Carol

Around the Garden in 60 Days: A Jules Verne Vegetable

July 9, 2015 by Carol 1 Comment

Growing up in a small New England town, I never saw kohlrabi, but while volunteering on a kibbutz one year (breakfast and supper both featuring a cornucopia of super-fresh produce), I fell in love with the bulb. The flavor is mild with just a tiny bit of a kick. Not as spicy as a radish, but with the same wonderful crunch.

A member of the cabbage family and also known by the names turnip cabbage and German turnip, kohlrabi comes in both red and pale green color and, once the stems and leaves are removed, looks somewhat like an underwater vessel you might see in a Jules Verne novel.

I just knew it was a sign when I saw sets at the garden shop this spring. I had to try my hand at planting them. The challenge would be that my luck at growing vegetables is variable. Some plants produce bountifully – in my freezer I still have jalapeno and banana peppers from four years ago. Bell peppers, on the other hand, are stingy and kind of bitter. In fact, the grocery store varieties are better. Far better. When it comes to eggplant, the Ichiban variety is prolific for months, while the big fat Black Beauties grant me only two or three fruits at most.

So, hopeful but not delusional, I prepared the garden with the whole nine yards of stuff: organic fertilizer, compost, water, mulch. Just two months and a few prayers later, I returned from a week away from home to find that the kohlrabi was ready to harvest. Pretty fast by New England standards. Even better, the animals seem to be staying away, perhaps stymied by the obstacle course provided by so many stems and leaves surrounding the hard bulbs. (My tomatoes are being devoured by rabbits and chipmunks, necessitating better fencing.)

It was a good experiment but, in retrospect, since only one bulb comes from each plant, there may be better uses of the space in the garden. The farmer’s market is sure to have some, right?

Wistful for Wisteria

June 12, 2015 by Carol 1 Comment

PICT2386 Many years ago I bought a wisteria plant at a local garden center. When I got home and took it out of the package, a stick fell out. Just a stick. No root ball hidden by the cardboard label. No indication that it would survive, much less become a magnificent vine heavy with pale purple blossoms.

But, since I had bought it, I planted it out by the stucco wall in the backyard. And just to be safe, I placed a tomato cage around the stick so that nobody, thinking it was a weed, would mistakenly pull it up.

The stick grew inch by inch over the next several years, but not one flower appeared. Then one day, the plant grew large enough that it no longer needed its protective cage. It was also big enough that we needed wire cutters to set it free.

But still no flowers.

Just as I was giving up hope of ever seeing the pendulous flowering vine that I was sure would transport me to the lawn at Mansfield Park or Northanger Abbey, the Sunday New York Times featured an article about wisteria. In it, the writer detailed her own travails with the plant, and she noted that it could take ten years before the first blossom appeared.

We were on year nine when the Times published that article and, wouldn’t you know it, the following summer we awoke one morning to find three small blossoms. Pale lilac in color and emitting a heady perfume, they were beautiful.

But, there was no foliage!

Now, all these years later, we have three distinct seasons of wisteria. The first consists of blossoms on bare, gray branches. The second gives us foliage with no blossoms. The third features both. The vine has grown so hearty that it has spread along and over the wall, and into our neighbor’s garden.

You’d never know that it all begin with a scrawny stick.

They say that patience is a virtue. If you are longing for wisteria, I’d advise you to develop a healthy dose of it.

Whipping up Meringues

June 1, 2015 by Carol Leave a Comment

My good friend Lorrin listens to what people say. Really closely. I happened to mention – once, and many months ago – that in preparing for the Big Middle Eastern Feasts this past winter, I had found several recipes calling for rose water, including Ottolenghi’s famous meringues. I didn’t have rose water in the house and, it being the dead of one of the snowiest winters on record, I decided to prepare dessert with ingredients already on hand or those easily obtained.

Well, wouldn’t you know that when Lorrin came for dinner last Friday night, my very thoughtful friend brought me a bottle of rose water, an ingredient so important in cooking and baking around the world, and especially in Persian and Middle Eastern recipes.

So, what should I try first? Nougat, Turkish delight, baklava? Indian rice pudding or lassi? Malaysian bandung? So many choices, and those were just the sweets.

Or, perhaps those meringues that Ottolenghi developed while working as head pastry chef at London’s Baker & Spice?

Yes, those meringues. The ingredients are few: egg whites, caster sugar, and of course, rose water, all rolled in chopped pistachios. And now that I had the rose water, it was time to bake.

With the recipe calling for ten egg whites to make only a dozen meringues, you can just imagine how big each one is. Enough to share if you happen to be the sharing type.

As for caster sugar, this is simply superfine sugar, and there’s no need to angst over not being able to find it in the supermarket. Just zap some regular old table sugar in the food processor – but not so much zap that it turns to powder.

But, what was I to do with the ten egg yolks now sitting in a bowl on the counter? It would be terribly wasteful just to throw them out. This is where the internet came to the rescue. I found a website, http://www.fortysomething.ca/2010/04/recipes_to_use_up_extra_egg_yo.php, that lists recipes for dishes requiring anywhere from one to twelve egg yolks. What a brilliant idea, and well worth book-marking.

I decided on a Golden Butter Cake calling for eleven egg yolks, for a couple reasons. First, a very rich crème brûlée on top of meringues would be a serious sugar and fat overkill, especially if we aren’t expecting guests. Second, it’s simply practical to freeze the cake for future use. Invited to a pot luck dinner? I’ll bring dessert! If you do decide to try this cake recipe, make sure to add vanilla; I’m pretty sure that its absence from the list of ingredients was inadvertent.

Now, what to do with that one extra egg white? Maybe fortysomething.ca will see this and post a similar list for whites. In the meantime, breakfast will probably be an omelette.

Gettysburg 150 Years Later

April 30, 2015 by Carol 1 Comment

“Our days are as grass; we flourish as a flower in the field. The wind passes over it and it is gone, and no one can recognize where it grew.”

This stanza from a poem read at Yizkor, Jewish memorial services, came to mind as we stood last week on the pastoral farmland on which the Battle of Gettysburg took place 150 years ago this July. The temperature had plunged 40 degrees, the wind blew, and the grass in the fields rippled with every gust.

Perhaps nobody would recognize where a flower once grew, but there is no danger that the tens of thousands of soldiers and the one civilian who perished in this Civil War battle will be forgotten.

Millions of people have made the pilgrimage to this tiny town in southeastern Pennsylvania to bear witness to the horror that took place here, in a war of brother against brother that nearly tore our nation apart. They reenact campaigns. They climb Little Round Top and gaze out at the positions held by Confederate troops. They look out from Cemetery Ridge and the Copse of Trees, trying to conjure the image of a mile-long phalanx of men in gray marching toward them during Pickett’s Charge.

The battlefield is studded with square white stones that mark the left and right flanks of every platoon — from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. And dozens of monuments — beautiful sculpture and even a tower from which to view that bucolic farmland — honor the regiments from every state that participated in the Battle.

They tour the David Wills House, where Abraham Lincoln spent the night before delivering his Gettysburg Address, an amazingly brief speech of only 272 words that has stayed with us for a century and a half.

And, they visit the first national military cemetery established in this country. Magnolias in full bloom and trees leafing out make it a beautiful place, silent but for the birdsong and distant hum of traffic. It is a most fitting resting place for the more than 3,500 Union troops who gave their lives to ensure that slavery be abolished.

The countryside around Gettysburg is spectacular, but it haunts me. That so much carnage took place in such an idyllic spot seems impossible. But it did.

May we never forget where the grass grew and where the people died.

Mint Condition

April 12, 2015 by Carol 2 Comments

Unknown Last summer, as the mint was taking over my garden, I contacted my friend Barb the Gourmet to ask her for recipes using the herb. There was just so much taboule I could prepare with the mounds of mint I was getting, and she was bound to have ideas.

Barb did give me a couple recipes, neither of which used more than a couple tablespoons of the green stuff. So, in desperation, I began to tear the plant from the soil, knowing full well that it would be back the following summer, if not sooner.

Of course, during the winter when I needed fresh mint, I had to buy a peppermint plant at the grocery store – it was much fresher and would last longer than the limp bundle in the herb section of the produce aisle. Loathe to waste anything, I watered it and kept it in the sunroom, where it thrived so well that I had to repot it.

When a couple weeks went by with no further need for the herb, I had to pinch it back so it wouldn’t get leggy. I took the snipped-off pieces and put them in a glass of water – where they began to root. And grow. Again! The mint began to take over!

Anyway, as this winter from hell seemed never to end, I developed the habit of comforting myself every afternoon with a big mug of hot herbal tea. I find that it goes really well with writing (I try to channel my favorite authors while sipping).

One day, inspiration struck. No, not for a plot twist, but for tea. Why not harvest and dry the mint to make my own perfectly organic mint tea?

Scavenging through my kitchen cabinets and drawers, I realized that I must have given my old tea infusers to one of the kids, so that is at the top of my shopping list this week.

Maybe I’ll find a few other varieties of the herb to round out the collection: orange or lemon bergamot, pineapple, banana.

Or how about chocolate mint? That should be good for inspiring something. A Proustian contemplation of Girl Scout cookies perhaps?

Greens With Envy

March 31, 2015 by Carol 5 Comments

cilantro It was while dining at a paladar in Havana that I discovered that I no longer had to keep my secret. As a dedicated gourmand, I love food. I enjoy reading about, planning, and preparing all manner of dishes using a wide variety of herbs and spices. And eating! Oh, yes. In fact, I think my internist would prefer I eat a little less of these creations.

There is little I don’t like.

But I was embarrassed to admit as an avowed foodie that there is one thing I absolutely cannot tolerate: fresh cilantro. And it was at that paladar in Havana that I found not just one, but several soul-mates. How the subject actually came up in conversation I don’t recall, but one of my fellow travelers mentioned that his wife thinks the stuff tastes like soap.

“Yes!” I practically shouted with relief. I had never been able to put my finger on why I thought of bug spray every time I would partake of certain dishes with the green stuff sprinkled on top.

It appears there may be a genetic predisposition to herb hatred, and that my ancestors may have developed the aversion for survival purposes. I have learned that the cilantro aroma is created by something called aldehydes, a substance also found in soaps and lotions. Early humans may have associated the smell with a negative past experience (like sickness or death) and developed the distaste for it .

Although cilantro is commonly used in the Middle East, where my ancestors came from
way back, the herb wasn’t native to the area and probably didn’t arrive ’til much later, when Arab merchants brought back all manner of spices from their journeys into Asia.

So, did great-great-great-great (etc.) grandma think the stuff tastes like soap? Just maybe she did. And just maybe I got her cilantro-loathing gene.

Curiously, I can and do use the dried herb liberally and have no problem at all with the seed of the plant – coriander. Maybe the smell dissipates with evaporation?

I’d love to hear from fellow cilantro-tastes-like-soap readers and learn what you substitute when a recipe calls for the vile green stuff.