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As you’ve probably guessed from my radio silence, the Biscuit is out of the oven — and now on to her third week of life. Needless to say, I’m not writing a whole lot right now, and I’m not gardening or cooking very much either.
Instead, we’re being nourished by all of our amazing friends and relatives, who keep showing up with delicious things to eat — fresh corn and tomato salads, roasted chicken, cheesy pastas and polentas, bean soups, a gallon of chowder. Or who drop off fresh, end-of-season produce that’s just been picked at the pea patch.
I’ve fed plenty of people in my time, but nothing like this. It’s truly humbling.
As for this blog, I’ll continue posting my kitchen and garden adventures from time to time, and I’ll certainly still follow the food blogs I like so much. Expect not to hear from me quite as regularly, though, at least for a while.
But know that the local adventures are keeping on, off-line. The Biscuit and I made it to the Broadway farmers market last weekend, where the last of the corn and nectarines were on the tables, and we’re planning to keep going so long as the farmers keep coming. The pea patch plot has been put to bed, thanks to my good friend Alice, who cleared out the tomatoes and cucumbers and eggplants, and sprinkled the soil with cover crop seed. A quarter side of beef arrives from Sweet Grass Farm this weekend, and the lettuces, chard, and celery root are more or less established in the backyard winter garden. Pears, squash, basil, and green beans have gone into deep freeze for cold weather eating.
It’s our version of going to the mattresses. But I hope you’ll check back periodically, to keep up on Stephen’s food adventures in Alaska, and because at some point we’ll come up for air.
Ah, nesting. For some it involves setting up the crib and painting the nursery. Sewing cute baby quilts. Scrubbing the house down and making way for all the gear that comes with modern babies.
Over here, it’s been a cooking frenzy instead.
But who can help it? There’s so much that’s good and plentiful in the garden right now. I made quarts of our favorite Bolognese sauce, using orange paste tomatoes plus handfuls of fresh oregano, thyme, parsley, and basil. Pints of bread and butter pickles for eating with burgers. A lovely green sauce from ripe tomatillos, for enchiladas and similar fare. I cured a big slab of pork belly guanciale, which will make its way into pastas, soups, and stews all winter long.
And because they make me so happy, I assembled and froze multiple batches of my grandmother’s wonton, using pot sticker filling. These we’ll drop into steaming broth and eat with chopped greens and minced scallions for easy cool weather nourishment.
I even peeled, cored, and froze pears for use as baby food down the road. It feels like storing acorns for winter.
Surely we’d be fine without any of it. We’ve been ready for weeks for this new creature to arrive, so the bustle in the kitchen feels more like a diversion, something to distract me from thoughts of just how dramatically life is about to change. One thing that I’m guessing will stay the same: we’ll like having tasty local and homegrown food in the weeks and months to come.
Recipe: Bolognese Meat Sauce
I’ve made this sauce for countless friends in the throes of new parenthood.
1 large onion, minced / 2 carrots, minced / 2 stalks celery, minced / 2 lbs ground beef and/or pork / 1 cup milk / pinch of nutmeg / 1 cup white wine / 6 cups skinless paste tomatoes / a generous quantity fresh parsley, oregano, thyme, and basil, minced / salt & pepper
Warm a heavy pot over medium heat. Swirl in 1 tbls vegetable oil and add onion, carrots, and celery, cooking over medium heat until softened, about 8 minutes. Add ground meat, ¼ tsp salt, a few grindings of pepper, and cook until browned. Add milk and nutmeg and cook until liquid is essentially gone. Add wine and cook until liquid is essentially gone. Add tomatoes and herbs, bring to a slow boil, then turn down heat and cook over low for 3 hours or until flavors melt together richly. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve over spaghetti noodles, garnished with Parmesan cheese and fresh minced parsley if desired. Freezes great. Adapted from Marcella Hazan. Feeds 8-10.
I’m almost afraid to say so, lest the garden gods take offense, but the basil supply was overwhelming this year. We grew eight or ten plants at the pea patch, which we shared with our friend Alice, plus a few more plants in the backyard, and it was plenty for everybody. Credit the unusually hot weather for this summer’s bounty; I snipped back the herb tops constantly to delay flowering, and the plants got bushier and leafier with each trim. Just like they describe in the books, but honestly, who knew?
So we made pesto, and ate the pesto with pasta and fresh cherry tomatoes, or sauteed zucchini squash. We spread pesto under chicken skin and grilled the pieces, so the cheese and garlic and the herbs all melted together.
Even then, there was scads more basil. Not that I’m complaining, not exactly.
We swirled pesto into a tasty frittata with ham, potatoes, and more sauteed zucchini. We spread it on sandwiches with leftover grilled chicken and avocado. We assembled caprese salads, and stirred basil ribbons into spicy tomato pasta with fried eggplant.
Abundance can make a person indifferent, as happens with zucchini. Or it can fuel more creative ends; for instance, we’ve discovered that basil mixes well with mint and cilantro in a spicy carrot salad. That it’s lovely in corn chowder with bacon and roasted chilies, that it’s delicious tossed into a green bean and radish salad, or with grilled nectarines.
Next on the agenda is basil-infused fruit syrups, blended with flavors like vanilla and cinnamon. Quinces are said to be wonderful poached with the herb, something I can’t confirm, since fresh quince are hard to come by locally. But Jerry Traunfeld does blueberries and watermelon in a cinnamon basil syrup, and he’s rarely wrong about these things.
Even after, there should be plenty of raw material to play with. So tell me, what are your favorite ways with basil?
I love fresh flowers, but given limited garden space, I’ve always had a hard time committing to grow anything except vegetables. Sure, some blossoms like nasturtiums and violas make pretty, edible garnishes. And sure, some flowers are good organic partners, repelling unwanted critters and attracting helpful pollinators. It just doesn’t feel like the same bang for the buck.
But I’m slowly coming around, thanks to a less-than-perfect track record with certain vegetables, and this summer I opted to plant sweet peas, cosmos, and zinnas among the edibles.
Wish I could say it’s been an unqualified success but frankly, the results have been mixed. The sweet peas produce stunningly-colored blooms, but suboptimal growing conditions made for small, sparse plants. Cosmos, which demand a fair amount of elbow room, are just now putting out delicate, short-lived flowers. The only real upshot has been zinnas, which grew big and bushy and sent up multiple blossoms; something about our maritime climate seems to suit them. They look wonderful in a simple vase and contribute as much happiness at the table as what’s on the plates.
Scarlet runner beans — talk about a plant that doesn’t lack for good P.R. You can hardly get through a gardening magazine these days without somebody gushing over this heirloom varietal. Fedco, one of my preferred seed sources, claims that Thomas Jefferson grew the beans at Monticello. They might as well have come over on the Mayflower.
So this year I surrendered to the hype and planted them, and so far they’re not exactly an unqualified success. Despite a choice planting location, the vines are really pretty puny. By comparison, Wally’s Romano beans, which are up in an adjacent bed, are twice as lush. It’s pretty much a solid ass-kicking at this stage.
But! We’ve just discovered one upside to scarlet runners: the garish scarlet flowers attract hummingbirds, and we’ve had lots of backyard visitors the last few days. The tiny birds are so enthralling that I just don’t think to run for the camera, and anyway they don’t stick around for long. Still, it’s redemption enough that if the beans are halfway edible, I’ll probably grow them again next year.
It’s not too late to get fall and winter vegetables going if you’re contemplating a cold season garden. Brassicas like kale grow well even with very little attention, and the plants produce in all but the most frigid months. For variety you might also consider lettuces, radishes, beets, spinach, and fava beans, which are often good through December. It’s said that choosing varieties specifically bred for fall and winter conditions can give a leg up — and for the clueless like me, names such as ‘Winter Marvel’ Lettuce would be a hint.
Though the tougher brassicas should do fine seeded directly into the soil, I’ve learned the hard way that a hot, dry day can turn tender seedlings to a wilted, lifeless mass, undoing weeks of effort, or cause them to bolt long before their time. So my preference is to start seeds in backyard pots, where I can better fuss over their heat, light, and moisture than at the more remote pea patch. And bonus, the seedlings are starting to harden up by the time the weather has cooled enough to facilitate successful transplanting.
Garlic is my kind of crop. In fall you bury individual cloves in rich, well-drained soil, and then you forget about them. Which is what I did, literally, leaving the ‘07 cloves in the ground by mistake, and they sprouted a second time last fall. Long story short, one old clove became five heads of garlic this summer.
So it was time to harvest the heads before a more permanent takeover occurred. My Rodale guide describes the optimal harvest time as when 75% of the leaves are browned — early July in my plot. They came up covered with dirt, of course, but with sunny, dry conditions and a couple of weeks’ cure in a dark-ish spot, it was easy enough to brush off most of what still clung to the papery skins.
So we’re finally enjoying their strong, almost sweet flavor in the kitchen. Even the smallest central cloves yield up all the garlicky essence needed, and I love how juicy and fresh they are compared with store-bought.
It’s such minimal work for tremendous flavor that I’ll definitely be planting more cloves this fall. And if there’s still more that’s yet unharvested, well, all the better.
For once we’ve got a lush dill crop, the key apparently being that clever combination of good sunlight and good drainage. Only problem has been a lack of garden partners, so for most of the season we’ve been chopping the herb into piccata sauces — simple amalgams of lemon, butter, and dill served over sauteed chicken breasts or grilled fish, a throwback to Charlie’s New England childhood.
That’s until this week, when the first cucumbers came ready, and just in time for dill to send up its yellow umbrels. So the overlap with cukes won’t be more than ten days or so, but still. It’s enough time for tasty cucumber salads dressed with this easy dill-yogurt sauce adapted from the incomparable Deborah Madison. The sauce is also terrific with fried rounds of eggplant, available now at the farmers market.
A couple of tricks here in your prep. First is to drain the yogurt of whey using a fine-mesh strainer, which yields a thickened yogurt ‘cheese’ — I find that homemade yogurt releases a fair quantity of whey, and straining firms things considerably. Alternately opt for a store brand like Nancy’s Organic Yogurt, which comes almost as thick as the Greek stuff, which gains body from fat. Second trick is to pound the garlic to a pulp with a bit of salt, which mellows the flavor and diffuses it more evenly through the sauce.
Recipe: Dill-Yogurt Sauce
½ cup plain yogurt / 1 small clove garlic / ¼ tsp salt / 1 tbls dill, chopped finely / pinch cayenne
Drain yogurt in a fine mesh strainer until fairly firm, about 30 minutes. Pound garlic with salt and add to yogurt when yogurt is fully drained. Stir in dill and cayenne, correct for salt, and chill for 30 minutes before serving tossed with sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, and feta, or atop fried eggplant. Makes ½ cup. It’s best on the day it’s prepared.
I like to think this year’s pea patch plan incorporated a few things learned in prior summers. Like that fewer plants are happier plants. So this time around the focus was on just four hot season vegetables: tomatoes, tomatillos, summer squash, and cucumbers. Each crop had its own generous 5-foot by 5-foot quadrant, and I have to confess that back in early June the plot looked woefully underplanted.
Which made it so very tempting to plant more, especially knowing we wouldn’t be able to eat exclusively from the patch this year.
But we practiced restraint, and it turns out that the less-is-more strategy does work, especially in the setting of record-high temps. So the more recent question was how to encourage continued growth despite increasingly limited real estate. The solution? Go vertical. We stabilized the tomatoes with standard tomato cages that, clustered together, look like high-rise apartment buildings. The tomatillos are now growing up and through a tall tepee trellis, and we lashed together an A-frame structure for cucumbers. Not elegant, but functional nonetheless. It being kind of late in the game, there was a bit of stem and flower breakage as we wove the vines and tendrils upwards, but no matter. A day later and the plants were re-oriented to the sun, already putting on new growth.
Above: tomato houses built by my hippie neighbor George. “They’re growing through the roof,” he said, chuckling. And thanks to the weather, he’s looking to add on a second story.
Ain’t easy pulling up plants that aren’t working, even when you know it’s what good gardeners do. For days I had been dithering over the idea of cutting down my spring peas, which were lagging at eighteen inches tall. It was starting to seem that patience alone wasn’t going to do much for these guys. They were planted in a good south-facing location, by the backyard trellises, but about a month ago the fava beans in front of them took off, casting everything else in shadow.
I wasn’t about to sacrifice the favas, which are looking pretty edible lately.
The way the math works right now, every day the peas aren’t growing is another day that nothing else is up and going, either. It’s opportunity cost. And now that the calendar says summer, it’s high time to get beans into the ground.
Still I dithered. On solstice I began ripping out the peas one by one, staring with the runtiest, and it took me all day long. But it got easier the more I pulled — suddenly there was space in the garden again.
