Fall Sea Kale Medley

Hello!  It's been a while since I posted.  Life just got busy.  And the garden got slow.  But one of the beautiful things about perennial greens is that they often have a fall season to go along with their spring season.  And that is the case with sea kale, one of my garden favorites.

Fall sea kale shoots

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the spring we enjoy the flower buds of the sea kale - we eat them like broccoli raab.  In the summer the sea kale is beautiful and attracts bees with its honey-scented flowers.  And then in the late fall, as we turn towards winter, the sea kale gives us one last tasty treat: tender new growth leaves.

Jonathan is the kale master in our kitchen, so he took charge and cooked up a medley of the sea kale along with some regular kale that is still hanging on in our front garden.

Regular kale in the front garden

He sauteed up leaves from each plant, along with a healthy dose of chopped garlic, some tamari, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a dash of balsamic vinegar at the end.  So tasty, and what a treat to be eating garden greens even as we approach Thanksgiving.

Yay for the garden!  Yay for sea kale!

Garden Storm

Hmmm....  Well, I missed a week of posts due to being sick and working hard on a mayoral race I'm helping with.  And then came this (see photo).  We had a big storm Saturday night that dropped more limbs and branches than I thought possible onto our backyard.  Note the flattened greenhouse.  I was going to start digging and sampling some of our perennial root crops, but things are bit hard to get to right now.  Hopefully the sun will shine, the air will warm up, and the snow will melt just enough for me to get at some more tasty treats before winter really settles in for the long haul. 

We took the opportunity to hack back the banana trees for the season.  While we were at it we found a couple figs that were ready.  So we enjoyed the fresh figs while looking out at snow and ice.  How strange!

Enchanted Bottle Gourd

This year we experimented with growing a Bottle Gourd, or calabash.  We planted one out front, and one in the greenhouse.  The one in the greenhouse grew so big it exploded out of the greenhouse and draped down, out, and over our blueberry bushes, like a green lava flow.  The one in front chose to grow up a pole, so we gave it a string and it grew across it and back down the other side to make a beautiful arch over the sidewalk. 

The arch became a fixture in our neighborhood this summer.  I would often see teenagers walk by, stop under the arch, and show each other the flowers.  People enjoyed walking under it, and it lent some enchantment to the street, encouraging people to stop for a minute in their travels and admire this vibrant plant.  We ate its shoots this spring and they were quite tasty.  This one in the picture was growing a great, large gourd this fall.  Someone cut it off and took it over the weekend.  I hope they are enjoying it!

The Persimmon Needs No Recipe

The persimmon is my favorite fruit in the whole garden.  It is a full gourmet dessert in and of itself.  Have you tried one?  It tastes like brandied caramel apricots on butterscotch-vanilla pudding.  No joke.  They are fabulous.  Exquisite.  AWESOME!!!!  They are in season right now and each morning I creep out to see if any have fallen from the tree.  You have to time it just right.  If you get impatient and try to eat them before they're ripe (before they've fallen) beware!  As a friend said, if you eat them when they're under-ripe you'll feel like your face is turning inside out.  Astringent!  And if you wait too long, the squirrels will have eaten them first.  That's why I check for them daily.  Eating a persimmon is one of the great joys in life.  I savor it and remember that life is good.  It's like eating a sunset.

Last Hurrah Pesto

Fall is certainly here.  It's 6:00 right now and almost dark!  Today we harvested some lingering greens to make a pesto for tomorrow's Edible Forest Garden Workshop.  I used a variety from the garden: Thai basil, perennial arugula, parsley, and kale.

Thai basil, perennial arugula, parsley, and kale leaves for pesto

I rinsed off the greens and then put them in a plastic bag and beat them with a rolling pin.  I've read that roughing them up like that is a good way to release the cracken.  No, I mean to release the flavor.

Releasing the flavor (how often do you get to hit something with a rolling pin?  Fun!)

Then I combined the greens with some roasted garlic cloves, olive oil, and salt and blended them up, traditional pesto style.  Put the green awesomeness in a bowl and mixed in a healthy dose of parmesan cheese (I do love parmesan, as some of you know.)

Finished product: Last Hurrah Pesto

Tomorrow the guests for our workshop will have this for lunch and we'll find out how it turned out!  It tasted pretty good on a spoon, so I'm expecting good things.

Chestnut Puree

Sunday night I tried my hand at the famous Hungarian Chestnut Puree (Gestenyepure).  It wasn't the same as my host mother used to make it, but it was quite good!

First I roasted a pound and a half of chestnuts.  We had four people helping to cut "X"s into the shells so that the nuts could expand without exploding (yes, we have had explosions before).  I spread the nuts out on a cookie sheet, sprinkled some water on top, and roasted them for about 25 minutes at 425 degrees.  When they were done, I took them out of the oven and we cooled them briefly before peeling the shells off.  I put the shelled, roasted nuts in the food processor and chopped them up as finely as I could.  The way I had this dessert in Hungary the nuts must have been ground nearly to a flour consistency.  My chopped chestnuts ended up in bigger chunks than that, sort of like ground walnuts. 

I set the chestnuts aside and mixed 1/4 cup water and 3/4 cup sugar in a saucepan and set it on the stove to simmer and create a simple syrup.  When the syrup was ready I combined it with the ground nuts in a medium sized bowl.  In retrospect I would use less syrup.  It was very sweet, and my sweet tooth is rather small!  Then I added some whole milk, maybe a tablespoon or two, and a tablespoon or two of rum.  Stirred it up and set it in the fridge while we ate dinner.  After dinner I made some whipped cream, and served the chilled puree with whipped cream on top.  We ended up mixing the whipped cream into the puree, and a few hardy souls added even more rum and said it was great. It was a delicious, filling, chestnutty dessert.  So good!

Roasted Yam Berries

Jonathan's parents are visiting and we just had a foraged lunch.  Gwen and Ralph brought boiled peanuts from the south, we supplied some homemade pear juice from our neighbor's pear tree, and we roasted up some chestnuts and the yam berries (aka Chinese Yam or Cinnamon Vine)!  (Oh, and there are some huckleberry chocolate cordials in there for good measure.)

Today's foraged lunch

In the past we've boiled the yam berries, or "air potatoes" as we like to call them.  But I thought roasting would be a good idea, and they came out great!  It was so easy.  I went out the door and harvested them, just shaking the vines slightly and collecting the little guys in a bowl.  Came in and separated the berries from the other dried leaves and flowers and stuff that got in the bowl.  Then I added some olive oil to coat them, and sprinkled a generous amount of salt on top.  I spread them out on a cookie sheet, and popped them in the oven that was heated to 425 degrees.  After about 12 minutes I tested them with a fork and they were completely tender, even though they were hard like marbles when I put them in.  They tasted great!  What a fun party food, perfect for a foraged lunch!

Roasted berries from the Chinese Yam (Dioscorea batatas)

Jonathan's mom, Gwen, with the roasted yam berries

PawPaw Wine

Yes, we made wine. Or actually, mead. Jonathan started it a few months ago. We got inspired by Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation, and used his honey wine recipe.  Jonathan combined frozen pawpaw fruit pulp from the previous year, honey, and water, and started it fermenting in a wide mouthed container with a towel on top. After a few days he moved the concoction into a gallon jug with an airlock on top. It took several rounds of straining to get the taste just right. Sweet, fruity, with a little zing. Just delightful. We had some last week and it was perfect. We had some last night and it had gotten a little yeasty. There is clearly an art to making homemade wine.  We'll just have to try it again!  Here we are with the wine and one of the pawpaws. 

Pawpaw on NPR!

Check out this great segment about pawpaws on NPR.  The link includes an audio segment and a short video.  I learned that Thomas Jefferson and Lewis and Clark all ate pawpaws!

A Bit About My Home

I have the great good fortune of living in the Holyoke Edible Forest Garden.  I moved here in the summer of 2007, when the garden was well underway, having been designed and maintained by my husband, Jonathan Bates, and our housemate, Eric Toensmeier (with help from many, many people, including members of the Western Massachusetts Permaculture Guild).  This is the mission they developed:

"Our urban forest garden is an intensively managed backyard foraging paradise, a megadiverse living ark of useful and multifunctional plants from our own bioregion and around the world. The forest garden is the unifying element of a larger permaculture design for food production, wildlife habitat, and social spaces that encompasses the entire property."

This is what the place looked like in the beginning, 2004:

Looks like your regular urban lot, and well, it is.  (Or should I say it was.)

Here's the same view, taken in 2008:

And a similar view in the summer of 2010 (note the persimmon tree on the left, the lotuses in the water garden, and the hardy kiwi arbor - three of my favorite things in the garden):

It's from this urban back (and front) yard that I get most of the things I write about in this blog.  It is a delight to live here.  May this blog inspire the creation of gardens like this in all places!  Food Forests For All! 

Giant Ground Sloth's Delight

But first, an update on the chestnuts.  I did go back for more, and collected seven pounds!  It was pretty fun.  I wore thick leather gloves to protect my hands.  Could have used some more bug spray.  But I was just in awe at how much food was on those trees.  Incredible.  We simmered the nuts in 120 degree water for 20 minutes in an attempt to kill the weevil eggs before they hatch.  Eating an itsy bitsy bug egg is one thing, but a full blown worm in my chestnut?  Uh, no thanks.  Now the nuts are spread out on beach towels on our kitchen floor to dry.  Our kitchen is always full of "projects".

But today I want to talk about pawpaws.  Asimina triloba, our beloved North American fruit.  When we were kids a lot of us learned the song, "pickin' up pawpaws, put 'em in your pocket", but that's as close as we ever got to an actual pawpaw.  Well, they are native to this region, easy to grow, pest free, and amazing!  (But really, I don't think you could fit them in your pocket.  Maybe one per pocket, unless you have some mighty big pockets.  They're about the size of a mango or large potato.)

What are they like?  Slice them open and you'll find loads of cream-colored custardy flesh surrounding a set of large dark brown seeds.  Describing the taste is something that has eluded many.  They taste kind of like melon-banana-fruitpunch-vanilla-floral-custard.  They taste like something from the tropics.  It's really mind blowing that they grow right here. 

Some ideas for cooking with them are to make them into a smoothy.  I like this best using frozen pawpaw flesh and milk.  I bet frozen yogurt would be great too.  If you used frozen yogurt you could use fresh pawpaws and still get that chilly, slushy texture.  I also like to make a baked pudding recipe that I found in Joy of Cooking.  Oh!  And this year Jonathan made pawpaw wine!  That will deserve its own post here.

And you can't go wrong with eating them fresh off the tree.  That's how giant sloths and other megafauna ate them.  Pawpaws evolved alongside these giant animals and that's why their seeds are so big!  Who else but a giant sloth, mastadon, or camel could eat a whole pawpaw and poop out the seeds?  Dude! 

Chestnuts. Sigh.

It's chestnut time!  Oh, what a wonderful time of year.  We've been closely monitoring the trees we collect from.  We went by them this weekend and gathered a small batch of nuts.  One of the branches had broken and so the nuts on that branch were open and ready for the taking.  We went by again yesterday and the other nuts are still not quite ready.  But they will be soon, and we are not the only people who know about this group of trees.  It's a dog-eat-dog world out there.  We want to be sure to get some, so we're going back this weekend to see what's shaking.

I fell in love with chestnuts while living in Budapest, Hungary during my junior year of college.  Vendors would roast them right there on the street.  They smelled so good in the crisp, fall air.  My host mother, Ilona, would make THE MOST AMAZING dessert: Gesztenye pure (chestnut puree).  Oh, it was heavenly.  And I just looked online and found a recipe, so I am definitely making it this year. 

But really, you don't even need a recipe for enjoying chestnuts.  Just roast 'em, like the Christmas Carol says.  They are nutty and sweet, creamy, and tender.  A perfect way to welcome in the fall. 

As they say in Hungary, Jo etvayot!  Bon appetit!

Yam Berries! Yam Berries!

The yam berries are ready!  We have a beautiful Chinese Yam (Dioscorea batatas) planted out front, and it is full of aerial tubers - little "air potatoes". 

I am thinking up ways to prepare them.  The simplest would be to boil them up and serve with butter, salt, pepper, and maybe some rosemary.  I'm also thinking about using them for a Spanish Tortilla.  Or maybe roasting them to make some little round "fries".  Seems like a fun snack food!  They're just about the size of a Junior Mint.  You could sneak some in your bag and take them to the movies!

I've read that the large taproot is a staple crop in Japan, and quite delicious.  But we don't really have enough plants to go eating their taproots.  So, we'll enjoy the "berries".  I'm waiting till next week to cook with them (we have a video shoot at our house and want to keep them on the vine for that).  I will let you know how my experiments turn out!

 (photo of taproot, leaves, yam berries, and pruners for scale)

Holyoke's Extra Famous Beach Plum Crisp

When we first made this a couple years ago we were ecstatic.  What great flavor!  We couldn't stop talking about it, and it's become an annual tradition: Holyoke's Extra Famous Beach Plum Crisp.  Why is it EXTRA famous?  Well, you'll just have to try it and find out. 

We have a beautiful beach plum in our backyard.  It's an improved variety of the kind you find near the beach.  It makes luscious little plums that we always have to fight the blue jays for.  We tend to have trouble with stone fruits here - they seem to attract pests - and the beach plum is no exception.  Bummer because they're so tasty.

You can get your own beach plum shrub from our nursery, Food Forest Farm.  Or you can forage for plums at your favorite New England or Mid Atlantic beach.

The recipe is simple and easy:

5 cups beach plums, pitted and halved
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla

3/4 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
3/4 cup oatmeal
1/4 cup cold butter, cut up

Preheat oven to 375.  Spread plums evenly onto bottom of lightly greased 13" x 9" glass baking dish.  Mix lemon juice and vanilla in a small bowl and sprinkle evenly over plums.

In a separate bowl, mix topping ingredients together.  Sprinkle evenly over plums.  Bake 35 - 40 minutes.

Here's a picture of me and Jonathan near the beach plum at our wedding in the forest garden.  Check out the beautiful fruits (and I don't mean us!)

(Photo by Becca Bock Hagen)

Kings, Chickens, and Other Neighborhood Finds

In my post about the bananas I mentioned that with an Edible Forest Garden sometimes you don't have to cook - you just give the products away and they come back to you as food.  Well, this post is about how sometimes you don't have to grow things.  You just treat your neighborhood as your garden, and forage away.

We live in an urban neighborhood, downtown Holyoke, so if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere.  Jonathan got the ball rolling the other day.  He loaded up his truck with some empty spackle buckets and went out into the world.  I was out playing violin and when I came home the house was loaded with foraged goodies.  In a shopping center parking lot, he found a cache of King Boletes!  At a city park he found Berkeley's Polypore!  At the side of the street he found loads of Concord Grapes!  And over at the cemetery he found two apple trees! 

My parents gave us a juicer last year for Christmas, so we brought it out and proceeded to make some fabulous grape juice and apple juice.  All for free!  I cooked up some of the King Boletes.  I sliced them to about 1/4 inch thickness, and sauteed them in olive oil and butter with some chopped garlic.  Finished them off with a dash of sea salt.  Wow.  So good.  No wonder they call it the King.  We had a simple dinner of sauteed mushrooms and fried eggs (thanks, girls!) with parmesan cheese. 

The information we found online about Berkeley's Polypore was not so inspirational as far as cooking it.  One article Jonathan found was talking about how you need to marinate it well in lots of oil, bake it, and then squeeze out all the oil.  Somehow that doesn't sound that appealing to me.  So, it's still in our fridge.

Jonathan's foraging has rubbed off on me.  Yesterday I went for a run on one of my usual routes - to the Dunkin Donuts and back.  I was running through a local park when something caught my eye.  Could this be Chicken of the Woods?  I decided to keep running till my turn around and then come back for it on my return trip.  When I got back to the spot, there it was, nestled at the bottom of an oak tree.  There was a big (20 inches in diameter) one and then a smaller pup (8 inches).  The pup seemed to be more tender, plus I was still 10 minutes from home and thought it might be hard to jog carrying a giant mushroom.  So I picked the pup and ran home, ipod in one hand, mushroom in the other (too bad I didn't get a photo of that to post here!).  I got some interesting looks, but hey, it's free, tasty food!  The plan for this afternoon is to make a chicken pot pie with wild mushrooms.  I can't wait.

Eating the Giant Lamb's Quarters

We are growing a plant that we call Giant Lamb's Quarters.  Eric brought it back from a trip to Colorado.  He met someone there who had found the plant growing in an urban lot in Canada and had brought it back to his garden where it had been self seeding for the past 10-15 years.  We had never seen a Lamb's Quarters with leaves that big, so we were eager to try it.  We don't know what species it is, but it is a member of the Chenopodium family, which is the same family that includes Good King Henry and Quinoa.

Jonathan brought some in today and we cooked it up for lunch.  Just a simple saute with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper.  We cooked a mix of the large leaves and their soft stems.  It tasted delicious.  Kind of nutty, kind of beet-like.  We weren't sure how it would taste since it had begun to put on flower buds, and oftentimes that makes a plant turn bitter, but we were happy to find it still had a very delicate flavor.

Food Photography

I love looking at cookbooks and food magazines, especially when there are photos.  The photos always get me interested in making the dish.  I want to have photos in this cookbook. 

I don't normally take many photos in my life.  I prefer to write about my experiences, rather than capturing them on film.  But I love looking at pictures, so I think I will try to develop my photography skills.  We are in need of a new camera anyway, so we'll look for one that takes good close up shots, with good focus and vibrant colors. 

I was just looking at this Intro to Food Photography and it has some good tips.  Their first tip is about good lighting.  I'm not sure how to create good lighting, but I will try!  I remember when I worked at the violin shop I would take pictures of the violins for the website.  It was so hard to get the lighting set so that it brought out the shine and richness of the varnish and so the flash didn't bounce of the wood.  I wonder if taking pictures of food is any easier? 

I have been looking at Aran Goyoaga's blog "Cannelle et Vanille" for a long time.  Her work is an inspiration to me.  I see she offers food styling and photography workshops.  Hmmm....  I wonder if there's someone local I could work with and learn from.

Banana Leaves

One of my favorite things about our Holyoke Edible Forest Garden are the banana trees growing in front of our house.  People are always surprised to see them growing here.  They grow tall each summer, with big tropical leaves spreading out to cover our front porch.  Our climate is too cold for them to fruit, but we love them for the look.  Below is a photo of my housemate, Marikler, with our front tropical garden.  The banana trees are to the right and bottom of the photo.

Our neighbors love the banana trees for the leaves!  One day I came home from work and pulled into the driveway to find a neighbor standing there with a machete in his hand.  He said it was about to frost and asked if he could cut the leaves.  He wanted to give the leaves to his sister to make pasteles.  You can find out more about pasteles here.  He offered to bring us pasteles in exchange for the leaves.  What a great trade.  That's the thing about edible forest garden cooking.  Sometimes you don't even have to cook!  You just grow cool things, give them away, and people bring you fully prepared food. 

Perennial Arugula and Asian Pear Salad

There are two foods in our garden that I really love and that we have a lot of right now: Perennial Arugula and Asian Pears.  I've heard of people eating arugula salads with pears and Parmesan cheese so I thought I'd try something similar with the food we had on hand. 

I picked a handful of Perennial Arugula.  Just a handful will do ya - this stuff is strong!  Puts hair on your chest, as I my dad would say.  I picked two Asian Pears, but ended up just using one.  We have three varieties growing on one grafted tree.  I used the variety that is ripe right now.  It's the blandest one to my taste, but it's juicy and crisp and it went just right in the salad. 

I washed some lettuce from our CSA and put that on two plates.  Then I placed half the handful of arugula on each plate.  I topped that with slices of Asian Pear, halved sun gold cherry tomatoes, and chopped red onion.  I drizzled some excellent extra virgin olive oil on top, along with salt and fresh ground pepper.  Then I crumbled on some Bulgarian sheep cheese we get from the Casablanca Halal Market over in Hadley. 

The result?  Check out Jonathan's face below.  He looked just as happy after lunch when his plate was clean.

Asking for a Kick in the Pants

I need to get eating. 

I need to get eating the Edible Forest Garden.

It's so easy to fall into the comfort of filling my plate with luscious high-summer annual vegetables.  When the tomatoes are bursting out of their skins and peppers come one after the next, it's hard to remember to go after the more unusual plants in our garden.  But that's exactly where the knowledge needs to be built.  And if I'm going to write this cookbook (and I am), I need to give myself a little kick in the pants to experiment with all the stuff growing in our backyard. 

When I moved in to this place, the Holyoke Edible Forest Garden was already several years old, lovingly designed and nurtured by Jonathan and Eric.  They had over 200 species of edibles!  That was very cool, but I wanted to go beyond the geek factor.  How do you eat this stuff, I wanted to know.  Does it really taste any good?  How can we cook with it? 

Those are the questions I want to explore here and in the cookbook.  Consider this my kick in the pants. 

PS- I'll be at the beach (woo hoo!) on Thursday, so look for my next post a week from today.

Fall Preview

It may still feel like summer, but there's no denying just the slightest hint of fall in the air.  The night arrives a little earlier, the stars shine a little brighter, and you can almost smell the earthy scent of leaves.  I do love fall, and I'm looking forward to our fall crop of foods. 

Some of them I already have ideas about:
    - sweet coconut rice with pawpaw
    - beach plum crisp
    - skirrit latkes
    - sunchoke spanish omelette
    - rustic pizza with arugula pesto

And then there are the:
    - cucumber berries
    - air potatoes
    - mint root
    - sea kale leaves
    - asian pears
    - persimmons
    - ground nut

The cucumber berries are ready right now.  Perhaps they will be my next victim.  I've been on a pickling roll, and that seems like a good thing to do with them.  Or put them in a tabouli!  For now, we are busy eating the hot peppers and tomatoes out of the garden.  Oh, and we just harvested a bunch of concord-type grapes.  What flavor!  We froze a bunch to eat throughout the winter.  Mmmm.... I couldn't help but eat a handful of the frozen ones already.
   

Forest Garden Plants Heading out into the World

This past weekend we had a booth at the NOFA (Northeast Organic Farmers Association) summer conference in Amherst, MA.  The booth was for our nursery, Food Forest Farm, and we brought lots of perennial vegetables and forest garden plants for sale.  It was so much fun interacting with people and sharing information and enthusiasm about the plants. 

I am so excited to have sent off so many plants to new homes.  This means lots more people will be planting, cultivating, and experimenting with these perennial foods.  The sea kale, turkish rocket, and chinese yam were the big hits, along with the ever-popular jostaberries, beach plums and hazelnuts.  I foresee a growing community of food foresters!  I am looking forward to sharing my recipes and thinking in this blog and in my cookbook.

Recipe for a Glorious Summer Day

1. Wake up to one of those exceedingly beautiful days when the air is dry and there's a gentle breeze, warm sun, and a few stray clouds drifting across an ocean blue sky.

2. Play some chords on the mandolin.

3. Find your friends outside in the back, sitting under the hardy kiwi arbor. 

4. Bring out a watermelon, some boiled peanuts, and pick some grapes off the vine.  Have a slurpy, salty feast.

5. Talk and laugh as you braid onion tops, and then hang them to dry.

It's only midday, and already it's been enough to make my soul smile.

Stymied... Or Then Again Not

I just went out for a walk around the garden, looking for inspiration for trying a new recipe.  It's a low time for perennial vegetables.  I found some red raspberries but not enough to do anything with so I just ate them ("eat out of hand" is always my fall-back recipe).  There's tons of perennial arugula, but I'm in more of a sweet mood right now, so I passed it by.

I decide to revisit the clove currants.  Last time I posted about them I was about to make them into a dessert.  But I got busy and sleepy, and it didn't happen.  I woke up thinking today would be the day.  I started brainstorming recipes.  My first idea was to put them in muffins, maybe with some sort of spicy topping.  But then I remembered one of my springtime favorites and decided to try substituting clove currants for rhubarb in my mom's beloved "Rhubarb Delight".  It's a dessert that features a simple shortbread crust topped with tender rhubarb chunks suspended in a vanilla custard.  Mmmm...

So, I just popped outside to pick them, hoping for 3-4 cups of currants, and all I got was a measly half cup.  I think the ones that were ready before have gone by.  There are plenty of ripening currants, but very few that were perfectly ripe today.  So now I have a half cup of clove currants kicking around.  Maybe that's enough to pop in a ramekin and put a little crust on top. 

So much for the "Clove Currant Delight".  But come to think of it, rhubarb is a perennial vegetable, and a part of our Edible Forest Garden, so it can go ahead and be the star of the recipe.  I'll have to put that in my tickler file for next spring.

Beautiful Eggplants and Drunken Bees

It's the time of year when the annuals in our edible forest garden really take center stage.  The perennial vegetables that provided succulent spring shoots, buds, and leaves have matured into full-flowering (and somewhat bitter) plants.  We're in a bit of a lull in berry production.  And the fall crops of leaves, roots and tree fruits are yet to make an appearance on the dinner plate (or in the snack hand). 

But our annual beds are really glorious.  Deep purple eggplants, ruby red beets, green tomatoes beginning to tinge yellow and red, summer squash, garlic...  August is a beautiful month.

The passion fruit is flowering and we've started to enjoy our summer host of drunken bees.  Did you know that when a bee is in the passion flower it gets so sedated that you can pet it?  We like to pet the bees, because really, how cool is that?

So, most of the edible forest garden cookery these days is centered around the standard annuals.  Maybe now would be a good time to prepare for the fall season of recipe planning and tasting.  I want to spend some quality time with the fall plants so I can get some recipes set and then be ready to focus on the spring ones next year.

Houttuynia Photos

Last week I posted about the great Houttuynia and using it in a meatball recipe.  I thought our camera was out of batteries, but it turns out it still had enough juice to transfer these photos to my computer.  Here they are!

First, the plant itself.  This is growing as a groundcover in our front garden under the banana trees:

Next, the chopped Houttuynia leaves (the green leaves) mixed with chopped basil (the purple leaves):

And, the sizzling meatballs.  Maybe not the most photogenic dish, but they sure were tasty:

Clove Currants

Our clove currants are ripening, slowly and steadily.  The clove currant (Ribes odoratum) is a medium shrub with spicy smelling yellow flowers in the spring and shiny blue-purple-black berries about the size of blueberries that are coming ripe right about now.  The berries have a sour taste and are quite juicy.

Today I've been pondering about what to do with the clove currants.  Jam, jelly, juice, syrup, and leather all sound appealing but also sound like more work than I feel like putting in today.  I'm thinking a crisp might be nice, and my friend offered some maple syrup to use in exchange for giving him part of the crisp.  Sounds like a deal too good to pass up!  I'll let you know how it goes...

Ho Ho Houttuynia

Houttuynia!  The area around our front porch is covered with this lovely, green and red variegated plant, officially named Houttuynia cordata.  I thought it was just another pretty face for the longest time, but this season I've discovered it as a culinary herb.  And I love it!

The leaves have a strong flavor, which, according to Wikipedia, is sometimes described as "fishy".  A fishy tasting herb does not sound that appetizing to me, and probably not to you either.  But I've started using it in place of fish sauce in recipes and it is just fantastic.  

Tonight I'll be making the Edible Forest Garden version of Vietnamese meatballs.  I make it a little differently every time (yeah improvising!), but it goes something like this:

Combine:
1 lb ground pork
1/4 c. finely chopped basil
4 garlic cloves, minced
3 multiplier onions, finely chopped (can substitute an equivalent amount of scallions or regular onions)
a small handful of Houttuynia leaves (about 10 leaves), finely chopped
1 Tbsp hot chili sauce
1 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp cornstarch
1 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp salt

Form into meatballs, cook in sesame oil in a large skillet over medium high heat, about 15 minutes, turning meatballs frequently to cook all sides.  Unless you have an enormous skillet, you'll need to do a couple batches. 

I think we'll eat this tonight with some stir fried eggplants from our garden, and maybe some carrots and cucumbers to cool things down.  Provecho!

What to Do with Perennial Arugula?

Perennial arugula (aka sylvetta, and for the plant geeks out there (and you know who you are), Diplotaxis tenuifolia).  An assertive, dependable plant.  It grows well in our garden and gives us lots of spicy leaves all summer long.  It's flowering right now, which makes its flavor extra strong.  I was outside in the garden last night and my husband came over to say something to me.  He opened his mouth and I was blown back by pungent arugula breath.  This plant is not for the faint of heart!

Does anyone else think arugula tastes a little skunky?  I hate the smell of skunks, but love arugula.  Go figure.

So, we have lots of this plant and I'm thinking about good ways to use it.  I could make a pesto with walnuts, olive oil, and parmesan cheese.  I bet the pesto would be good on some sourdough bread.  The arugula could also be really good on a homemade pizza.  Top the pizza with some olive oil, cheese of choice, maybe some tomato slices and some anchovies.  Mmmm....  How about sauteed in some olive oil and garlic and served on a bowl of pasta with some sausage?  It seems like starch of some sort is a good idea to mellow out the spiciness.

We sold out of perennial arugula at our booth this past weekend at the Northeast Permaculture Convergence.  I'm glad our baby plants are going off to good homes.  I wonder how other people are going to cook with this plant.  What are your ideas?

I Sound My Barbaric Yawp!

Tomorrow we're heading to the Northeast Permaculture Convergence.  We'll have a booth there for our nursery, Food Forest Farm.  I'm going to bring some fliers to announce this blog and the upcoming cookbook.  Putting this out there is scary.  For a long while I was telling people, "I want to write a cookbook."  Now I'm saying, "I AM writing a cookbook!"  (And as a friend of mine in high school used to say (and it turns out he was quoting Walt Whitman), "I sound my barbaric yawp!")

I'm working through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.  For those who don't know it, it's a workbook about recovering your creativity.  I'm excited about the process, and it's thrilling (thrilling like riding a rollercoaster and being scared out of your mind but also having a blast) putting myself out there as a creator and artist - in this case, a writer and cook.  One of the things I'm working on in The Artist's Way is affirmations.  Today I'm thinking about this affirmation: "My dreams come from the universe, and the universe has the power to accomplish them."  Step by step I am creating a cookbook.  Thanks, universe, for planting the seed, the dream of this cookbook, in me. 

Starting the Blog, Introducing Gooseberry/Jostaberry Slump

Welcome to Edible Forest Garden Cookery!   I'm writing a cookbook featuring the plants we grow in our edible forest garden here in Massachusetts.  A friend and fellow cookbook-writer suggested I start a blog about my writing process.  I figure it will keep me honest, hold me to writing this thing, and help me gather some great input from other people interested in this stuff.  So, here I go!

I thought I'd kick things off with a recipe.   It's modeled after a recipe my mom made up.  She calls it a slump, so I'll keep the name.  This version calls for a combination of gooseberries and jostaberries.  Depending on where you live, you may still have some of these juicy beauties clinging to the bush.   If not, feel free to substitute other fruits - just adjust the amount of sugar accordingly.

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Gooseberry and Jostaberry Slump 

Berries:

2 cups mixed berries (gooseberries and jostaberries)

1/4 cup sugar 

1 Tbsp. flour

1/8 tsp. salt

Crust:
1/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/8 tsp. salt
1 tsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. butter
1/8 cup milk


Preheat oven to 425 degrees. 
 

Place berries in a mixing bowl.  Stir in sugar. Add flour and salt and stir to combine.  Dump berry mixture into two ramekins or baking dish.

In small mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar.  Cut butter into small pieces, and add to flour mixture, squishing it in with your fingers to make a crumble.  Slowly add just enough milk to make dry crumbs.

Sprinkle crumbs over fruit.   Bake for 15-20 minutes until fruit is bubbling and crust is golden.

Let it cool so you don't burn your mouth, and enjoy with yogurt, ice cream, or as is!
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If you try this out, let me know what you think!