Detours

I hope all my mommy friends had a wonderful, well-deserved day of fun and relaxation!  Today is Tuesday and Mother’s Day already feels a million years ago.  Sigh.  At least the lovely tulips and irises my dear hubby gave me maintain their cheeky pinks and purples.

Oh, an ode to motherhood and all its intrinsic embarrassments.  I’m teaching my four-year old to identify rhyming words and on Mother’s Day he came to me and said, “Mommy nine and wine are rhyming words”.  Um, yes dear they are, that’s wonderful! I replied.   Today he is at pre-school and I will certainly cringe if the school’s comes up on my phone’s caller-ID.

Berried Treasure

Our culinary adventures this past weekend revolved around berries!  Strawberry and blueberry season is upon us so I took the boys to Pappy’s U-Pick.  I really wanted to make the trip worthwhile and pick enough blueberries so I would have some to freeze. Obsession overcomes ambitious people when faced with a challenge.  I had six quart-sized baskets to fill with tiny berries and berry bushes as far as the eye could see.  I knew that the bushes closest to the parking lot would be the most picked over so we headed for the far corners.  The refrains “I’m thirsty”, “no shoes”, “I’m thirsty”, “no shoes” did nothing to hold back my goal.

My Little Big Boy

While I focused on selecting the plumpest, bluest berries, I kept the boys close to me by warning about the snakes lurking under the bushes.  I hope they don’t have a snake phobia now.  Just as my hand detached a berry and dropped it in the basket my eye would land on MORE berries just an arm’s reach away.  The berries were poetically plump vibrant ruby and sapphire orbs.   And they were perfectly sweet!  We filled six baskets and even improvised a container from the hat one of the boys wore.  I will definitely make another trip out there soon.

My Little Boy

On the way home, we stopped at a fairly decent farmer’s market located in the parking lot of an open-air, big box shopping mall.  I scored two red peppers and a yellow pepper, four young zucchini, and three plump tomatoes for $5.   Then I went home and pulled out the cookbooks.  Little did I anticipate a derailment….

Learning new things reportedly keeps the mind young.  Being a mom requires juggling multiple tasks while changing direction at a moment’s notice in response the dilemmas life throws to you.  Long story short, my camera croaked this weekend.  Buoyed by my successful produce shopping, on Mother’s Day I prepared a lovely meal of Summer Vegetable Stew with Herb Butter and Yeasted Sugar Cake with Blueberry Compote.  I artfully arranged dinner and dessert plates for photos and snapped away until I noticed that the photos looked like I had smeared the lens with Crisco.  Great for Garbo’s close-ups, not so much for plates of food.  I fooled around with the camera settings but had no luck.  So while I am dying to share the recipes, the absence of photos just won’t do.  Just a minor hitch in the plans.  I must admit my photography skills have a lot of room for improvement so, on the bright side of things, today I will shop for a new camera.  SLR digital cameras, a stretch for my budget and my skills, seem to be the food photographer’s camera of choice.  And you dear reader can eagerly anticipate my post with the mouth-watering recipes and accompanying photos.

I did at least manage snap a few adorable pix of my cuties at the berry patch.  And I still put together a post for today taking just a slight detour from my original plans.

p.s. The photo of the boxes of berries was my camera’s grande finale.  RIP Casio Exilim.

All About My Garden

The fall before my oldest son turned one I set up two raised garden beds in my backyard.  I planted a bunch of vegetables that were loved to death by caterpillars – the big, juicy Chartreuse ones that make you feel like you are murdering a small animal when you stomp them and their guts ooze and leave a greasy residue you have to wash away with the hose. YUCK.  Weeds then came along and choked what the caterpillars rejected.  At least my procreation plans moved right along and I got pregnant again.  Fast-forward two years and now that I no longer have a baby attached to my breast (well not for nourishment anyway) the second incarnation of my garden is underway.  Three cedar log raised beds replace the two plywood 4×4 beds I began with three years ago.   I’ve also repurposed one corner flowerbed for edible plants.  Hold your breath, here’s what growing in my suburban backyard:

• Ronde de Nice zucchini
• Flageolet beans
• Calypso beans
• Christmas lima beans
• Miniature white cucumber
• Forellenschluss lettuce
• Aunt Molly’s ground cherry
• Sweet Pea currant tomatoes
• Rainbow tomatoes
• Heirloom Greek tomatoes
• Bell peppers
• Nasturtiums
• Calendula
• Rosemary
• Lavender
• Basil
• Thyme
• Greek Oregano
• Savory
• Lovage
• Borage
• Bee balm
• Red Velvet Sunflowers
• Mint from summers past that refuses to die

Okay, I have only three raised garden beds, (well, a total of four beds with the ground level plot where I’ve sown the ground cherries and one of the beds is 4×7) how, you might ponder, do I have room for all these plants?

Newly sprouted bee balm

Well…. seeds are miniscule capsules of future promises and you can toss A LOT of them onto the soil and their green heads so teeny tiny when they pop above the soil.

When I planned the “major” plants, I really had no idea how big the beans would grow (see previous post about “Cooking Beans”) and now I wish I had planted more of them.  And due to my congenital lack of patience, I want all the bare dirt covered NOW with a carpet of verdant, fecund green.

The growing rate of the different plants took me by surprise.  I planted all the seeds on February 26 in peat pots.  Some seeds lulled around like divas in a mud bath and some set their sights on the checkered flag.  Now in early May the Christmas limas have outgrown their 6’ bamboo supports, my currant tomatoes have teeny yellow blossoms on foot tall plants, and the squash pumps out blossoms like Lucy & Ethel’s chocolate factory.  Sadly, troopers that they are, my little ground cherries could be mistaken for an amuse bouche garnish.  However, I do realize that if all goes as planned, come July, my backyard will make the Little Shop of Horrors look like a petunia patch.

Ronde de Nice Squash Blossoms

No seriously, at this point in time, most of the plants are in their adolescence, just now showing the curves, muscles and hairy patches that indicate looming adulthood but not yet crying out for elbow room.   I have really had to contain myself when I make “quick” trips to Lowe’s or Home Depot.  The stores now stock a much better variety of seed than they have in the past and I find irresistible those little packets with their pretty pictures and the magical music the seeds sing to me when I shake the packet!  Just yesterday I caved in and bought rosemary and lavender plants because their plump sappy sticky bottle green leaves wafted their hypnotizing fragrance into the air and I fell in their thrall.  Those now abide in clay pots.

Next year I will be better able to anticipate my needs and so I will (promise!) purchase all my seeds through seed savers exchanges to do my part in promoting plant diversity by using heirloom, non-GMO, organic seeds.  Who knows, maybe I’ll even sketch a garden plan.

Garden May 2011

My First Dragonfruit

I am completely in awe of the amazing blogs being created.  The brilliant photography!  The witty, genius writing!   One such blog chronicles a Swedish couple, their daughter, and their six-month culinary and cultural voyage around the world.  A guest writer from Asia posted pictures on their blog of this improbably bizarre fruit called dragonfruit.  I had never heard of such a thing!  Shaped like an alien flower bud, its exterior is a vivid gaudy fuchsia and its interior is polka-dotted white and black.  Visions of an 80’s outfit I wore in high school scarily come to mind.  My husband said he had tried the fruit before but I have never in my life seen it.  Duly inspired, I took off laptop in tow to a coffee shop to get my thoughts together and plan my own brilliant blog.  While there, I searched the CSA database to find a Friday farmer’s market.  I found a Friday farmer’s market in Flagler Beach.  Coincidentally, my husband surprised me last October with a romantic birthday weekend at Flagler Beach.  We stayed in a magical bed and breakfast owned by a most genial couple.  Suddenly I had unfolding before me a day at a lovely beach AND a new farmer’s market!  I burned my tongue slurping down my coffee, packed up my things and raced back home to pick up the family and get on the road.   Flagler Beach is an hour and a half drive from Orlando but the boys napped blissfully and we got to listen to Brian Ferry in peace the entire way there.  The bridge over the intercoastal dropped us on a quaint beachside town square unfolding toward the blue Atlantic and occupied by perhaps a dozen white tents covering a plethora of colorful wares.

Flagler Beach Farmer's Market

We hurried the boys out of the car promising them a festival and then the beach (Little white lies are a mere survival tool at this point in our lives.  One does not reason with toddlers).  After a quick survey (again, casual meandering does not figure in with toddlers in tow), we entered the largest of the fruit and vegetable stands.  One of the first things my eyes landed on was a plastic bag only partially obscuring the oblong, fuchsia object about the size of an orange inside.  I could hardly believe the day’s serendipity!  Dragonfruit!  One lonely specimen but mine nonetheless.   A $3.50 treasure!

I asked the stand’s proprietor where it came from and with a shrug of her shoulders she said Miami.   Tropical Miami may or may not be an appropriate climate for the fruit of a cactus.  A topic for future exploration.  So we wrapped up our shopping, schlepped everything to the beach.  After settling under our umbrella I got out a paper plate and plastic knife and whacked unceremoniously into my prized fruit to taste it.

Yes, future posts will explore my congenital lack of patience.  What did it taste like?  Drum roll please…not much of anything.  The flesh was mildly sweet, a drier version of the confounding soft and crunchy texture of kiwi but no explosion of violently complex perfumed tropical nectar promised by the gaudy exterior.  Oh well.  For all I know it had spent the last four weeks in a cargo hold being gassed to keep from rotting.  Sigh.  But what an incredibly lovely fruit!  I refuse to lose my enthusiasm over one example.  I know when fresh and chilled (and eaten under a palm tree on a Balinese island) it must taste better so I’m not going to write it off just yet.  I just need to find a more local source.  Or better yet, go to the source.  And anyway, how can I deny the joy in this completely serendipitous day?

This website for a company based in California has a really interesting description of the fruit:  http://www.tradewindsfruit.com/dragon_fruit.htm

Closer to home, here’s a place in Miami that offers an enormous variety of exotic fruit:  http://www.tropicalfruitnursery.com/index.htm.  This culinary adventuress may have a field trip to Miami coming up soon!

The impetus for day of the dragonfruit: Green Kitchen Stories  http://www.greenkitchenstories.com

Wow! That’s a lot of beans.

Calypso, Flageolet and Christmas Lima Beans

My gardening adventure of 2011 began in a harried haze of confused urgency.  You will note below that a photo of cooked Christmas Lima Beans graces my first post while in reality my seedlings are just now happily winding themselves up their willow reed support.  In my crazed excitement perusing the Seed Savers Exchange online seed catalog www.seedsavers.org, I clicked the category “Cooking Beans” thinking, well duh, of course I’m going to cook them….Mind you, I attempt all of my online shopping with a background chorus of screams in various pitch …. Variations indicate not just emotional but actual physical injury, which necessitate quickly shutting down the laptop, jumping up from the table, and running mommy to the rescue. By the time I’ve returned to my shopping, I’ve forgotten exactly where I was in the online catalog and resume as best I can. So I frantically complete my order for three different kinds of “cooking beans”, balking somewhat at the price and quantity (500 seeds?) but needing to wrap up the order before the next screaming session began. After a few days, the lovely beans arrive in the mail and I examine the package and search everywhere for planting instructions. I call the company to ask if they are bush or climbing type etc. and I exclaim my surprise that no instructions were included with the package. The patient and kind young woman explains that I purchased “cooking beans’ (well, duh) and the beans in these packages are not proofed for germination. Well, lucky for me they hadn’t been sitting in the Seed Savers’ basement for the last three or so years and the seeds I planted in peat pots had already germinated so I was good on that front but feeling rather obtuse that I hadn’t noticed the LARGE DISCLAIMER at the top of the “Cooking Beans” page that said “THESE SEEDS ARE NOT MEANT FOR PLANTING”. Cooking beans, duh.  Okay, got it.

On the bright side, I have bonus beans! I get to cook them before I even grow them. Since I’m growing three types I think I will cook one each month for the next three months. That way, while I am battling caterpillars, aphids, heat and humidity, the beans culinary potential will encourage me  through the long, hot days of summer.

Sorrel, green onion, celery

I adapted my first recipe from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. This cookbook contains magic.  Every time I open it I find just the perfect recipe and seemingly one I’ve never seen before. Case in point – she has a recipe called Giant Lima Beans with Parsley and Sorrel. I have always wanted to try sorrel and fortuitously, a local hydroponic grower supplies it.  It tastes like sour spinach – very refreshing but tart. And as mentioned above, I have a quantity of giant Christmas Lima Beans and no reason not to cook them up. I imagined that my beans really would benefit from the crisp green crunch of celery so I added that to the sauce ingredients. I slipped off the vegan wagon and cooked the green onion and celery in butter – the smell is divine. I thought the sorrel would “melt” and become saucy, but maybe I didn’t tear the leaves into small enough pieces because they wilted but didn’t become liquid.  The beans tasted earthy like kidney beans but milder with a more tender skin and firmer interior.  Due to their size they did great in a dish where their substance provided the ‘meaty’ base for a vegetarian meal.  They were terrific finger food for my two-year old, who kept snatching them from my plate (I had prudently fed them their own dinner, just in case).   And the leftover beans added substance as a topping for salad the next day.

Christmas Lima Beans with Sorrel Sauce

2 cups Christmas Lima Beans – boiled for one minute in four quarts water and soaked for one hour
Herbes de Provence
2 tbsp. butter
1 cup diagonally sliced celery
1 cup sliced leek or green onion
1 cups torn sorrel leaves
1/2 chopped fresh parsley
Cooked Brown Rice

After the beans have soaked, drain and rinse, return to pot and cover with water and add a generous tablespoon of Herbes de Provence. Bring to a boil and cook until tender 45 to 60 minutes adding boiling water as necessary to keep the beans submerged 2-3 inches. Add a generous tablespoon of salt at about the halfway cooking point. When tender, drain and return to the pot to keep warm. (reserve a cup or so of the cooking liquid for the sauce).

Melt the butter in a sauté pan and when hot add the leek or green onion and the celery. Saute until just tender and then add the sorrel leaves. Mush up the leaves with the back of a wooden spoon. Toss in the parsley and add salt and pepper to taste. A 1/2 cup or so of the bean cooking liquid will moisten and thin the sauce. Cook until the sorrel is wilted , 3-4 minutes.

To serve: spoon the brown rice onto a plate. Layer with a portion of the hot, cooked beans and then top with the sorrel sauce. Serves 4.

Christmas Lima Beans with Sorrel Sauce