Autumn Vegetables

Healthnews.com has a "list" feature, like David Letterman. This week it's "The Best of the Fall Vegetables".

1. Avocado
2. Beans
3. Broccoli, broccoli rabe, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts
4. Garlic
5. Leafy Greens
6. Jerusalem artichoke
7. Leek
8. Root vegetables: parsnip, celery root, rutabaga, turnip, beet, carrot
9. Salsify
10. Snow pea
11. Sweet potato
12. Winter squash, pumpkin

I have a few quibbles with this list. Mostly, the point of an article like this should be to encourage people to eat locally-grown produce. How can avocados be number 1? In the places where avocados grow, there isn't really anything I would call autumn. I think "salsify" is a verb, not a vegetable. And how on earth, halfway through October, can it take you to the end of the list to think of pumpkins?

Blackberry Pie Recipe: Take 2 blackberries...

The blackberries are getting huge, since that contretemps at the radiation lab.

Taking up the Cudgels

Writing an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Amanda Hesser takes Michelle Obama to task for saying, “I don’t miss cooking. I’m just fine with other people cooking.” She has some faint praise

for the White House organic garden, but is really ticked off by the idea (out of her own head, as far as I can tell) that Ms. Obama thinks cooking isn't worth doing. Worse yet, she goes on to say, "Because terrific local ingredients aren’t much use if people are cooking less and less; cooking is to gardening what parenting is to childbirth."

 

I sympathize with Ms. Hesser's motivations, but she's working from total cluelessness. There are two reasons we don't go to New York City to get advice on gardening. One is that they publish ungrammatical sentence fragments. The other is that the whole island of Manhattan is a terrarium, disconnected from life and nature. Ms. Hesser was writing on May 31, the beginning of a four-month period when cooking is totally optional. The garden outside my window is going gangbusters, and not a single thing in it needs to be cooked. She should check out some raw food blogs, or talk to some of these people.

 

For example, this is what I've had for dinner two nights this week:

2 large cucumbers, peeled and sliced

10 cherry tomatoes, halved

1 bell pepper, diced

sprinkling of red wine vinegar

freshly-ground salt and pepper

Mix in a bowl. Eat on the porch, with a big glass of iced tea. (Or a small glass of chianti, if you don't have work to do after dinner.)

Total preparation time, maybe 7-8 minutes picking the vegetables, plus another 5 minutes washing and chopping. No cooking involved. No threat to the stability of the Nation.

 

p.s. The title of this post is taken from a piece by Robert Benchley, which is one of the funniest science articles ever written.

Blackberry Season

The blackberries are coming in fast, now. Our bush is in its second year; it's about six feet high and three feet thick and ten feet long. It produces about a quart of berries every other day. They're great for smoothies, if you can get them to stay around that long. They evaporate quickly, once I get them into the kitchen.

Of course, they evaporate pretty fast on the bushes, too. There's a catbird hanging around the garden who thinks those berries are there for her benefit. According to the Wikipedia,

Grey Catbirds are not afraid of predators and respond to them aggressively by flashing their wings and tails and by making their signature mew sounds. They are also known to even attack and peck predators that come too near their nests.

I can vouch for the loud mouths and the aggression, but she doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. We have a deal -- anything that's still on the bush when I get home from work is MINE. So she can just shut up, or she can tell it to the cat.

The End of the Lettuce

This is the time of year when I turn locavoracious. I spend a lot of time in the garden, so I've decided to post a bit about it when something of note happens.

---

Zizania's motto is "Delicious, healthy, ethical eating", and a garden fits all four words. Delicious, because things you grew yourself taste better than things you buy. It could be because of a biochemical harmony among the minerals in the ground nearby, the flavor of the vegetables, and the smells all around you in the air. Or it could be because of all the work you put in. Doesn't matter. Healthy, because nothing is added that you didn't add. And you get a lot of exercise digging, weeding, mulching, and harvesting. Ethical, because you have 100% control over what goes on in the garden. Nobody's exploited. Nobody's eating something they don't know about.

---

I pulled up the lettuce plants from the garden today. All spring, it was wonderful stuff. Tender, green leaves that tasted perfect with any kind of salad dressingI cared to put on them. But on the first full moon after the summer solstice, they turn into huge beasts, shoulder-high and leather-tough. It's a kind of botanical lycanthropy. So they had to go.

This year, my lettuce was a commercial mesclun mix. The green leaf lettuce and red leaf lettuce were great for sandwiches, the romaine was nice and sweet, the arugula was crisp and spicy, and the mustard greens were good as always (can't kill mustard greens). There was also lots of a bizarre maroon-and-blue triffid that tasted so bitter it should only be eaten at dinner with your ex. Most of that went straight to the compost pile.

So the lettuce was successful, and true to the Virginia climate, it's all gone, just as the cucumbers and tomatoes are starting to plump up. Never knew a "local tossed salad" was such a contradiction in terms.