Opting out

Six reasons to opt out of national food system:

1. Industrial foods are lower in nutritional value.
2. Buying from local, entrepreneurial farmers and sellers improves the local economy. Know your farmer!
3. The US does not require that genetically modified foods be labeled as such.
4. A pregnant teen that I know told me that she "doesn't eat vegetables."
5. HFCS. 'nuff said.
6. You'll never find this in a box:

Mashed summer roots
Per every 2 diners:
One large potato
3-5 radishes
1 medium parsnip
1 pat butter
1/4 cup (or so) milk, half-half, or cream
white pepper and sea salt to taste

Peel, roughly cube, and boil all until soft (you can easily slip a knife in). To cube vegetables, just cut them up along each axis-- length, width, height. Mash into a lumpy mass with a potato masher or fork, then add the butter and milk/cream. Continue to mash with the masher/fork or whip with a hand mixer on low. I don't mind lumps in my mashed potatoes, but some people like them really smooth.

Serve with meat loaf, or pan fried pork, fish or portobello mushroom.

Meeting Farmer Rick and the Flowerweaver

I used to wonder if I would ever make the kind of intimate, lifelong friends that I made when I was in college. In that period of your life, you spend a lot of time with, well, time, and interacting mostly with people who closely share your interests and outlooks. Your off-hours are filled with them-- you eat with them, play with them, run into them at random times during the day.

And when, as an adult, do you get to do that again? You spend your days in an office with people thrown together randomly by their skill set. Most of the day you interact with these people only at it relates to the task at hand. While you can get incredibly intimate with these people-- you go to their weddings and holiday parties, they know when you've had a fight with your spouse, or your mother, they send you cards when your favorite aunt dies-- work friendships, however intimate, tend to last only as long as the job. It's very hard to connect at a personal level, independent of the profession and maintain the connection once you don't share phone lines anymore.

As an adult, you mostly meet people through very narrow mutual interests-- yoga class-- or you see your family.

And then came the internet.

On line, I have met people very much the way I used to meet them in school: through mutual interest, on my off hours, and I "run into" them at random times throughout the day. I have met a dozen people in the past year, through gardening on line, who are now some of my best friends.

Today I got to meet the people behind the blog The Flowerweaver, whom I know from My Folia, in town to visit their new grandbaby. I made them a garden lunch: parsnip soup, raspberry soda, peach scones and the autumn salsa noted below and took them to the Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago's wonderful free 20-acre greenhouse. We spent 4 hours in non-stop conversation, and not just about gardening.

So yes, I guess I will meet new and wonderful people, all my life.

Autumn salsa

2 large apples, peeled and cored
15 medium radishes
1 small onion
lime juice
salt

Dice the apples, radishes and onions. Caramelize the onions in about a tablespoon of butter. Mix all together with about 1/4 cup (or less) of lime juice. Salt to taste. This made enough for healthy servings for three adults.

Remember to zest the lime and either freeze it or set it aside to dry. Always nice to have a little citrus zest around.

By the way, this is so delicious. I might try it with a little honey or sugar for a sweet salsa some time.

Recycling recipes

I read somewhere recently that the typical family uses just about 10 different recipes; when I look at the label cloud I see that, indeed, there are 11 recipes here tagged "family favorites." It would be interesting to take, say, 50 families and see how many common recipes they have among themselves-- you could instantly grow your repertoire by just making someone else's family favorite.

It sounds a little depressing, to know that you're repeating a meal every ten days. But are you really? Or are you taking basic concepts and adapting, changing, reinventing?

There are some basic concepts, starting with meat or vegetarian. Subdivide those into different types of meat and vegetables. Further divide that by cooking method. Start changing up the additional ingredients. Pretty soon you've got not 10 basic recipes, but a hundred.

When you cook seasonally, this activity completes itself. I can't cook with fresh peas or string beans right now, because there aren't any, so I'm using swiss chard and brussels sprouts as the green in all my dishes. What I was making with eggplant in July I am now making with squash. It's a little scary the first time you look in the fridge to pull out something for, say, biryani, and discover that it isn't there. So you take a deep breath and substitute.

Now, the good news is, you've been eating for years and probably have a decent sense of what substitutions you can make. The other good news is, if it doesn't work there's always carry out.

Here's Monday's adapted soup:

Squash soup with caramelized radishes

3 T butter, melted in a pan
4 cloves of garlic, slightly crushed
20 medium radishes, halved

Melt the butter, turn the heat down to low and add the vegetables. Brown them over a very low flame until soft and browned, about 20 minutes. Add to the soup just before serving. Here's a couple of squash soup recipes:

Butternut-cider soup
Roasted autumn-veggie soup

The best thing

When the first sprout pokes its head through the dirt

I always think
This is the best thing about gardening

When I make that first spring salad with the early crops
of lettuce and radish and green onion
I always think
This is the best thing about gardening

Then comes that week where you spend 12 hours
Every day,
Digging and planting and listening to the early bees
And you can’t get the dirt out of your pores

And suddenly it looks like a garden again
And I think
This is the best thing about gardening

Every day, all summer long
Flowers bloom and birds sing and bees move from blossom
to blossom
And that’s the best thing about gardening too

But then comes fall
The garden starts to die
But you chop the dead leaves
And turn the empty earth
And it is black and rich and full of worms and promise

And that is the best thing about gardening

Autumn salsa

2 large apples, peeled and cored
20 medium radishes
1 small onion
lime juice
salt

Dice the apples, radishes and onions. Caramelize the onions in about a tablespoon of butter. Mix all together with about 1/4 cup (or less) of lime juice. Salt to taste. This made enough for healthy servings for three adults.

Everything but the cheese was home grown

Practiced a little "kitchen archeology" a couple of days ago and unearthed a jar of homegrown walnuts from my "uncle of the heart" Lajos, who lives on a small farm in Hungary and brings produce a couple of times a year.

So I went out into the garden and deadheaded my five sweet basil plants (if it bolts, i.e. develops flowers, the flavor changes, so you have to pinch off the flowers at this time of year). Pulled up 5 enormous cherry belle radishes and made a pesto, using walnut oil instead of olive oil. Sauteed some new snow peas from the oregon sugar pods that just started to fruit, a couple of large mustard greens and the radish greens. Added all to a lovely fettucini from World Market (they have really good fettucini), crumbled some more walnuts on top.

As my previous post averred, this is one of the joys of backyard gardening, joined to a fearless approach to cooking. I had never heard of a pesto made with radishes, but I know that pesto is just a "paste" (literal translation) made of vegetables, oil, hard cheese, and nuts. So why NOT a radish pesto?

Radish Basil Pesto Sauce

* 5 medium radishes, diced
* 1/4 cup walnuts
* 2-3 cloves garlic
* 1 cup fresh basil
* 1/4 cup olive or nut oil
* 1/4 cup grated fresh Parmesan

Toast the walnuts and garlic (200F/90C for 5 to 8 minutes).

Place the radishes, walnuts, garlic and basil in the food processor and pulse about 7 to 10 times, until the ingredients are grated, not pureed. Add enough oil to moisten the ingredients and pulse again until blended. My food processor is one of those 3-cup ones, so at this point I moved the pesto into a bowl, but you can mix the cheese right in the food processor if there's room. Add the freshly grated Parmesan and mix it by hand. Taste and season the pesto with kosher salt, as necessary. Don't use pepper with this recipe, as it will mask the peppery flavor of the radishes.

Makes about 2 cups.

Spoon onto fresh, hot pasta to taste. Important that the pasta is hot, because it will soften the pesto. If the pasta is too cool, the pesto will just be in nasty lumps. For additional culinary and aesthetic interest, add sauteed greens and or green beans, diced roasted or sauteed squash, or a diced fresh tomato (or all of them!).

The pesto also makes a terrific condiment for sandwiches.