Cool dish for a hot day

The spinach, which never really grew, bolted, so I cut it all back. Just enough, supplemented with a store-bought lettuce and potatoes, and garnished with nasturtium flowers and salad burnet, for a lovely nicoise.

Salad nicoise a la Xan

Spinach
Head lettuce
Salad burnet
Nasturtium flowers
Small red potatoes
Olives
Tuna (fresh is nice, but canned is cheaper. Get a dolphin-safe brand)
Vinaigrette

Blanche the spinach and burnet (very quickly-- boiling water, spinach goes in and immediately back out). Arrange artistically (very important) with other ingredients. Drizzle with vinaigrette to taste. If my tarragon and parsley were large enough to cut some fresh, I'd garnish with these herbs, but alas, still no herbs in the garden big enough to bother.

I also must confess, I had no small red potatoes and used roughly cubed Idahos instead. My bad.

I had some nasturtium flowers left over, so I made some cheese and crackers. Something tells me my kids (for whom I ostensibly write this) are not going to be making these.

Cooking, NOT from the garden

"redloon" over at MyFolia made a salad with garden greens and strawberries, which inspired me to try my hand at creating a slaw to go with the crab cakes I had prepared. These ingredients (most of which are actually in my garden) are all store-bought, because they aren't ripe yet out back.

Strawberry-leek slaw

• 1 cup sliced leeks
• 1 small baby bok choy
• 1/2 teaspoon ginger, fresh grated

• 1 tablespoon remoulade
• 1 teaspoon orange zest (fresh or dried)
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 tablespoons lime juice (fresh is best)
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, fresh ground

• 2 cups strawberries, thinly sliced
• 1 cup celery cabbage

Sautee first 3 ingredients until leeks are golden. Toss with thinly sliced strawberries. Add additional ingredients to the remoulade and whip. Mix with vegetables & strawberries and set aside at least one hour. Serve as side dish with crab cakes.

This dish did not keep well, eat it when you make it.

Cooking from the garden

I started this journal because my daughter is a performer on a three-year tour, cooking on a hot plate in hotel rooms, and she wanted to be able to make some of our family recipes. So the early recipes are all stove-top, or things that can be adapted to stove top. But that leaves out lasagna, and casseroles, and baked chicken, and too many things, so I thought, well my son can use this too!

And then I started this year’s garden.

As I mentioned last time, in the summer all of our meals come from the garden. Meat consumption plummets as the plants get going. So I’ve decided to join the legion of Chicago garden bloggers and start posting about the garden, and about the food I make from it. I’ll try to keep it linked to the cooking for now (all food gardeners are cooks) but who knows.

Thanks for inspiration to my many, many friends on the MyFolia community garden blog, and to MrBrownThumb, who knows about it, and to YouGrowGirl and MySkinnyGarden, where I lurk.

Stir Fried Garden Vegetables







Ingredients for a cooking gardener are “what is in the garden today?” This batch:

From the garden:
Early spinach
Mustard greens
Sugar snap snow peas
Wild onion greens
Broccoli

From the cupboard:
Onion
Almond slivers
3 slices of bacon
rice

For tips on stir fry, see Rock stars need to eat, too.

Holding Patterns

At the end of May I'm always just waiting to be able to cook right out of the garden. Some years I've managed to avoid the grocery store, for daily edibles at least, from mid-June through early October. This year we'll have beans, eggplants, tomatoes, green peppers, broccoli, brussels sprouts, corn, snowpeas, greens, carrots, garlic, cukes, pumpkins and squash, as well as raspberries and blackberries, so there are going to be a lot of great meals.

But today the only thing I could harvest was some young radish greens (can't even use the green onions anymore, as the new neighbor is dumping chemicals onto his roses just on the other side of the fence, keeping his roses weed-free but incidentally poisoning my food).

So I chopped up the greens, added some onions and bacon, and added them to this old-faithful quiche, from The Vegetarian Epicure. I use purchased, frozen crusts, but feel free to make your own.


Basic Quiche
3 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 cups cream or half and half
6 to 8 oz. of gruyere cheese (they say cubed, but I like to grate it for a smoother texture)

Some additional ingredients that I have added to this in the past:
Sauteed chard, bacon and onions, chopped fresh basil or parsley, sun dried tomatoes and feta cheese

Saute the additional ingredient, as appropriate (bacon, ham, onions, greens). Sprinkle them on the bottom of a crust. On top of this, spread the cheese. Now combine the eggs with salt and pepper and beat til frothy. Add the cream and beat again. Pour this mixture over the cheese. Bake for 15 minutes at 450, then turn the heat down to 350 and continue baking another 10 to 15 minutes, or until top is lightly browned and a knife comes out clean.

Let sit until it cools enough to retain its pie shape when cut. This can also be served cold.

Sight, sound, touch, taste, scent

There is a “Savory Walk” in my garden—a 12 by 16 foot plot filled with herbs and aromatics. Basil, oregano, 3 kinds of mint; parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Rue for the poetic name. Salad burnett because it's mentioned in Shakespeare. Savory, summer and winter, chamomile, caraway, coriander. Wormwood and Russian sage, with the added bonus of beautiful silver foliage.

Elsewhere in the garden are other herbs and aromatics, as well as medicinal plants—basil, cilantro, marigold, and parsley as companions in the vegetable plots, lavender in one flower bed, fennel in another. Borage for strength, beebalm for the bees, and of course, since this is Chicago, our own wild onions, everywhere.

Marigolds are one of those stealth aromatics— you always forget that marigold is an herb, and that it has a wonderful smell. I want to say strong smell, but that’s misleading. What I mean is that the smell makes you think “strength.”

I love to walk past the fennel. If you brush against it the whole yard gets a whisper of the anise scent. Sage will do this too. It was this that inspired the Savory Walk—a slightly-too-narrow path lined with aromatics so that you have to brush them on your way past.

A garden is sensory. You can experience it in so many ways. There’s sight of course— what most people think of when they see a garden— it looks nice. And taste— you can grow the things you eat. This is where gardeners start, I think, with a desire for beauty and food. But gardens also have sound. Buzzing insects, and singing birds. Rustling of small animals in the brush, maybe running water. Gardeners know about touch. The fuzz of a lambs ear, or the prick of a rose. A crisp forsythia leaf, the hard shell of a nut, the heavy sun on the back of your neck and of course the wonderful feel of the soil around your hands.

Scent is subtlest sensory benefit of a garden. It’s why I feel you can’t really plant too many herbs. I never feel bad about not harvesting all of them, because the dried and dead plants will retain their scent right into the winter. You can brush your hand over dead thyme in the middle of January and get a rush of midsummer hitting your nose.

Mint-Lavender Soda

2 cups granulated sugar
2 1/2 cups water + 1/2 cup water
splash of lemon juice
one cup of lavender blossoms
one cup whole mint leaves

Bring the sugar, lemon, and 2 1/2 c. water to 200° F and maintain for 10 minutes. The sugar should be completely dissolved and the syrup clear. Add the rest of the water, the mint and lavender, and bring back to 200 and boil for 10 more minutes or until the liquid is reduced to two cups.

Add 2 oz. to a 12 oz. glass of sparkling water with ice, with fresh mint leaves to garnish.

Is it Spring yet?

Springtime in Chicago is not really winter, but it's not really spring either. Everything gets green and the flowers come up, but the nighttime temps still drop into the low 40s, especially here by the lake. So a good sturdy soup is in order, hence this totally made-up recipe for some real stick-to-your-ribs goodness.

Potato-Leek soup with Feta cheese

1 medium leek for each 2 servings
1 medium-sized potato for each serving
vegetable or chicken stock
parsley
feta cheese


Cut the greens off the leeks and skin the potatoes. (Place the peeled potatoes in cold water to keep them from going brown) Boil these with some sea salt and peppercorns in 2-3 cups of water to make stock.

Cut up and boil the potatoes until soft. Dice and saute the leeks in 2 tablespoons of butter, until golden, add the stock. Drain the potatoes and add to the leeks and stock. Cream this using an immersible blender; thin with more stock or with half-and-half. Add fresh or dried parsley, salt and pepper to taste.

Ladel into bowls and garnish with crumbled feta cheese.

A nice side salad completes this. Nora makes one with garbanzos, grape tomatoes, sliced cucumber and a sesame-balsamic dressing.

Never fear too much parsley again

I grow parsley in the garden every year, and always end up with too much. This year I found a wonderful recipe for parsley soup on The Vegetarian Epicure website. We've got both Vegetarian Epicure cookbooks, but there's lots more stuff on line as well.

Generally, I tend not to get "fresh" vegetables from the grocery store in winter, mostly because the concept of fresh is stretched a little too thin for me. I assume grocery store vegetable aisle offerings were fresh at some remote point in time and on some remote part of the planet, but I'd just as soon buy the preserved/frozen ones as contribute to the conniptions that Big Ag goes through to fool me into buying out-of-season as though it's legitimately fresh.

Anyway, relented on this and bought a big bunch of parsley--some italian and some curly-- to make this soup tonight. I'll serve it with a quiche, also a Vegetarian Epicure recipe.

Parsley Soup

Use one of the tasty, creamy-textured varieties of potato for this soup, such as Yukon Gold, or any of the fingerling potatoes that are becoming more commonly available. And be sure to get flat-leaf parsley, also known as Italian parsley, which has a stronger flavor than the curly parsley used for
garnishing.

About 1 lb. potatoes - fingerlings or Yukon Gold
3 bunches flat-leaf parsley (4 cups chopped)
3 leeks, white only (3 cups chopped)
1 1/2 Tbs. butter
1 tsp. olive oil
salt to taste

4-5 cups vegetable broth
white pepper
nutmeg
1/2 cup white wine
2-3 tsp. lemon juice
Parmesan cheese

Scrub the potatoes and chop them. Put them in a soup pot with about a quart of water and half a teaspoon salt, and boil them. Meanwhile, rinse and chop the parsley (stems are OK), and wash and slice the leeks.

Saute the chopped parsley in a large non-stick pan, in a tablespoon of butter, tossing and stirring it until it is sizzling and beginning to color. Add the parsley to the potatoes.

In the same pan, sauté the leeks in the remaining butter and oil until they are soft and turning gold. Add them to the soup, alo ng with 4 or 5 cups of light vegetable broth, a generous sprinkle of white pepper, a big pinch of nutmeg, and half a cup of white wine. Simmer everything together for about half an hour, then puree it in the blender in batches.

Return the pureed soup to the pot, bring it to a simmer, and taste. Keep tasting as you stir in a bit of fresh lemon juice, and correct the seasoning with more salt and pepper as needed.

Serve the soup hot, garnished with freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Serves eight.