, a huge green zucchini bat appears lying in contrast across them. It had grown there for a while undetected under the many over-arching leaves despite my daily efforts to seek out such out and prevent such monstrosities. This was only the third or so zucchini that got away from me in the course of the summer. We have enjoyed probably close to a hundred at the perfect size - around six to eight inches long.

As the zucchinis kept piling up and I used them in different ways - zucchini stir-fry with tomato and garlic, curried zucchini, zucchini quiche, zucchini en tuna noodle casserole, and froze some… I longed for the eggplants to be ready as they are the perfect partner for zucchini in ratatatouille - one of those quintessential end-of-summer dishes that absorb lots of tomatoes and peppers as well. A few carrots and green beans can also blend well if they are handy. To make a meal out of it - give it a little protein boost - nothing could beat catfish to my taste.

Catfish nuggets are a great bargain available at my local supermarket. Priced around $3 a pound, they're extraordinarily flavorful, easy to cook, and presumably quite nutritious. I think they're fish-farmed now so hopefully the environment is clean since they're the bottom suckers.

So faced with a pile of small eggplants, each about 3 inches long and not even 1/2 inch wide, I decided it was time for this end-of-summer treat. Though I've been disappointed that they were not bigger, these little gems could probably achieve gourmet status with the right spin! The trend of using baby vegetables seemed rather faddish to me, but that does not prevent me from making the best use of those wee ones when that's all you have.. Chopping up the little eggplants, I started to get concerned how they would taste, so I put in fewer than planned, so I've still got a bunch. Plus we have some more trying to grow in the garden under that mattress cover!

As with most of the things I cook, started with some oil in the cast-iron dutch oven and fried up a couple onions; added carrots, garlic and peppers, salt and eggplant. Didn't bother salting the eggplant first. It was going to be a stew after all so there would be plenty of juices to soften up the eggplant and vice versa. Turned up the heat and threw in the chunks of catfish too. Stirred them around and around. Added a few scarlet runner beans, and some minced thai peppers that were sitting in a small wooden bowl on the table, waiting for just such an opportunity.

Once the pinkness was off the catfish, I cut up some tomatoes and added those to the mix. With my wooden spoon, jabbed the chunks of catfish to break them up a bit, but not too much. Turned the heat down and covered it up and let it simmer. I forgot to put in any herbs or spices! But the flavors that had seeped earlier into the cast iron came out slowly and delicately into the stew. Tortillas on the side with perhaps a touch of sour cream or yogurt, and maybe some cheese.

There is still time...

2006-08-04T11:48:00.001-04:00

The garden is in high gear. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and beans are now coming on seriously. Vacations beckon but home garden demands. Weeding, watering, and most important of all at this time of year: harvesting begins in earnest. And if you like flowers, a few minutes of deadheading each week makes the difference to keep the flowers blooming and the dead at bay: fall is soon enough for dried brown flowerheads. No time to take a vacation, but going out into the garden, if regularly enough, is escape enough. But I went anyway. The family draws even harder on your heart than the plants. And it is good to get away from home to another place once in a while and shed the usual and simplify; but who will take care of the garden?

Every year something does well, and something fails. The humiliation of high August with its assault of insects, weeds, heat, and drought; and the seductive call of the lake and the pool. There are never enough cucumbers that follow the promise of the early plants, for all the pickles that we would like to give as gifts at Christmas. Watering by hand never matches the gift of water from the sky.

The sound of cicadas stops time when it rises up in the afternoon, swelling into the evening into the chorus of the crickets: the music that evokes deep silence--a percussion ensemble totally absorbed in mono-tony, yet it rises and falls and suddenly stops. Are new ones joining in?

Just get out there when you can. Be outside however you can. Enjoy the sweat. Soon enough the walls and the heating system will close in. The pink sky through the haze above West Hill draws me out onto the porch. Cars have died down in the west end, thankfully. The insects almost drown them out when you're outside the house.

It's not too easy to think of fall crops now, but you'll be happy later if you did. It's probably too late now to start broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, collards, and brussel's sprouts. They probably needed to be started by mid-June to get fall crops, though you can never tell what the weather will be like, especially with global warming. We go by experiences in the past--averages and extremes. Carrots should've been sown by mid-July, but no regrets! There is still time to direct seed lettuce, spinach, arugula, cilantro!, mustard greens, chinese cabbage, tat soi, pac choi, and probably a host of others. The rewards will be ample. Diligent watering keeps them going during the hot spells. If you're good and the winter is mild like last year, you can pick the biggest leaves of spinach and lettuce in the fall and then cover the little plants with dry leaves for the winter. In spring, brush off the leaves, and find precious early salads for weeks that predate those sown in March or April.

Salsa time. Peppers are coming on slow, but one little hot purple pepper, ripening to red, is ready and hot enough to carry the salsas. I managed to overwinter Pretty in Purple in a pot over the winter in a south-facing window. A find from Johnny's Selected Seeds, a wonderful seed company from Albion, Maine. It used to be my favorite seed company before discovering the less glossy, more economical, but just as devoted Pinetree Garden Seeds from New Gloucester, Maine. Their seed packets are smaller, but plenty for the home gardener.

The tomatoes are lush. Hybrid Early Girls ripened first, and then the Sweet Million cherry tomatoes. But now the heirloom tomatoes are kicking in with incomparable flavor--Pruden's Purple (I'd sure like to know who Pruden was--is all I know is that this is delicious, a dusky pink and considered to be an early Brandywine) and Golden Queen (this one is from the Amish introduced in 1882). Brandywine, another Amish tomato, has not yet totally ripened. Hardly a meal goes by without some manifestation of tomatoes.

Oh, the kids are hungry or thirsty! They are running downstairs. What will they find in the kitchen? The kids are old enough to poke around and find something good. Rachel is well-rehearsed in what is available, and since she entered her teens, she has shown more interest in good nutrition.

I was just enjoying some sun tea;--very refreshing-made with a little English Breakfast tea for a little kick, and for flavor, herbs from the garden, dried--bee balm, peppermint, catnip, maybe some thyme flowers? Each time I make it it is a little different--I follow my nose and throw in what smells harmonious.

2006-07-22T14:16:00.000-04:00

Succession planting. Here it is July, and I still don't have all the plants in the garden. Not only are the plants for the fall garden waiting in the wings, but also some of the summer ones. There's still basil in pots, as well as dwarf marigolds and a second round of calendulas. They're still rather small so I didn't want to rush to get them into the garden, and then have to struggle to keep them watered. When they are so little, they might need to be watered at least twice a day in a dry spell. To keep them growing I transplanted them into slightly bigger pots, as I do with most plants before finally settling them into the garden. After initially sowing seeds in small plastic six-pack units, I transfer most plants into 15-ounce ricotta cheese or sour cream containers, or sometimes the little 8-ounce yogurt containers.. (Some fast-growing plants like tomatoes go directly into 32-ounce yogurt containers.) To make holes in the bottom for drainage, I turn them upside down on a flat surface, and jab through with a two-pronged carving fork in several places.

A few plants, like lobelia, begonias, and small-leafed basil, are transplanted into a nicer pot to display on a window sill or on the patio. But most of the containers are in the coldframes or in flats on the floor of the porch. There's not really a rush as some or all can stay in pots if need be.

All the plants for the fall garden have also been transplanted into the bigger containers and are waiting in the coldframes for when there is room in the garden. Kale, collards, cabbage, cauliflower, cabbage, and radicchio were all started by seed May 21, even before the tomatoes got into the garden! They can grow into the containers until they reach a decent size for transplanting, and equally important, when there is room in the garden!

The garden is constantly in sequence from one crop to another in the summertime. When the spring crops finish up, there's room for whatever is ready to go in next. I have maps of the garden from the last two years, and all the beds are numbered. I refer to these to try to avoid planting anything in the same spot where it has been before in those two years, so as to make it harder on the pest insects and diseases to get a foothold. So far I have not been able to work up a complete plan prior to planting time, as there are so many variables. It's a rather fluid time -- constantly evaluating what needs to get into the ground and where there is room, and what grew there before. I try not to get in a rush and make snap decisions, because that's when I make mistakes.

There's also the over-wintered crops to consider and it differs from year to year what survives the winter and flourishes in spring. Last year I had let a small bed of garden cress flower in summer. By fall, it had re-seeded itself over two beds where the garlic was harvested in mid-summer. Early this spring it came back again, and so I let them stay, and we enjoyed plenty of fresh cress before any other spring greens were ready. They flowered in late spring, and I hope they had a chance to spread more seed, but come June I just had to pull them out to make room for tomatoes and zucchinis. Tomatoes just get too big to stay in pots unless they're hugh pots. Zucchinis I start from seed out in the ground.

Wild arugula is another crop that is abundant from last year. No need to re-sow that this year! It threatens to take over, so I have to pull out more than we can actually eat. Nevertheless we've been eating plenty of this pungent green, as well as freezing some for later use, as I do with all the greens when they are abundant.

The last of the lettuce is showing early signs of going to seed and the pea and snap pea vines are putting out fewer flowers, and when it's all over there will be two more beds there. Once we get a dry spell, it won't be long after that for the garlic to be ready to pull.

Rain. We've had plenty of rain this summer so far, unlike the drought of last year. Others around us - near the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers - suffered torrential floods, which we were spared here in Ithaca. Everything is lush from the rain.

Mulch. Maybe it was last year's drought, or just getting tired of the endless weeding, but this year Steve and I decided to go much heavier on the mulch than we have in the past 12 or so years gardening together. Going back to my roots, in a way. The first garden I ever had back in my parents' yard in Columbus, Ohio, was inspired by intensive reading of Organic Gardening publications. Ruth Stout was among the most inspiring and entertaining. A beginning gardener, already I was attracted to her no-work mulch method, realizing that I too would be old someday. At that time I had access to all the grass clippings I could desire, as my father mowed the large lawn and all the clippings collected in a bag hooked to the mower. Here in Ithaca we buy straw bales from Agway, and leave our grass clippings on the grass to keep the lawn nourished. We've done some mulching in the past, but not enough to really cut down on the weeding. This year we've bought more bales than ever before, so we can lay them down thickly, at least around the tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, and peppers. It keeps the moisture in, cuts down on weeding, and breaks down some, adding more organic matter to the soil.

Ruth Stout says leaves can be used too, and I will have to try that too, but we're running low on leaves now. In the fall, we run around and drive around taking other people's bags of leaves off the curb, where they're waiting to be picked up by the city. We stockpile them and use them for layering in the compost bin to cover the kitchen waste in the wintertime when we are short of weeds. We have used them for mulching plants in the fall, and covering some, like spinach, in the hopes of over-wintering. But why not use them in the summertime, if we have enough? Will have to gather even more this fall to have next summer!

Another garlic mustard pull

2006-05-13T20:19:00.003-04:00

Another garlic mustard pull at the Biodiversity Preserve today, and another beautiful day despite (or maybe because of) the dramatic clouds building up and erupting into rolling thunder as we were leaving. We had two smaller groups today, but our group made considerable progress clearing out a lovely wooded area full of wildflowers -- white foam flower, bishops cap, dark-pink flowered geraniums, jack-in-the-pulpit, and blue cohosh -- right near a beaver dam in the Cayuga Inlet. Betsy called it the "Sugar Cup" and said they have been working on that area at least every second year for the past eight years, and the efforts are obviously paying off as the clumps were much fewer than in the past. So that was particularly satisfying to wander around and pick every garlic mustard in sight until after a while we could no longer find any.This time I brought along a garlic mustard appetizer to introduce everyone to its flavor. I modified Jane Brody's "Spinach and cheese squares" recipe from The Good Food Book. Instead of the 10 oz frozen spinach spinach, I used almost that much garlic mustard which I had previously cooked as above (2nd delicious idea). The addition of garlic chives is excellent too, if you have it available.

* 2 eggs
* 6 T whole wheat pastry flour
* 8 oz cooked garlic mustard
* 2 T chopped garlic chives
* 16 oz (2 cups) cottage cheese
* 2 cups grated cheddar cheese
* 1/2 tsp black pepper to taste
* 1/8 tsp cayenne to taste
* pinch nutmeg
* 3 T wheat germ

Pre-heat the oven to 350. Whip up the eggs and stir in the flour til well-mixed. Add the rest of the ingredients (except wheat germ) and mix well. Turn on to greased 13" by 9" pan. Sprinkle with wheat germ. Bake 45 minutes or so. Let cool in pan 10 minutes before cutting into squares.

Garlic Mustard - its time has come!

2006-05-09T20:16:00.002-04:00

Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) has an image problem! Here is a wonderful useful plant that was introduced to the United States by European settlers who appreciated its flavor as well as well as its nutritional value (high in vitamins A and C). Plus they found it helpful controlling erosion, and even treating ulcers and gangrene! Eventually it escaped from cultivation on Long Island and became a pest from Maine to Oregon and into Canada. It's mostly a concern in forests where it exudes chemicals which disrupt the mychorrizal fungi that so many trees depend on. (Back in Europe there are plenty of insects who devour it, but not here. Even the deer don't like it, so they actually hasten its spread by eating its native competitors instead.) The paradox is that if garlic mustard were more popular then it would be less of a problem. Hence the campaign to use it while we try to eradicate from our forests. If leagues of people were heading out to the woods and fields every spring to pick crops of garlic mustard, then the problem of it taking over our woodlands would soon be over.

On Sunday I participated in a "Garlic Mustard Pull" at the Lindsay-Parson Biodiversity Preserve in West Danby, New York. This 450-acre preserve full of glacial hills and a mix of forest and meadow, ponds and stream, is not immune to the onslaught of garlic mustard, but fortunately its presence is so far limited to spots here and there. But that could change if no control measures are taken. It seems like a Herculean task when you look at the enormous numbers of plants in some patches. So the strategy, as Betsy Darlington, a delightful doyenne of nature activism in Ithaca, explained, is to first pick your area, where it is not so impossible and overwhelming. Our group went deep into the woods to a a spot filled with the enchantments of rolling terrain scattered with ferns in the underbrush, and a patch of mayapples, studded with white trilliums and other native plants. Betsy showed us a jack-in-the-pulpit (first time I recall seeing one), and it wasn't soon after that I discovered one for myself while pulling garlic mustard. Once the area is chosen, then we fanned out and went after the outliers - the upstarts that were on the march spreading outward from the patch.

The past few weeks have been the ideal time for pulling out the plants, as they start to get big, and up to the time that they begin to flower, but before they set seed. I only had a few plants in my yard, as I try to pull all of them every year, but I don't have to go far to find vast fields of them. Recently I filled several bags at the Fuertes bird sanctuary here in Ithaca, New York, and another day on the path along the water north of the Farmer's Market. Some delicious ideas:

* Young tender leaves can be torn up a bit and added to salads.
* Sautee garlic in olive oil or sesame oil or bacon grease; add chopped garlic mustard and other greens if available (garlic chives, spinach, arugula, lambsquarters, mustard greens, what-have-you); a little salt or soy sauce; add a bit of water or stock and cook gently. A dash of vinegar, balsamic or otherwise, may be in order. Taste and decide. This could be spread on toast, added to casseroles, eggs, quiche, stir-fries, etc.
* Garlic mustard pesto: crush garlic, slice up garlic mustard and also garlic chives if available, puree both in food processor with olive oil and walnuts (or pine nuts); add parmesan cheese. Start the water for pasta!
* Cream sauce: heat 1/4 cup oil and add 1/4 cup flour and cook; add hot milk. Separately cook finely chopped garlic mustard in a little sesame oil; and tamari or soy sauce. Add some of the sauce; puree in food processor and add back to the sauce. Add cheese as desired. Good on stuffed grape leaves for one.
* With leftover garlic mustard sauce, add a little yogurt, balsamic vinegar, and tamari and serve as a sauce for steamed asparagus.
* Make a sauce for roast beef. First the roast beef: make a slurry with crushed garlic and Worcestershire sauce, and make little inch slashes on the roast. Take a teaspoon to inject the slurry into the slashes, and slather the rest of the slurry all over the roast. Add some water to the bottom of the roast pan. Cover with aluminum for part of the cooking time so the outside doesn't burn. Bake at 325 til it reaches the desired internal temperature according to your meat thermometer. Make a cream sauce with the garlic mustard: Chop finely the garlic mustard and garlic chives, which are also in great abundance. Sautee in olive oil; add chicken stock or other liquid and cook gently. Make a cream sauce (as above) and add it all together along with drippings from the roast beef pan. This is so flavorful - cheese is unnecessary.

parable of the potatoes

2005-07-02T14:02:00.000-04:00

I confess to being a food fascist. Not the kind who tells people what kind of food to eat, but the one who can't bear to throw food away and tries to find a use for everything before it goes bad. It's not so bad when I'm home and can keep better track and encourage my two family members on the things that they might like to eat, but I get into trouble when I am on vacation and we're ready to go home and none of my extended family members (who bought most of this excess food) wants to carry any of it home with them. So it's triage for me—deciding what can fit into my cooler and what must go into the trash. At least at home I can compost the remains or feed it to the worms, but I'm not going so far as to pack the car with smelly food for the compost.

I should be thanking all of the others for their leftovers instead of complaining; I just feel sad about the wasted food that goes into the trash.

Every year for the past seventeen years my family has taken a vacation together spread across three or four cabins on a lake in southeastern Ohio. It's a venue that everyone from old to young enjoys. The first night we always eat at the lodge restaurant and the rest of the week each family takes a turn to cook in the cabins.

On the last night of the week, we have leftover night. In the last few years I've taken over organizing just because that's my thing - it gives me great satisfaction to make good out of leftovers. My aunt wanted to take us all to the lodge for another dinner, but to me and at least one of my sisters, that would be a shame. I said it would be a sin! to waste all this food. My Irish aunt calls missing Mass a sin. Each to her own.

Food is often connected with religion: just for starters the bread and wine of the Catholicism I've been trying to leave behind; nevertheless I appreciate the potent metaphor of the deep dark association with body and blood. We do ultimately eat our ancestors (or somebody else's). My own home-grown religion is grounded in the very soil that nourishes the seeds, and the whole cycle in which there is no waste, thanks to compost. Anything that we let go bad goes to the compost, so there is less guilt then. "Waste not want not", my mother always told me, and it sunk in deeper than she might have expected; eventually, I think I now believe it more than she does, and appear a bit fanatical. My daughter finds it a foolish saying, but I bet it will sink into her too. She's already picked up my nutritional ideas (though she was very fussy from age 5 to 14 or so, similar to my own fussy food age); also she's starting to pick up on the environmental value of my aversion to cars, and encourages her friends to walk whenever possible. I suppose what I have to learn is not to preach to people, but to care about their feelings and merely to subtly inspire them. They surely inspire me with their thoughtfulness about many other things for which I am at a loss.

This is the first year that the kids' cabin took a turn to cook—now that the kids are all teenagers and some in their twenties. We've only had a separate cabin for the kids the last two years or so. Since we already had so much food accumulated, we encouraged them to use some of it, but could certainly understand that they wanted to make what they wanted to make. So Mikie got chicken breasts which he marinated in Italian dressing, and barbecued brilliantly even though it started pouring rain. Fortunately he was under some trees and got finished before the leaves became full of water and dropped it all.

My aunt Ethel, who had wanted to bring us to the lodge, had also nevertheless gone grocery shopping earlier in the week when my sister wanted to go after Mass, and she bought ingredients for a rigatoni casserole. Plus she had brought two bags of salt potatoes with her from Syracuse because my Mom raves about it every time she makes it. Just in case.

So we encouraged the kids to use the potatoes and they decided to use the rigatoni too. Jamie came in that day to my cabin, and asked if I had a potato peeler. I told her that there was no need to peel the potatoes—the peel is the best part. Well, she was intending to use the peel; she just had another idea. She and Ricky peeled the potatoes and she cooked up the peels in butter and onions and garlic, and then boiled the potatoes and planned to mash them and add in the potato peels. I respected her creativity and initiative and didn't give her anymore advice though it seemed a lot of work for all those little potatoes. But hey, they don't have much to do while on vacation. And Ricky probably doesn't get involved in the cooking chores too often; so that was his contribution. It beats watching TV! Joey cleaned the dishes that had accumulated over the days in the sink. Rachel put together the salad or made the rigatoni or something. They all contributed.

The kids were doing the final cooking and we were relaxing at happy hour when Aunt Ethel caught wind that they were mashing the salt potatoes. "You don't do that! Didn't you read the directions?!" She got right up out of her chair and went into the kitchen. After the dinner was all ready, we found out that she must have told Jamie to add the salt bag. Well, the salt bag is for adding to the water when boiling the potatoes. The potatoes were already boiled; nevertheless someone added the entire bag of salt to the potatoes. I wasn't there to witness this. I don't think anyone one could do more but peck at the final salty product.

For leftover night, (among many other things) we boiled more potatoes (with no salt!) and added them, lumpily mashed, to the salty potatoes, and eventually the right balance was found and they were most delicious. I just wanted to bring to realization the potatoes that Jamie had intended (and not waste anything, of course.) Ethel did like them in the end, even though they weren't done in the traditional way. Unfortunately there's a hugh amount of them, and I will try to fit them in the cooler and find uses for them at home. Potato pancakes, potato pie with cheese….

Living with the weeds

2005-06-14T10:11:00.000-04:00

The plum tree is loaded this year; branches are bowed over filled with little plums, and today I noticed the June drop has begun. When you don't use poisons to control disease, clean cultivation is one way to help prevent problems. Getting rid of rotting fruit all over the ground will provide less nourishment for those bugs who like to feed on the fruit. After the first five minutes or so of sitting and kneeling on the ground, picking up one hard or sometimes shriveled little plums scattered below the whole circumference of the tree--millions of them--in the grass--it's one of those activities, when I start to wonder if I'm nuts! But then I start to get into it. At first I barely can see all the little plums, but soon my eyes focus on their purplish green oval forms hiding in the grass. After a bit I start noticing more all the varied little plants that are growing. This is not just grass, but white clover, which is currently flowering, and gill-over-the-ground, which has some little purple flowers still blooming. Fortunately Steve cut the grass before the magnificent thunderstorm yesterday that shook so many of the littlest plums out of the tree. The plums are a bit more visible iin the short grass. Even little tiny wild strawberries have managed to set fruit here and there in the short grass. When I crawl close to the tree trunk, I start to notice the activity of insects going up and down the bark. Besides ants there are a number of another insect that I don't recognize. It is black with two orange stripes going the length of its back. It crawls onto my hand too with many legs. It's maybe 4 mm long and 1 1/2 mm wide. Back into the grass I start to see more of these critters and others--a ladybug, and another triangular orange insect and I wish I knew all their names and whether they are friend or foe. And soon I am grateful for this seemingly insane task that has taken a half hour so far and I am only half done. What a good excuse to crawl around the grass and look at everything. I can even look up occasionally from my task to see the yellow mustard flowers and the fava beans in the garden waving in the breeze, and the blue sky and white clouds above, and still feel productive.

So much of gardening is a good excuse to play in the dirt and be outside. When I put transplants into the ground, like the tomatoes and peppers which I recently planted, it reminds me of playing in the dirt as a child, making hills and rivers and pouring water through them. For each plant I dig a hole, throw in some compost and then gently place in the plant, and pat back in the dirt. I raise up the soil in ring around the plant four or five inches or so from the plant, so that when I water it, the water does not flow away but stays within the rilng and percolates downwards into the roots.

2005-05-27T20:27:00.000-04:00

Lambsquarters are everywhere but small yet. Nevertheless I need to pull out a bunch now to make room for other things. And they must drain out some of the nutrientrs from the plants they appear with. They're all over spots of the garlic, and the irises! I'm always glad to see them: #1 they indicate a good soil, at least it's high in nitrogen, #2 they make the most delicious cooked green. And they're good in salads too! They take a bit of work processing but it's fun and medative. The leaves are small but with a compost bucket at hand, the good parts can go into another bowl for washing. Or sometimes, if I pick them in the morning, but don't have much time, I just fill a bowl with cold water and stick them in roots and all; that evening when I have more time I can pluck the leaves and wash them.

2005-05-24T20:26:00.000-04:00

The peas are growing and I finally got around to putting up the trellis netting. What a wonderful invention that was. It's a heavy duty nylon mesh that you can hang between stakes. I guess you can staple them to wood stakes, but they are most conveniently used with the metal stakes that those little grippers that you can hang the mesh on. I bought the trellis netting at least seven years ago and have re-used it every year for peas, snow peas, and cucumbers. It's so easy to work with--it's quite amazing. It helps to put it up when the air is fairly still. Well, I always enjoyed untangling things, and they do get a little tangled in storage though I try to fold them neatly at the end of each year. On an unwindy evening like today, I took the pieces out of storage and laid them in the grass, so as to pick out pieces of the best length. On previous years, I've cut off extra ends with scissors. Last year I actually used little bits of twine to tie together two shorter pieces. I might actually have to buy more trellis netting this year (or use more stakes?) but I still think that's pretty good. Growing the tall types of peas and cucumbers up vertically saves a lot of space, and gives the veggies plenty of air to deter some diseases.

Been picking radishes which I always sow together with the carrots. Carrots always need some thinning, so picking the radishes starts off the thinning. The radishes grow quickly and are so cheerful to see coming up. They're a nice touch in the salad.

2005-05-18T20:25:00.000-04:00

Yet another reason to allow deer hunting: "In places that have had very limited or no deer hunting, native plant losses are four times greater than those open to deer hunting," Dr. Rooney [Tom Rooney of University of Wisconsin] said. "The deer population has been growing steadily since the 1960's. They are having a profound effect on the spring ephemerals and other wildflowers." ("Forest's Colorful Jewels in a Fight for Their Lives" New York Times, May 17, 2005)

2005-05-15T20:24:00.000-04:00

Found a horde of little dill plants that had re-seeded themselves from last year. Most of them are right in my path. Pulled up a few all the way to the roots, and then inside put them in a little shot glass with water to keep on the counter and remind me to use dill on this and that--sandwiches, salads, omelet, asparagus, whatever.

Living with the weeds

2005-05-10T20:22:00.000-04:00

More salad greens all the time now! Lambsquarter are sprouting thick on certain beds. They're fantastic when they're big, so why not pick the biggest of the sprouts now to add to salads. Keep doing that until you need to put something else into that bed. By early June almost everything will be planted, so just pick the lambsquarters by then, and the biggest ones before that.

Which is also what I do with the lettuces and other greens that I sowed in early April.

Reading the news or hearing it on the radio. I got a question: the reporters report that when some guy (usually a guy) gets pulled over for some minor traffic infraction, or the police come knocking at the door (without a search warrant), and the suspect gives them permission to search their house or car. My question: why do they give them permission? My suspicion: there is a threat involved.

Redbud Woods

2005-04-30T10:58:00.001-04:00

Observations.

Yesterday, I took a walk up University Avenue, looking for the disputed Redbud Woods. Cornell students have been demonstrating and were hauled out of Day Hall by police; two others chained themselves to a little sycamore tree outside the administration bulding in symbolic protest of Cornell's plan to pave over this small woods. Cornell claims that they can only attract world-class freshman students if they can park their cars near to their dorm. The neighborhood association and the city's Landmarks Preservation Committee have been against the idea, but Cornell sued, and the state's Supreme Court ruled that it was an appropriate use of land under the zoning laws in existence. Though I've done plenty of walking to and from Cornell, and all around, I didn't recall ever walking through Redbud Woods, so I decided to check it out.

It's perfect timing to take a walk up University Avenue. Past the gorge entrance at the east end of Court Street, up the hill, the old cemetery looms to the right and the forsythia cascade all along the road in abundant bloom. Large houses full of student rentals and year-round residents are on the west side of the street overlooking the city. Before the four-way intersection with Willard Way and Gunhill Road, the entry way to Redbud Woods is on the right. A crumbling asphalt path winds through the woods. Lo and behold, a pink haze comes into focus as I walk and I see that the woods is indeed full of redbud trees coming into bloom. A deer crossed my path. This is the ideal way for people living on University Ave (as we call it) to gather their thoughts while making their way to the campus without a car. Such pocket parks are so essential to a quality urban life. It seems terribly regressive that Cornell wants to create another ugly parking lot that just encourages more driving. I'll be adding my voice to let Jeffrey Lehman (president of Cornell) know that this is not sustainable.

I took another route back downtown--a way I had gone many times in the past. Out of Redbud Woods, I headed south on Stewart Avenue past the new West Campus dorms, where freshman would live with or without their cars within a block away. The safety walls built around the construction site had "No parking" signs splashed on them. Graffiti artists added "in Redbud Woods." In a few minutes, I arrived at the bridge over Cascadilla Gorge. Right before the bridge, there's a walking path that heads down the hill overlooking the gorge. I wanted to see what spring flowers were blooming. The small gardens nestled in beds on ledges amid rocks by the old European-style houses as the path winds down the hill overlooking the gorge and rushing water far below. At one spot in the path I noticed a patch of garlic mustard budding out, just getting ready to bloom. I turned around and decided to pick them all, as there were only about 15 or 20 plants amid the vinca. But if they were left to go to seed, they would probably be taking over by next year. Pulled them by the roots and carried the bundle home and stuck them right in the bucket along with the dandelion greens I had picked earlier in the day at home. I had filled the bucket with water so as to keep the greens fresh until processed later in the day.

2005-04-23T10:57:00.001-04:00

The spring is too busy. Trips south to DC area and NYC give a foretaste to the spring coming here. After seeing cherries and crabapples in bloom down there, and trees lit in pale green lining the streets, it's exciting to come home to barer branches and be able to still watch the slow development.

Indoor gardening. Keeping all the little seeds watered and transplanting to bigger pots as needed. Getting more regular about giving a 1/2 strength fish emulsion fertilizer to the seedlings.

Outdoor gardening. Weeding: it's always a meditation on whether or not to pull what. Today was perfect conditions for weeding. After a long dry spell we got some gentle rain, and so much easier to pull out the newly vibrant plants. Many so-called weeds are desirable—they're just volunteers, after all—seeds in the wind, on hoof and alimentary system of birds and other creatures. Some are encouraged and others are yanked. I pull with regret the red dead nettle, with its purple flowered umbrellas, which looks delightful now, but it's better to catch it before it goes to seed. I need the room and into the compost pile it goes.

Competition is stiff in the plant world and life is often brief. Few species manage to survive to old age. Ancient trees inspire us with awe. Old people are honored but more so in the past; that respect is decreasing as the old become less rare.

Each year different plants manage to survive the winter. Last year, I had spinach and lettuce come back in the spring after having been covered by leaves during the cold of winter. Those so covered this year did not survive, but others that were not purposely covered are now offering small leaves for salads: radicchio, cress and arugula. Gathering greens for a salad in the early spring is like a miracle. There doesn't appear to be enough of anything, but little bits pile up. It does help to go out almost every morning to get some more, as things keep growing even in these cool temperatures. Also you always find more on each foraging trip. In addition to the greens that survived over the winter, there is corn salad that has seeded itself all over. Wild violets I have encouraged in certain areas to seed out and are now spreading under the crabapple tree and provide vitamin-C rich greens. Their main competitor now is lemon balm. I use some of their leaves too, but will pull some of that out, as I prefer more violets. There's also still some garlic mustard that I missed earlier. A bit of spearmint is good. (Another thing that is spreading and I have to pull out some.) Dandelions are getting bigger and I will dig those for cooked greens, but some of the smaller plants, I pick to throw into the salad. There is a great abundance of garlic chives now, as well as regular chives. Garlic chives are another rather aggressive plant which looks charming when in flower but seeds mischievously everywhere, and the deep roots are hard to pull out without a hand spade. So I will use them liberally and dig some out later.

Asparagus is poking up a few inches in purple. Next week's dinner!!

2005-04-05T10:56:00.002-04:00

The teeming activity of spring! Let me categorize the activites:

Indoor gardening. Started seeds last week of tomatoes, tomatillos, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and some flowers: zinnia and calendula, and a couple of herbs I am short of: sage and hyssop. The sage died last year, and the hyssop is so lovely, and it doesn't always come back like it should.

Soak parsley seed to sow outside!

Outdoor gardening. Pick dandelions. Weed! There's so much grass in the paths of the garden that never got dug up last year, and it's just too narrow to mow in the paths, I believe. I had been hoping Steve would do that for me as a regular practice, but he seems to be more absorbed in other activities, so I should just do it myself. Good exercise!

When the ground is dry enough, sow seed of peas, snow peas, fava beans, lettuce, spinach, mustard, arugula, carrots and radishes. Plant sets of onions, and finally this year I have gotten hold of Egyptian onions! I love anything perennial, and these should supply instances of onions, green or otherwise, at different times of the year. It's hard to always have a supply of green onions handy just when you want them for that batch of peanut noodles or tabouli, so I'm hoping the Egyptian walking onions will help. Yes, I suppose their walking habit will be a little irritating but I'm that kind of casual gardener who can sometimes be led by the plants and not be so controlling that everything must be in its place where I want it. That's too exhausting! I see the strawberries that Margaret gave me last year are spreading into the next bed; even worse the wild raspberries by the fence are bending over and taking root in my flower bed! Should that be allowed?

Cook. Dandelions! First time this year. Today I did the meat version with bacon. (Next time vegetarian for Rachel [and me] I promise.) Yes it is a lot of work, and I always feel slightly crazy but that's when I meditate. I'm trying to explain this in the checkout line of the grocery store, when my mother asks me about echinecea and tobacco.

Observations. It is essential to sit on the beautiful days, at least for a little while, perhaps in the sheltered sun of the south-facing patio after the rocks have absorbed the sun for a few hours. Listen and look. Last week I saw a single cedar waxwing in the crabapple tree-the scout. Today there are maybe a hundred. They come in for a few minutes, eat the crabapples and flit around, then all fly off, usually to the top branches of the big walnut (?) trees behind the Red Cross shelter. Then after a while swoop down again for another visit to the crabapple tree. Each one is like a miniature painting.

Take a walk! That is something that I tend not to do enough of once garden season starts because there is always so much to do here at home, but it is so good to walk and get away and observe other people's gardens and just do that walking meditation and stretch.

Time to start sweet onion seed soon...

2005-01-22T10:47:00.000-05:00

Our favorite for several years has been Ailsa Craig Exhibition sweet onions. Can be ordered from Pinetree Seeds among other sources. Impatiens are a good annual to fill in the semi-shady spots on the front (north) side of the house, and they need to be started in January to get flowers starting in June. Other seeds that I will start in late January or early February: cilantro, spicy globe basil, lobelia, pansy, and coleus..

Roast turkey

2005-01-21T10:47:00.000-05:00

Although the days are getting longer, January seems the darkest month. The warmth of the Christmas lights has dwindled away. Still need those brisk walks outside--no matter what the weather, but it's really a time to turn inward, or at least inside and do some baking. Baking bread is indispensable. Roasting meat for a long time is a good one too.

A turkey roasting provides warmth during the day, good smells, a wonderful stock for various uses, a special treat for the cat, and lots of leftovers. Taking full advantage of the carcass turns the turkey feast into a very economical, and ultimately labor-saving process. There's a fair amount of work at the beginning, but the delicious stocks and packages in the freezer provide a basis for many meals into the future. What seems like a big project becomes more leisurely when done bit by bit over days, rather than all in one long day.

Preparation begins long before for the stuffing. Ends of bread are saved in the freezer. A day or two before turkey day, the bread is thawed and cubed and left on cookie sheets to dry up. Attention turns to the preparation of the giblet stock. The innards and and neckbone are removed from the turkey cavity. Reserving the liver temporarily, the rest is put in a pot covering it with fresh water, along with a few pieces of onion, carrot and celery, some herbs. Gently simmer for a few hours and there is the beginning of the gravy and some of it can be used to moisten the stuffing. Add the liver the last hour, so it doesn't get too tough. Strain the giblet stock, and chop the liver and heart into little pieces. Give a bit to the cat, along with pieces from the neckbone. The bread is now dry. Add a beaten egg, chopped onion, celery, pecans, apples and raisins, a bit of sage perhaps, and mix it up with the dried bread, along with some stock. Add some of the giblets and save the rest for the gravy. Sometimes I use some turkey stock that was saved from a previous occasion, so as not to have to wait for the giblet stock to be ready. I've been known to throw in chicken stock sometimes too, but don't tell anyone.

On turkey day, rinse and dry the turkey. Paint it with a paste of stock, oil, crushed garlic, and paprika. Fill it with stuffing and put it breast-side up on the roasting pan. A cup of water and a chopped onion goes on the bottom, and the whole thing is covered with a tent of aluminum foil. This keeps it from drying out. The foil can be removed the last hour or so of cooking to darken the skin. Bake at 325° for as long as it takes to get to an internal temperature of 180-185° in the thigh (about 20 minutes per pound of turkey) . Thanks to Jane Brody's Good Food Book, whose Roasted Stuffed Turkey provides the basic recipe that has been my starting point.

If there's no gravy leftover from previous occasions, the turkey should come out of the oven well in advance of eating. Once the turkey is out of the oven and with care is transferred out of the pan to a platter, the drippings are poured into a can, which disappears into the freezer for hardening. After an hour or so, the fat is scraped off the top. About 1/4 cup is heated in a pan and an equivalent amount of flour is added and stirred in gently and continually to avoid lumpiness and scorching. After the flour has cooked for a few minutes, pour in the giblet stock gradully while stirring, and then the drippings that were in the freezer. You don't want to introduce much more fat at this point, so be careful to have removed all the fat from the can first.

I take some other short-cuts sometimes. If I can't wait so long for the drippings to separate, I might use bacon drippings or oil for the fat and turkey stock from a previous occasion.

There was a mystique to carving the beast when I grew up. It was a man's job--one of the few times you saw a man working in the kitchen. It does take some skill and patience to carve out multitudes of thin slices onto a platter. My slices tend to be of variable sizes. After the bulk of the slicing is done, I resort to the oldest best tool--my hands--to tear remaining pieces of meat from the bones. Invariably much meat is leftover and is roughly sorted by grade and bundled into plastic bags. The carcass is returned to the roasting pan, covered, and stored safely out in the cold, like in a shed where no animalsm can get to it.

The next day the carcass is covered with cold water and brought to a simmer. Throw in chunks of onions (pierced with a few whole cloves), carrots, celery, and bay leaf. Over the course of the afternoon, between doing other things, I throw in other things: a bunch of parsley, peppercorns, halved garlic, tarragon and thyme. Simmer for hours. The smell will warm the house. Strain and cool into a big pot. Even then I still save some of the bits of turkey left for the cat and to be thrown into soup or stews. The pot of broth is covered and again goes out into a cold safe place so that the fat can separate. The next day, the fat is scraped off and discarded; the broth is gently heated to the point where it can be poured out into smaller containers, so some can be frozen for other occasions.

first frost

2003-10-17T11:24:00.002-04:00

So much has happened since spring. Small seeds have sprouted into luxuriant plants, laden with fruits, and now death is a common event, but it always makes us pause, at the very very least. Overnight, the few thin tomato vines that still reached for the sky, the young ones that were unscathed by the munching of fungi and other critters, have now succumbed to the deadly frost. The pepper plants were oblivious til the last moment--looking lush and stouter than ever up to that last day, pumping out yet more flowers. It is bittersweet to go out in the garden in the soft muted light of a misty October day, which only intensifies the colors contrasting and there is the feeling of impending doom and then the next day all is covered with a thin layer of frost and a mild sense of relief as soon the labors of canning will turn into pride on the basement shelves. Another year is lost and gained. Virginia creeper leaves are dark red, showing up against the still green wild grapevines on the fence. Every day is a new change in color. Dead marigolds and sunflower stalks pulled out of the garden gain new respect and renewed charm laid hapless on the walls of the bird's nest bin.

The drought did not do good for the pumpkins this year, but the color of fall still shows up in the bowls of tomatoes in various stages of ripeness/unripeness on the coffee table in the living room. Green, pink blush, yellow and red. Potted plants that were outside are crowding for space at the windows.

In the garden, the fall crops come to the fore. Dark-green spinach; lettuces in hues from light green to streaked with the seriousness of dark red. White cauliflowers sparkle amidst the rows of every shade of green: brussels' sprouts, cabbages, kales, collards, and broccoli too. Tuscan kale adds a note of blue to the green, and I am again back in Italy, where I have never been. I squat to pull carrots from the still-yielding earth.

Today is the day to plant garlic.

The harvest is coming on hot...

2003-07-15T13:45:00.002-04:00

[butterfly (center), purple coneflower (Echinecea purpurea) and bee balm (Monarda) on left]

The harvest is coming on hot and heavy. The weather is almost too hot to cook other than barbecue, but the vegetables are beckoning. The salads are wonderful.
Oh, to go out in the morning and pick snow peas dripping from vines almost as tall as me. The perfect basis for a stir-fry. Delicate salad greens that could never survive shipping, but are a work of art on a salad or even placed on a sandwich for that moment before the top bread goes on. And the asparagus is still coming! Lightly steamed, they just hardly need anything--maybe a bit of butter, a splash of balsamic vinegar or lemon juice.
Soon it's time to let the asparagus grow up its hairy ferns to build strength for next year. The peas, and then the snow peas start to decline, and the lettuce begins to bolt. Pick quickly and enjoy big salads! Let some plants go to flower to collect seed later.
Now the attention is drawn to the fava beans. Even the august Sundays at Moosewood cookbook says that fresh fava beans are not available in Ithaca so they only used dried. I bet they're available at the Farmers' Market now. Beloved by Italian and Middle Eastern cuisines, they are a cinch to grow. Hardy plants, the seeds may be started in late March when there was a lull in the weather and all the early crops (carrots, radishes, spinach, lettuces...) may be sown. The big fat seeds are perfect to give to a child to sow an inch deep; nine seeds per square foot. The youngest ones are ready in June and just need to be shucked and briefly cooked, but with the abundance of vegetables available at the same time, I wait til July to use the favas when they are bigger. To cook these, pluck the beans from the big plush pods. After a few minutes in boiling water, cool them down under cold water, and then squeeze the light bright inner green bean out of its skin. Dress it up as you will. Good in stir-fries and even burritos.
The Chinese cabbages that I started indoors in April, and transplanted out in May, are big now. I've been picking the outer leaves as needed and they keep growing. Spinach, mustard greens, garden cress, and arugula have bolted in late June, but small leaves of a second sowing of arugula, sown just one month ago, are already available. The wild form of arugula, Rucola selvatica, has been slower growing and slower to bolt, so the finely-indented, flavorful leaves from the March sowing are still available. When there is the time to deal with it, collect the purslane, amaranth and lambsquarters that are now growing all over the garden and need to be weeded anyway, and clean and cook them up. (See June.)
One of my favorite meals for this time of year is some kind of variation on peanut sauce with noodles. It's flexible for the warm weather days, when appetites diminish. You can make a big batch of it and refrigerate it and serve it later for days afterwards. It's actually most ideal to eat at room temperature in the summer. I was first acquainted with peanut sauce from the Moosewood Cookbook at a time I lived with about eight people (it fluctuated regularly, of course) in the early eighties. I had to cook once a week or so and was always looking for recipes. I became hooked on Indoneasian gado-gado after the first time I tried that recipe. Since then I've seen it and eaten variations of the same in other Asian cuisines. I'm big on vegetables, and like meat, more or less, as a condiment, so I feel a certain kinship with Asian cuisines. Almost everyone seems to like it, once they taste it, even kids. The nice thing about serving it to kids is that you can sneak in a few vegetables and they hardly notice.

Here's the basic recipe: Lightly saute some fresh vegetables, like greens or well-chopped broccoli, with some minced garlic. work best. Thin natural peanut butter with liquids (like vinegar [balsamic is my favorite], lemon juice, toasted sesame oil, tamari or soy sauce, a little bit of honey, and water) in a good-sized bowl. Get it to a saucy consistency. Add minced ginger, garlic, and some kind of hot pepper to taste. Cook up some thin spaghetti or Asian-type noodle--and mix well in the bowl with the peanut sauce. If you break the spaghetti in half before cooking, it makes it much easier to mix. Add green onions, garlic chives, or what-have you. Mix it all together. When available, chopped cucumber is the perfect refreshing addition. The cucumbers should be along around here later this month. Experiment!

So many of the perennials are starting to bloom. The delicate purple hyssop spikes look fine next to the soon-to-be magnificent golden yarrow. White yarrow brightens up the red bee balm. Bright yellow coreopsis and heliopsis show that it is really summer. Catnip is blooming all over the place. One plant is about six foot high and three wide. Why can't I get myself to tear it down? Valerian is done blooming. Still some coral bells. Poison hemlock is lovely in bloom--another volunteer--it must like that wet weather we had for a while. The purple spots on the stem give it away--beware! Queen Anne's lace is another from the same family--umbelliferae---as the poison hemlock, and another which I allow to volunteer in certain spots for its beauty and the beneficial wasps it attracts that eat the not-so-nice insects that would like to eat the other plants in the garden. Beloved parsley is a domesticated plant from the same family, a biennial, blooming in its second year. Its flowers which are also just starting to open have the same attractive qualities to both wasps and humans. Although mullein is so tough it grows in the gravel by railroad tracks, I love the tall yellow spikes and it has found its way into my garden somehow and one is starting to open its lower blossoms.
What a pleasure to pull back the hay mulch from the potato plants and reach my hands into that dry soil to find a bunch of new potatoes for dinner!

binless composting

2003-06-22T16:02:00.015-04:00

What method of composting is:

--free?*

--uses only natural materials that you have around?*

--blends into the environment most harmoniously?*

* The Bird's Nest Bin!

Tompkins County Cooperative Extension Demo Site: Compost Fair May 2002

The bird's nest bin, also known as the binless bin, is a naturally constructed compost bin that you build out of the large, coarse plant materials that you have around the yard. Instead of throwing the big stalky stuff, like broccoli and kale plants, prunings from bushes, sunflower stalks, etc., into one pile together with the small, easy-to-degrade stuff like young weeds and kitchen food waste, they are separated so that the heavy-duty materials make up the walls and the finer materials are in the center. What a simple concept and how beautifully it works!

Without so much bulky material mixed in, the finer materials get to break down faster. The bin looks much neater than if everything is thrown together. Reminiscent of a bird's nest, the binless bin blends naturally into the landscape with charm and character. No need to buy plastic bins or build other structures.

It's easy to make a bird's nest bin. Pound four stakes into the ground to make a square four to six feet wide. These will provide all the structural support you need. Within the square, lay a few stalks crisscross on top of each other on the ground. This will allow some air to come through the bottom of the pile and be drawn upward through the pile to enhance breakdown. Around the perimeter, lay down your coarse materials to make walls eight to ten inches thick: big weeds, spent vegetable plants and flowers, prunings from shrub or trees, edges of sod you've dug up, old hay if you've got an excess of it--whatever you've got around, that you want to get rid of.

The center of the pile is reserved for the small stuff and the rotten stuff. Add food waste from the kitchen, the little weeds from the garden, the rotten fruit found under the trees. Always remember to cover up any food waste so as not to invite animals. Try to have a supply on hand at all times of something, like weeds, leaves, wood chips, or straw, to layer in with your food scraps and cover it up. If you don't have enough leaves of your own, there's a plentiful supply every fall, when people kindly leave these bags full of the precious compost ingredient (and excellent mulching material, but that's another story) on the curb.

Keep the walls higher than the center at all times, so nothing falls out. Once the bin is a few feet high, after a garden season, you can let it sit and start another. After a year or so the interior of the bin left sitting will become dark compost, unrecognizable in origin, ready to enrich your garden. The wall material will have only partially broken down and can be re-used for a new bin.

Eventually you might want to expand to a three-bin unit. The bin in the middle shares a wall with the other two. This way you can always have one bin sitting and ripening; another to add to, and the third for harvesting finished compost.

Try it and see the magic of composting for yourself!

With thanks to the Master Composter Program of the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County with funding from the Tompkins County Solid Waste Management Division

peas and volunteers

2003-06-10T20:23:00.002-04:00

Peas and snow peas are coming on thick. All of a sudden, just as the asparagus are starting to wane.

The most meticulous gardener may not reap as much as the watchful gardener. Though leisurely, the watchful gardener is not exactly lazy. The watchful gardener observes and thinks as well as works. Some efforts are made to plant favorites, but he or she often takes a step back and pays attention to what nature is providing for free.

If you have had occasion to grow dill or cilantro in your garden and if you are not a very fastidious sort of gardener, who tills everything up each year, you may have noticed that the plants have re-seeded themselves here and there around the garden. Many annual flowers, such as sweet alyssum and calendula, do the same thing. Although arugula (also called rocket or as the French say roquette and to the Italians and Spanish it's rugula or ricola) is gone from the scene all too soon, sending up flowers like white stars in early June, it just might show up later in the summer in a nearby spot.

To be on the safe side, I try to re-sow little patches of arugula and cilantro during the summer, as they are such essential ingredients. They are best eaten fresh. Observing and making room for the volunteers saves work. Yet gardening involves ruthlessness too. A plant in the wrong place really belongs on the compost pile--there will be plenty more. Or you can take the trouble to transplant it.

Little walnut trees are popping up here and there in the garden and the lawn from part of the stash that the squirrels left behind. There are plenty of walnut trees around the West End to keep the squirrels busy in the fall and well-fed in winter. Looking at the finely ordered leaves of the mini walnut tree, I envision letting it grow big, but the impact of its great shade is too hard to take for a gardener with a small yard, and I pull it out. Now the frisky squirrels are going for the walnut-sized peaches that are hanging in the trees, but most of what they grab seems to end up on the ground.

Cilantro comes on slowly, and there are only a few leaves to pick, and then suddenly there is such an abundance that you can't use it all fresh, Very quickly it goes to flower and is gone. I leave some to spread its seed and for the sake of its airy white flowers, which make you faint in bouquets.. I serve as much as possible fresh, chopped and thrown on anything from Mexican burritos to Thai-inspired stir-fries, but can't use it all. Have been trying to think of the best ways to preserve it to add that special flavor on the days when it is no longer freshly available. Chopped fine and blended with mashed garlic and lime juice and salt, it can hang out for a while in a jar in the cool part of the refrigerator and be ready for jazzing up salsa and all the same things for which it was good fresh.

The dill is out of control--it volunteers all over the garden and I hate to pull it out unless I have to, like if it's crowding other favored plants. I just don't have enough uses for it. I will have more use for it when the cucumbers are ready for pickle-making, but that's a ways off. I froze a bunch of it for winter soups, and I made a sauce for asparagus of snipped dill, yogurt, homemade hot honey mustard and minced and mashed fresh garlic. And for the Fourth of July it will go minced into the potato salad.

The peas are coming on in early June as I write this, climbing high the trellis netting and dripping pea pods from white blossoms. By the end of June all will have been shucked and eaten. Lambsquarters are growing lush where the soil is good. Often a weed in rich fertilized crop fields, they also pop up thickly in spots in my well-composted garden. Pull the biggest ones by the roots to take to the kitchen. After observing former housemates use lambsquarters, I was inspired to try them in the as a substitute for spinach in the spinach-rice casserole recipe found in the The New Moosewood Cookbook. Although lambsquarters don't hold a match to raw spinach in salads, they definitely rival it cooked. Stoop-sitting or porch-sitting on a beautiful day when you want to get out of the kitchen, out of the house, is a good time for pulling the leaves, whether alone in contemplation, listening to the birds and the traffic, or talking with whomever is around. Like Huck Finn, you may get volunteers to help you, but I wouldn't count on it, better just try to do outside and enjoy. Have a bowl for the good leaves and another for the pods or stems and roots that will end up in the compost. Then take the good leaves into the kitchen and swish them in a basin of cold water. Drain and they're ready to cook.

It's good to leave some lambsquarters around to go to seed. The birds feed on them in the wintertime, and some are left behind for next year.

watching the weeds grow

2003-05-12T11:13:00.001-04:00

We are fortunate to live in a land where water pours from the sky often and unpredictably, where the water flows through the veins of the city into a long lake. They call them the Finger Lakes. Going outside in late afternoon after a rain to pick the asparagus is a chance to see the world in a different light. Drenched leaves soak up the sunlight coming low through drifts of pastel clouds. Green fungus growing on dark brown bark brightens in contrast. The world is refreshed, washed clean and dripping.

May is a worldwind of intense activity and intoxicating smells. Planted by the early settlers as a medicinal herb, now ground ivy or gill-over-the-ground threads its purple flowers through the lawn. Dead nettles sprang up everywhere in April and early May, like a crowd opening purple umbrellas in a sudden downpour. Now they've faded away and have been added to the compost pile. Yellow mustard flowers are still brightening abandoned lots. Dainty celandine flowers grow effortlessly along the foundations of houses. These weeds, many of them of foreign origin, follow us everywhere. We may disdain the common, but are the poorer for it. Blossoms of the cherry trees fall; the lilacs and native dogwoods, honeysuckles and viburnums take their turns coming into bloom. Many of the trees planted along our city streets are from foreign lands as well, like the ancient gingko tree from China, which is planted, or the tree-of-heaven, which, though beautiful when it blooms (not yet), is a weed tree, able to survive in a crack in the sidewalk; it even grows in Brooklyn.

Weeds are no longer weeds when we come to love them. There are some very useful weeds, attractive weeds, edible and medicinal, weeds that attract the beneficial insects who patrol the garden, and eat the trouble-makers. The Queen Annes lace or wild carrot can be invasive in a meadow, but in the garden they are lovely and attract the beneficial wasps, just as other members of the parsley family. The Virginia creeper and the wild grapevines, when not allowed to strangle every other plant in reach, provide food for birds and cover for other creatures, as well as a natural covering for a fence and color in the fall.

The best kind of gardening involves plenty of observation and contemplation. Weeding or thinning can be a most absorbing task when the eyeballs and fingers are down on the level of the soil and plants, and the ego takes a vacation. Observing what was there first and working with an understanding of nature is a different attitude than seizing control with roto-tiller and weed whacker. So many plants grow up unbidden, and instead of learning who they are and why they grow there, we tear them out armed with our plans; we try to tyrannize the whole terrain.

One by one I'm getting to know every sprout I see, whether I sowed it, or it volunteered, so that I can then decide whether to let it grow or not, and how much of it to let grow. Any kinds of airborne seeds, like the ubiquitous dandelion, can blow in; or be carried in through the guts of birds. I am open to gifts. When I see an unrecognized sprout, I often let grow to see what it will become (so long as the spot is not terribly wrong, and I'm not too angry/aggessive that day.) It could be something wonderful, like the columbines that migrated from a neigbor's yard, or it could be something potentially noxious like garlic mustard. When I first noticed the patch of garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) taking a stand under the apple tree, I let it stay and flower and re-seed itself for a couple years. It's good to eat. Poor people used to call it it sauce-alone. The delicate white flowers above symmetric leaves in May is a welcome sight to the naive observer as myself, but I've learned, to my regret, that it is a menace in woodlands, where it manages to form dense colonies unlike other less agressive species, like ginseng and the spring ephemerals whose existence it threatens.. I figured I'd keep it in bounds in my yard in a city block in the West End of Ithaca. It is growing like crazy along the Cayuga Inlet, where they have cleared land for a powerline. But that's only a block away from my house, so last year I pulled it out of my yard, starting to feel guilty as I see it popping up now around the neighborhood. The little strip of land between the sidewalk and the street in front of my neighbor's house hasn't been mown lately and the garlic mustard is now flowering there--a foot taller than any of the other weeds or grasses.

Wild columbine purple, pink and yellow blossoms are bursting open. Though they're native from Saskatchewan to Florida and Texas, I just know mine came from my neighbor's yard. I always admired the abundant pastel blossoms at this time of year, when not much else is blooming, other than trees. The daffodils and tulips, the forsythia are faded. The neighbors gave us some branches full of columbine seeds one summer, and even though I kept them in a brown paper bag down in the basement for a year, finally I threw the seeds around in back of the yard around the apple tree where previously I had broadcast seeds of wild asters and queen anne's lace that I found growing along the railroad track. The following year in spring I noticed a new weed popping up in different spots all over the garden, and wondered what it was and where it came from, or whether it was something I was familiar with in flower but just had never recognized the small plant before. In a sudden ephiphany I remembered that it was the columbine. One of the benefits of getting older is that you start to recognize the details of each season. It becomes newer every year because you see more each year.

The young leaves of the wild asters and the goldenrod have appeared, and though I yank out some of them, I let others grow near the fence and in the little wild part in the back because they provide such beauty in the fall. Dames rocket looks much like the goldenrod at this stage, but eventually I'll sort it out. First you notice the flowers and then work your way back so that you can recognize what the leaves look like earlier in the season, so you can decide what to pull and what to keep where. Why plant mums when these wildflowers are for free? With a little considered weeding, the volunteers are encouraged to grow in certain areas, and rooted out in other places where there are other plans. The compost pile and the exercise of the body benefits. When a weed is given a little space in the yard--when a weed is weeded--freed from the competition of the plants around it, it can look quite a bit better than those struggling specimens in the parking lots, and rival the exotic bedding plants from the nursery with a more subtle beauty.

The work of the past bears fruit. The asparagus is abundant; neighbors who rent houses with old asparagus patches don't know any better, or they don't have the time or inclination to go out there and cut it and it grows tall. Another small patch grows near the railroad tracks and an aspiring guerrilla gardener tends the patch with water and compost, and in the night cuts down a few of the neighbor's asparagus which would otherwise fern out.

This year 2002 is the spring that followed the mildest winter on record. Of course it's only a little over 100 years ago that they started keeping records. This year was my best year for over-wintered spinach. The seed were sown last August. Ate the biggest leaves in the fall. All winter long and into the spring, Steve was good about covering the over-wintered spinach with leaves during the cold spells and uncovering them on the mild sunny days. We had spinach salad on Christmas eve, along with fresh kale. In a mild spell in January we had another fresh salad and again in late March. For Easter with the ham, we had brussels sprouts from the garden. New at brussels sprouts, I hadn't started the seeds early enough and the plant weren't budding out too well by Thanksgiving when I wanted to have them.

Now the lettuce, spinach and arugula sowed in late March are ready to thin. A few little plants pulled out from their roots give more space for their neighbors to grow bigger, and provide a fine, delicate salad, with the addition of garlic mustard, violets, sorrel and garlic chives. Last year the arugula was laced with the holes left by hungry flea beetles. Later in the year this is not usually a problem. But what seemed like a problem before no longer is. The leaves are still delicious. In the new light of late day, they have carefree look of a freckle-faced child. This year, for some reason, the flea beetles have not found them. Though the winter was mild, the spring is not exceptional, except in the way spring is always exceptional. The birds are going nuts with their singing, and what can you do but open the windows and turn off the radio!

Lambsquarter has shot up in clumps here and there in the garden an inch or two high, attesting to the fertile high nitrogen soil. Some I will let grow to eat later in the summer, and freeze some too because it is one of the best greens. Look for harvestable lambsquarters in late June or so.

The volunteers too are appearing in the garden. Sowed in previous years, now I don't have to sow them again. I see some cilantro, not yet dill. Some of the chervil is not only up but already flowering. It must have remembered the year I pulled a bunch of it up. It didn't know perhaps that I regreted I pulled it up, so now I am grateful that it is still coming up in a few spots. I'm not a big fan of such licorice flavors like the mild chervil, but in cooking as well as in the garden, everything has its place.. I hope to see again soon sweet alyssum, calendulas and sunflowers coming back. They're not always in a good spot, and sometimes gardeners must be a little ruthless, so that what does grow, grows well.

The next project I'm planning is to sheet compost around the viburnum bushes in front of the house. As an urban gardener I have an obligation to have a nice garden on my teeny strip of land next to the sidewalk. This gives people a hint that there is more in the back.

2003-03-09T11:47:00.000-05:00

It's been a real winter this year--consistently cold and snow-covered--taking us by surprise after last year, when a hot, dry summer was followed by the warmest winter on record, and we thought that global warming had kicked in even sooner than expected. It's March at last! Winter is slowing despite evidence to the contrary. Spring is beginning its wild dance of fluctuating temperatures and subtle signs.

A break in the weather brought me outside to check the garden. There's already a lot to do. The early surprise onslaught of winter with no break prevented me from completing fall clean-up. So it turns into spring clean-up. The ground is still frozen, so I can't yet yank out the fall plants-- broccoli, kale, collards, and cauliflower. I am casting about for plants to pull for more reason than tidying up. The bird's nest bin is in need of more wall material. Every week or two throughout the winter, I've come out to dump the contents of the 5-gallon kitchen compost bucket, so the interior of the bin is getting as high as the sides. Not much decomposition is taking place in the cold, so the compost doesn't shrink as it does in the warm times. Fortunately there's asparagus stalks, asters, and goldenrod all beaten down, that can be cut down, and added to build up the walls. Some dead sweet alyssum is available for more bulk, and then, oh yes, it's time to prune the fruit trees, and the agressively-spreading forsythia can always withstand the loss of a number of branches.

Circling around each fruit tree--peach, plum, cherry, serviceberry, and crabapple--eyeing the individual branches, their placement on the tree, how they intersect, envisioning the branches covered with leaves and heavy with fruit, I cut off the branches that were crowding each other, and the dead and withered ones. A few I bring inside, along with long branches of forsythia, to try to force into bloom for some early spring cheer. I hammer the ends of each branch so they take up water better, immerse them in lukewarm water in the bathtub for a while, then put into a 5-gallon bucket with a few inches of water on the bottom and a cotton ball soaked in ammonia. Other times I've just added bleach and a teaspoon of sugar to the water. Cover the whole thing with a big plastic garbage bag and leave in a cool room til the buds swell and open. It usually happens in six days to two weeks for the forsythia. I've haven't had as much luck with the fruit trees branches in the past, but the effort is minimal and the possible rewards are great.

Inside, preparations for the garden are beginning as well. Cilantro and sweet onion seedlings started in late January are already up and running down in the cool basement under flourescent shop lights. Geraniums in big pots accompany them. They like it cool and bright in the winter and don't do so well even by the south-facing window in the winter because the heater vent is too nearby.

Upstairs where it's a bit warmer, coleus, lobelia, impatiens, tobacco, and a small-leafed basil are thriving. When those little teeny plants first sprout, you have to be very careful watering them. They probably need water every day as they don't have the root system to survive much drought. But carelessly poured water could easily knock one of these babies over. I find a water bottle with a nozzle, like those that bicyclists carry, work really well to drip the water in around the precious seedlings without disturbing them.

Early in March is the time to start eggplants and peppers inside. They are slow-growing and do require a lot of warmth. Later in March, I will start tomatoes, tomatillos, broccoli, cauliflower, and some flowers indoors.

It remains to be seen if spring is on schedule this year. Every year for the past 15 years that I've been keeping records, there's been a mild spell here in Ithaca, New York (Zone 6 in the flats), later in March or early in April, when the ground has thawed and is dry enough to work, and that is when I sow seeds of peas, carrots, green onions, parsley, lettuces, spinach, carrots, radishes, mustard greens, fava beans, and arugula. Will this year be different?

the garden in fall

2002-11-28T11:12:00.000-05:00

Now I am terrified at the Earth! it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

--Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass

A lot of people seem to think that gardening is all over after the last frost. Not true. Things slow down, but there's still plenty to do (besides raking leaves) to take advantage of those crisp fall days, when with just an extra layer of clothes, there's nothing that feels better than to be moving around outside breathing the fresh air. After the initial jolt when every tomato vine withers, the annual flowers turn black and shrivelled, a cool sunny day revives the spirits, and it's the perfect time to clean up the dead and the weeds, and throw it into the compost bin.

It is with mixed emotions this time of year that I watch the progression of leaves. The serviceberry from one day to the next was different: light gold, darkening over days to burnt orange and fianlly burnished red til only a few bright leaves were left like tiny flags waving. The crabapple just outside the kitchen window with the leaves flickering golden lights in the breeze amidst bright red berries, presaging Christmas lights, and darken finally into brown and fall gently into the air, dancing down the invisible currents til they land. The dramatic displays of disease and death. It's true--some of the leaves are spotted with black--evidence of being eaten by other creatures even as they flare up into color before another death. The dying is all around--abundant and silent.

First snowfall. In the afternoon the wind kicked up and soon the leaves were falling in a crazy torrent. Looking north up Cayuga Lake from South Hill, the coastal hills are obscured in the thick gray billows of off-whiteness. Back to work, and minutes later another glance out the window and we are enveloped in a cloud of white sparkles.

It was already dark, and I realized I wanted some fresh dill for the raw vegetable dip. Out into the garden with a flashlight, I shone the light down and wondered what are these small plants full of little white flowers? Crouching down, I see that they are the lacey young dill plants adorned with snowflakes.

The pick is meager in the salad greens, but it's still worth it to go out once in a while on a moderate day, and pick a few leaves from among spinaches and lettuces, brushing aside the leaves so that when the real cold hits, we can cover them with leaves--maybe the arugula and cilantro too. During a thaw the dry leaves can be brushed away, so that the small plants can briefly and the biggest leaves selected for the table. Come early spring we are talking the only fresh food available.

The time has come to cut down the old peach trees that have been in the yard for at least 30 years, many years before I came. Our plan has reached fruition, but it is not without sadness and loss to pull down those venerable trees. It's odd that the Chinese, who first grew peaches around 1000 BC, look on the peach tree as a symbol of longevity, because they are generally known to be short-lived trees. In my Internet search I found they might live only 10-12 years in Missouri due to cold winters and insect pests, but they might live for 30 years in Virginia where they don't have the low winter temperatures that kill or weaken trees, and they don't have some of the diseases in other regions. Here in the flats of Ithaca, New York, an oasis of lake-influenced mildness, the three trees lived for thirty years, I estimate. A woman in the neighbohood remembers when they were planted when she was a kid, and they asked her friend's father, who was planting those sticks, what they were, and they were amazed and doubtful when told they were peach trees. Years later, their twisting limbs danced down the yard, each year growing more skeletal and abstract, as the dead limbs were cut off, and only the essential remained. We planted new young fruit trees between the peach trees a few years ago, and now they are competing with the old trees for space, so the time has come. Will the new young peach tree ever produce peaches with the flavor of the old? No peach has ever reached its maturity from the young tree. The squirrels grab them while still small and green. They could never get all the peaches from the abundance of the big old trees. Probably they just assisted with thinning.

a good year for tomatoes

2002-09-28T11:31:00.000-04:00

This is the year of the tomato in our micro-climate. I used to think I had to grow the hybrid tomatoes and couldn't grow the old heirloom varieties that didn't have all those letters by the variety name. VFNT: verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, nematode resistance etc.. I know I've gotten some of these fungal diseases on my plants before in wetter years. (And some of those plants were, I swear, the hybrids!) The leaves wilt and turn brown and gradually the plant dies and so doesn't get a chance for maximum production. But not this year. Or at least the wilt is only just starting now to hit some lower leaves. The tomatoes have been great. The Amish heirloom varieties like Pruden's Purple, Brandywine, and Golden Queen make me swoon with the sensuousness of their various shapes and colors, and the depth of flavor. I also grow some hybrids, like Early Girl because it's one of the earliest tomatoes to ripen, and Big Beef, or one of the other BIG main season tomatoes, and Heinz, a paste tomato, to hedge my bets. The hybrids last longer too and are less prone to cracking, so they are what you usually see at stores. The heirlooms you don't find at the big grocery stores. You can find them at the Farmer's Market or a natural food store, like the GreenStar, but there's nothing like the homegrown pleasure of growing those old Amish tomato varieties, and picking them sun-drenched off the vine.

There are practices that help discourage the wilts too. Not planting the tomatoes in the same spot every year. A new one I learned this year from a neighbor is to trim off the bottom-most branches that might be touching the soil because, after all, these are soil-borne diseases.

Another success this year are the Kentucky Wonder pole beans. Got them climbing up a pole and they are lush in spite of the heat. I hear the bush beans don't form proper flowers when it's above 90°, but the pole beans can take it. Today I'm going to can a few pints of pickled dilly beans. I like them and I have one relative, who has rhapsodized about someone else's pickled beans; that's a challenge I can't pass up, so I know what to get him for Christmas.

The cucumbers are a bit of a disappointment this year. With the heat and drought, Steve's best efforts to water every day still couldn't keep up with their needs. I got a few jars of pickles canned and there are a few more cucumbers coming on, but we're not getting the bumper crop we were hoping for.

Low to the warm ground, moving from knees to squat, then standing up and bending over (keep that back straight!), as I move along the rows, eyes close to the ground so as to pick the weeds and not the little spinach seedlings that only sparsely came up compared to the generous showing of purslane and amaranth. Wasps buzzing gently around, attracted by the moisture of the just-watered ground. Weeding is extra important this year, what with the drought and heat. The weeds can rob what moisture there is in the soil from the other plants, but, on the other hand, they can help shade the soil and keep the moisture. What's a mother to do? Why follow your instincts of course.

Weeding is most important with the smallest plants. The bigger plants are deeper rooted and can compete quite well, thank you.

Deadheading the calendula is another enjoyable weekly task--so satisfying to see the bed look bright and alive thereafter. I am reminded of the common saying--"damned if you, and damned if you don't" and I see the obverse here. If you do pick off the flowers that are fading away, then more energy will go into producing more flowers, but if you don't pick them, the flowers turn into seed and the birds enjoy them, and what is left is sown in the ground for another hospitable time.

hot honey mustard

2002-06-17T20:30:00.002-04:00

Ever since I tasted homemade mustard, I lost interest the store-bought variety; none of which could compare. My housemate's mother made it, but do you believe it? She would not give me the recipe. So I've done some searching and experimenting, and surprisingly enough the best recipe I came up with was inspired by Euell Gibbons' method described in Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Though I was surprised by the use of flour, it does temper the hotness of the ground yellow mustard. I find it a more sensible addition than eggs, which I saw in a few recipes. I want something that keeps! Then I can send it in little jars for Christmas presents and not worry about them.

In a large cast-iron fry pan, roast a cup or so of whole wheat pastry flour, stirring frequently with a wooden spoon. The aroma is wonderful.

Add the toasted flour to a bowl with an equivalent amount of ground yellow mustard seed. (More flour for a milder mustard; less for hotter.)

Add other dry ingredients you like--my favorites are dried crumbled tarragon and garlic salt. I plan to try some turmeric one of these days.

Stir in vinegar (balsamic is special), water, and honey until you get it to the right consistency and taste. Put in those cute little jars you've saved.

It tastes smooth with the bit of sweetness from the honey, and then suddenly you're hit from behind with an intensity that makes your eyes tear. That's good mustard.

burrito dance

2002-05-18T12:15:00.000-04:00

In my excitement, I got up too early this morning. By late morning, the inspiration of my dreams was reduced to commonplaces. Under the intense scrutiny of the afternoon sunlight, I gave up the thought that I could ever be a writer or would even want such a foolish, ephemeral thing. Bending to the practical, I decide to make dinner.

Looking around, I survey the possibilities. I hunt through the refrigerator. I wander around the garden, along the fence where the weeds grow among the raspberry bushes. I look in the lawn. Better use up what's in the refrigerator first, but also look to see if there are bitter greens I neglected to pick this morning. Soon they'll be blooming and not so good to eat.

When I don't know what else to make for dinner, I find solace in the thought of making burritos. The zip-loc bag of tortillas subtly evokes the dense marketplaces of Mexico, piled high with food riches. Like the Mexicans, I like to feed my compatriots with the simple food of dried beans started early in the day, even better soaked overnight, scrawny chickens butchered lovingly in the dust, and the weeds that grew so opportunistically on neglected ground.

I can put whatever I want inside a burrito, and no one needs to know. If I do it with thought and care, they will eat and enjoy. While clearing some of the leftovers out of the refrigerator, I imagine what tastes might meld successfully. The system of making burritos is well-rehearsed. I have the basic ingredients always on hand--the tortillas, salsa, cheese, sour cream or yogurt. I struggle to keep cilantro growing as much as I can.

When I don't have it, I use something else. All I need is the complex of interior ingredients to add to the simplicity of the system.

It doesn't take long to throw the burritos together, but the roots of the preparation go back in time--to the tradition of making them, to the planting of pepper seeds in April, to the early morning ritual of gathering whatever greens are abundant. It can be an act of absorption, as there is a basic system, within which a new combination of ingredients makes a new burrito. Much of the work is solitary and nourishing for the cook. Yet it's done for other people too. When the ingredients are ready and the system has been rehearsed, you can be drunk and still perform the burrito dance.

In the refrigerator, I find some black beans I cooked another day so as to be ready for whenever I need them. Often there are barbecued potatoes that didn't get eaten. A half of one chopped up would make a good filling with eggs and greens. If I'm lucky, there's leftover fish or meat.

Picking greens and other vegetables in the morning is a ritual--like the peace that enters in a church Sunday morning when voices soar. It's the sabbath that comes after all the efforts of the growing season. It doesn't come regular like a Sunday, but when the weather is right you are out there like a farmer picking what is ready. Finding edible "weeds" is one of those graces that grow out of mere awareness without expectation. There are free dandelion greens for a while in April and May; lambsquarters and purslane pop up throughout the garden and along the fence all summer. I pick the largest plants, leaving the small ones to grow some more, if they are not competing with a carefully nurtured tomato or pepper plant.

I lay each plant gathered in the same direction in a blue-wire-mesh harvest basket. That will make it easier to render off the roots back in the kitchen. As I develop these patterns of doing things for whatever reason, the effect is a sense of order, of practicing a ritual--where certain actions are prescribed and the mind is free.

In a previous existence, it was a necessity of survival to gather food when available and to process it immediately. Now it feels a like a deep luxury to have the time to act on the produce the day it is at its freshest. To others perhaps it is an eccentricity. Yet, though no longer a physical survival need, it has become an inner necessity. To some, it is drudgery to pull weeds and sort them according to what goes to compost and what will be saved to eat, and then to pull the small lambsquarters leaves off the stems and wash the leaves. I have become the housewife I never wanted to become in my youth, and then some. In the fifties, my mother was just escaping drudgery. Washing machines and convenience foods were a godsend. I do use a washing machine. Selecting useful technologies and avoiding others is a constant effort. Everyone picks their area of delving deep into the primitive, doing something from the ground up.

Some people need to build their own house from the ground up (maybe I'll do that some day too). Some people have to design bridges and make lots of money to spend on other people's goods and labor. I have to design and grow gardens, gather more food from the wild and spend as little time and money as possible at the supermarket.

My mother taught me the principle of trying to use leftovers. One Christmas she gave me a rubber spatula. "Waste not, want not," she told me, picturing me cleaning out peanut butter and mayonnaise jars in my dorm room. Though I initially scoffed at the inanity of this gift, I've grown to appreciate the meaning behind it and its actual usefulness, now that I'm facing the limits of reality, of myself. It's a growing sense of the necessity of being thoroughly practical, of using what I already have--to have some control, as I try to keep from being strait-jacketed by the systems of modern life--I create my own systems.

The taste of a burrito is a complex of different tastes--the warm wheat tortilla wrapping the rich, spicy filling, sparked by salsa and smoothed out by sour cream or yogurt. Some fresh lettuce is welcome for its fresh crunch. The list of ingredients for a complex Indian curry or a traditional Chinese meal may look daunting. The complexity of such sophisticated cuisines shows a highly developed sense of flavor as well as nutrition by utilizing a wide variety of foods and healthful herbs and spices. With leftovers and whatever is available, complexity is attained by the instinct that comes with experience, and by smelling and tasting while cooking. Following recipes is useful when teaching oneself to cook, but becomes debilitating if the instincts are not developed to begin to improvise. The excitement of cooking unites all the senses into the consideration of what will work--an intersection of economy and maximum satisfaction for all who share in the meal.

The process of making a burrito is part of the practice of moving smoothly and gracefully through life. It's a balancing act--tossing a tortilla on the hot pan, turning to work on loading up the tortillas already heated, turning back to flip the tortilla. Somene walks into the kitchen, and the dance has a subtle shift, but the central burrito dance continues. It's a conversation with more parties, animate as well as inanimate. We move through space; we deal with objects at the same time that we are relating to other people. Everything we do has an effect, not just the work we do, but the effect we have on other people as we move through space, not only to be efficient, but to be graceful and not spill the beans all over whoever walks into the kitchen.

All the ingredients are laid out and ready. The filling is hot. Cilantro and garlic chives are chopped and ready. The large cast-iron fry pan is hot and the first tortilla goes on. It only takes a minute or so to do each side. Put the next tortilla on when you take the first one off. Put the filling in, grate some cheese on it. Add salsa, sour cream or yogurt, some fresh greens and herbs and wrap it up. In the meantime, keep those tortillas cooking and do it all at the same time. Like juggling, it takes practice. You start doing it in slow motion, and pick up speed with each attempt. Doing something for the first time invariably involves a certain humiliation: movements are awkward and jerky; there's a fair amount of back-tracking and correcting mistakes. It all takes so much longer than expected. But without going through such trials, we never get to the joy of doing something well.

The joy can dissipate through too many repetitions. At times, the effort that goes into it all seems wasted. Sometimes it just doesn't come out good, or no one is hungry when you thought they were. Another time, food rots in the refrigerator while people want to go out to eat. I lose the will to cook; other activities are more pressing. The compost pile forgives and makes use of all our failings and the cycle of life and death goes on.

It's getting richer, it's getting thicker--this melange, this unity, this taste. From the complexity that those who share in this meal taste, there is a peace, a sense of unity, of being nourished. That's a start.

Cooking without recipes

2002-04-05T15:55:00.000-05:00

The proliferation of cookbooks and recipes is daunting. Printed in magazines and newspapers, on the backs of boxes and demonstrated on TV, the endless supply of recipes has to make one wonder how much people actually use them. Everyone has their favorite recipes that they use over and over. Some people actually do like to try new recipes. For years I cooked with recipes and I still refer to them and read them, but over time I've come to enjoy cooking from memory and imagination. Starting from basic forms, I use the ingredients at hand and meditate on what to combine and how.

Following a recipe can be fun, like looking at a map when you don't know where you're going and the terrain is unfamililiar, but it sure slows you down. You have to measure everything and dirty many measuring devices and containers. Continually referring to the instructions in the recipe, you don't really know what's ahead and make mistakes. The old grandmothers of our memories threw in a little of this and a little of that to make it good. And they tasted and smelled, til they knew it was right.

There's often a lot of waste involved with using recipes. At the grocery store you pick up all the ingredients you need for the recipe. For some ingredients, you invariably get more than you need. After a couple of days of following recipes, you have quite an assortment of odds and ends in the refrigerator. How much of this ends up in the compost?

The cookbooks I admire the most have some flexibility as far as ingredients and amounts, often offering suggestion for variations, and ideas about using up leftovers. Use It All by Jane Dieckmann--the title tells it all. Recipes are organized by the main food that is in them, or by the food that you want to use up. Another favorite is Tassajara Cooking, a vegetarian cookbook by the cook at a Zen monastery, Edward Espe Brown. There are recipes with variations for every vegetable, basic recipes for soups and casseroles where the variations are long lists of possibilities and the amounts are vague.

The greatest joy in the kitchen comes when you can let go of the books and move freely and follow your own instincts and the ingredients that you have gathered yourself. I read recipes sometimes for inspiration and ideas, but it's rare that I will follow a recipe slavishly without making any adjustments.

The key to developing your own recipes is to cook gradually, with thought, and taste and smell at different stages to decide what it needs. You can add, but you can't take away.

Acting out in the kitchen allows me to release the tension--the back-and-forth action of my mind. I used to worry about the efficiency of my movements. Now I let my body learn the efficiency through trial and error and some thought too. But I let my body move as smoothly and relaxed as possible, so even if I am making extra movements, I am doing it like a dance--smoothly.

I am not the first woman (person) to recognize the contemplative possibilities of working in the kitchen. Julia Child talked about wanting to get back to the contemplative life of cooking and writing. The act of peeling requires some patience and care that can lead to contemplation, or maybe a form of hypnotism. Whatever--my intuition requires that I do these tasks. Certainly all kinds of manual work can lend to a quiet serenity.

Better than peeling asparagus or chopping vegetables is seeing a vegetable through the whole process. Digging the dandelion out of the grass with a trowel and get out all the root...

My method of cooking usually starts with the question: what ingredients do I want to use up? And I go from there...

In spring, summer and fall, it actually starts further back. I check out the garden, maybe go for a walk and find something to collect in the wild. If I don't use these fresh foods that day, I'll want to use them soon, or freeze them.

After a long winter, the dandelion days are coming!

Anytime of year, I can fall back on the burrito dance and combine various leftovers with staples and a few fresh ingredients that happen to be available.

Cooking without recipes is an art form. Form is important--you work within a form and make variation, like a certain kind of poem. The art comes from imagination of the cook and the appreciation of the sensual components--visual, olfactory, as well as gustatory.

There's a time for following a recipe and seeing into another's creation, and then there's another time for exploring, for a more meditative cooking experience, when each ingredient is appreciated. It's particularly valuable for the deepest appreciation when you know where each ingredient came from, most valuable when you grew it yourself and you know its whole history so intimately that the miracle is clear.

Dandelion Days: Edible weeds and old trees still blooming

2000-04-15T15:51:00.000-04:00

White blossoms covering the skeletal form of the apricot tree in front of the vet clinic presaged the spring snow. For a day the snow weighed heavy on the daffodils and covered the newly emerging leaves on the crabapple tree. The snow melted and the daffodils lifted up again like hope. The cedar waxwings are heavy into the wrinkled crabapples now, grabbing them as others are falling off the tree. Dark-eyed juncos stopped by too on their way back to Canada ...

Some dandelions are just beginning to form flowers, so there is still time to dig them out of the lawn before they flower and become bitter, whenever you can get to them between the snow melting and the sun shining. High in calcium, potassium and Vitamin A, the botanical name says it all: Taraxacum officinale: the official remedy for disorders. Your neighbors will probably be delighted to let you yank theirs out too, until they recognize their virtues too. On a day that is dry, the roots dig out easily with a trowel. Winter cress leaves, too, are still to be found, just starting to send up flower shoots. These little buds look and taste like broccoli, and the leaves spark with earthy flavor.

White violets are blooming. The humble violet is only humble in the sense of its affinity for humus. No humility in its tremendous Vitamin C content or its lovely flowers that serve as edible adornments to salads. The leaves are rather bland so they're good mixed with dandelions and other greens. Where I saw a clump of violets growing wild near a tree in my backyard, I cleared away the other little plants so as to encourage them to grow and spread.

The intense flavors of greens cooked or raw wake up the tastebuds. They can be mellowed by adding the leftovers the next day to eggs, burritos, casseroles, stir-fries and soups.

In these days of convenience, gathering plants in the wild may seem strange. You can go to the supermarket and get your veggies pre-cut and scrubbed. Tops even had dandelions for sale recently. But the experience of roaming the extravagant aisles in Wegmans produce section does not match the total experience of being outside and in tune, aware of the air dense with birdsong and, of digging the plant from the ground carefully and easily, remembering with a smile all the enemies of dandelions, while watching the work of the earthworm, whose presence is a good sign. A time for the no-rush attitude... of movement flowing with mind, purpose with play.

In a previous existence, it was a matter of survival to gather food when available and to process it immediately. Now it feels a like a deep luxury to take the time to act on the produce the day it is at its freshest. No longer a physical survival need, it has become an inner necessity, a spiritual need, an act of resistance to a culture which has stripped us from our connection to nature. To some, it is drudgery to pull weeds and sort them according to what goes to compost and what will be saved to eat, and then to separate out the best leaves from yellowed and rotted ones and from the grass blades mixed in and tear off the dark roots, and then to plunge them into a cold water bath, swish them around and lift them gently out into a colander. They're all ready to cut up. The water clinging will be just enough. To me that's life.

The weeds that have been following humans around for millennia need not be our enemies. The penchant we have for clearing land only invites them. By making use of them and appreciating their beauty we make our peace.

In the planted garden, as opposed to the semi-wild world, the lettuce is up, spinach, arugula and mustard, green onions and now the peas and snow peas too. Garlic is doing well over in the community gardens. The Walla Walla sweet onions sowed as an experiment in the fall have sprouted bravely bearing witness to the milder winters we are experiencing.

The venerable old cherry tree that anchors the neighbor's yard is opening its first white blossoms, and even the pink flowers on the frail peach trees in my own yard are waking up for yet another year. Old for peach trees, they will never achieve the girth of the cherry tree. The trunk is splitting and oozing sap; they have lost so many dying limbs to pruning over the years that the branches remaining are twisting and reaching out like dancers suspended -- The robin likes to sit in its branches late in the day facing the setting sun; its breast burning red seemingly from within.

Someone told me once that this neighborhood was originally populated by Italian workers after the swampy land was filled in back in the twenties. It is to them we have to thank for the many fruit and nut trees still growing and spreading their seed. The mother of my daughter's friend remembers coming to my house to visit her friend long ago (when I was living far away), and seeing her friend's father planting sticks in the ground. They were doubtful when he talked of the fat peaches to come. Now those peaches in jars in the basement bear witness to the miracle.

Report from the Wild West End

2000-03-18T11:40:00.000-05:00

The Full Worm moon arrived on the night of the nineteenth, just hours before the vernal equinox on the twentieth. Spring is here! Red maple trees lining Washington Park are bursting with red blossoms clearly distinguishing them from the other maples. Tight yellow flowers festoon the twisting limbs of the Cornelian cherry. An immigrant from somewhere in Eurasia, the Cornelian cherry makes its home happily in the city along with the native red maple, as it can take pollution.

A very helpful resource for identifying trees around town can be found at www.IthacaMaps.org. Click on "Interactive mapping", and then click to zoom on a location of the map, and soon you can click on a tree icon on a map, and find out the name of the tree.

Spring seems to be lurching wildly with the advances and retreats of snow and temperature, but the planet is serenely on its course; the days inexorably lengthening. The air is clear and cold as a bell, yet when the wind stops for a second, the sun hints warmly of caresses to come. For weeks, we've been watching the increasing activities of the birds. The robins are eating the crabapples. They join the starlings, crows and cardinals to check what's in the garden that was mulched with leaves last fall. They throw the leaves around in their search for seeds and worms. In one brief interlude of 50° weather, I raked the leaves off one of the garden beds to get it ready for planting peas and lettuce, spinach and carrots. On the suddenly naked soil surface, worms coiled and flipped in surprise and grubs turned suddenly into vulnerable invitations to birds. With the next snow, I regretted removing that protective layer... but soon the sun will shine and warm up the soil.

In the thirteen years I've been gardening here and keeping records, there's usually been a moderate spell the last week in March and the ground's been dry enough to work. The earliest I've ever planted was March 19; the latest April 17. Yes, it gets colder again, but the seeds swell up whenever it rains, and wait for that moment of warm enough to burst forth.

I'm longing for something new and fresh, tired of the old winter squash, discouraged to see the potatoes are sprouting. Squash soup for dinner doesn't yield the same zest or comfort it did back in the late fall. The appetite yearns for the fresh greens of spring. Fortunately there was a garlic bulb left in the garden that is thick with broad blades of garlic. Succulent with garlic flavor, I sliced them last night onto store-bought Romaine lettuce.

Early in March when the weather was mild, I found a bunch of winter cress over at the community gardens. Considered a weed, no one grows it on purpose, yet it is here and there lushly available at this time of year, when otherwise only the grocery stores can make such boasts for nutrition and good taste in produce they import from far away. I must have arrived at the community gardens shortly after someone pulled a couple of large plants of winter cress and threw them in the compost bin. I pulled off a few leaves that were still good. More winter cress was found around the compost area where many weeds grow the best, and spotted here and there in rich, abandoned gardens. I only took the largest leaves so the smaller leaves would get a chance to grow. Euell Gibbons, in that classic work Stalking the Wild Asparagus, noted that one of the earliest signs of spring near his home in suburban Philadelphia was to see the Italians out roaming the fields and ditches collecting winter cress.

After coming out of the renewed onslaught of winter weather in mid-March, greedy for more signs of spring, I went back to the community gardens again the last day of winter. Now the winter cress plants that had been thrown so diligently into the compost bin had taken root, revitalizing the bigger leaves that had been wilting when last I was there and sprouting new young leaves. In another bin, a thick growth of cleavers was luxuriating. I tore off the tops, leaving some to re-grow for someone else. The cleavers that grow along my fence at home are not so well enriched and well-advanced.

Here's my favorite recipe for cooking up greens: rinse the leaves and cup them up. Mince up a bunch of garlic cloves. Heat up a little bacon grease, or maybe some canola oil with a dash of toasted sesame oil. Throw in the garlic and stir for just a few, then add the leaves with a little water still clinging. Stir, splash on some tamari, add some bacon bits if you're so inclined, lower the heat, cover, let cook for a few minutes. Taste til it's cooked to your liking. Splash on some balsamic vinegar (or whatever kind you've got), and eat to your health!